Eric Leach's Weblog
Back with a Bang... or OpenSSO goes LIVE!
Ok, so it has been a while. I guess I needed something huge to prod me back into action. So here goes.
OpenSSO went live today. Finally. Phew.
OpenSSO Announcement
I think this is one of those moments that I will be able to look back on years later and say, wow, I was a part of that. (A small part.)
I am extremely proud to be a part of the tireless, hardworking team that made this huge task possible. It is always nice to witness talented people making hard things look easy.
Posted at 04:07PM Aug 17, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source | Comments[1]
I've been remiss
Ok, clearly I've not been keeping up. I do, however, have a perfectly legitimate excuse. First and foremost, it's the end of the fiscal year here at Sun and for a product manager that tends to be a very busy time indeed.
(Apparently, deep product knowledge comes in handy near the end of the quarter/year. Whether you actually have that deep product knowledge or not is a different story.)
The other thing keeping me busy is what seems to be a growing trend - goofing around with Ubuntu. Dapper Drake was released at the beginning of June, so I've got that up and running and am starting to play. First order of business is getting my iPod to work, followed shortly by getting AM7.1 and Netbeans to work. Then it's onto my laptop, wireless, printers, and mounting the digital camara, and we are pretty much set to be Windows free in my house.
Tinker, tinker, tinker. I've definitely caught the bug. I am not very good, but at least I am having fun.
On to important matters - bold predictions. I am in America, so I realize huge swaths of people are completely ignorant of the fact that the Fifa World Cup is set to begin in a few short days. Most Americans, being total football ignoramuses, also probably don't know that the US is currently ranked fifth in the world. (Ok, well, equal fifth with Spain.) That is, erm, ahem, five places better than England.
So, the bold prediction. The US is going to win the world cup.
Yes, I know there are about 5 teams with names like Brazil, Argentina, Czech Republic, France, and Angola who could run away with this thing. (Ok, maybe not Angola.) But I think the ol' YOU-ESS-AAY has a mighty good chance. They play some pretty spirited, determined football, they run hard, and they are smarter as a team now than they ever have been. If they can get past the Czech's in the first game of their group stage on June 12, they are sure to make it to the knockout stage.
And from there, victory!
Posted at 09:15PM Jun 06, 2006 by carlericleach in Football | Comments[2]
Leeds will have to wait til next year.
Oy. This playoff championship was a sad state of affairs. Three - nil Watford. Leeds never looked in it. Watford was faster, stonger, more aggressive from the opening kick. Still, that's an awful lot of celebrating for what amounts to third place and a chance to be run off the pitch by Chelsea, Man Utd, Liverpool, and Spurs.
It's probably better for Leeds this way. They struggled to score goals against championship sides and would very likely have had similar troubles in the Premiership. But promotion is worth somewhere between 20-40M pounds and Leeds sure could have used the cash. Just ask West Ham and Wigan.
So Watford, Reading, and Sheffield United switch places with West Brom, Sunderland, and Birmingham. My guess is at least two go straight back down...
Posted at 12:48PM May 21, 2006 by carlericleach in Football | Comments[0]
Today's lesson: Bike 2.0 presages Web 2.0
About ten years ago, I built my first bike from the ground up. I selected a cool Kona frame that I liked and ordered it through our distributor. One of the reasons I chose the frame I did was because I wanted a single speed bike. No gears, 10 speed cassettes, derailleurs, shifters - in short, way less moving parts.
I picked out wheels, fork, stem, saddle, brakes - and everything else I needed to complete the bike. When the frame arrived, I slipped the seatopst in and put the frame up in the stand, "chased and faced" it, threaded in the bottom bracket, bolted on the cranks, and spun 'em hard. It already looked like a bike.
Building it went faster than I expected. I bolted the front and rear brakes onto the mounts, pressed in the headset, cut and filed the fork's stearer tube to fit, bolted on stem and handle bars and mounted the brake levers. About a half hour later I snapped the pin back into the chain, pulled the rear wheel tight and cranked down on the rear skewer, tightened the pedals onto the cranks and hefted the biked down out of the work stand. The whole process, from box to bike, took about an hour. Bike 2.0.
That bike road great, that first time and just about every time after that, too. I built a bunch of other bikes after that, but none of them as easily or as fast.
So, to the lesson. Simple technology is better.
Lighter, easier things attract more people and get used longer than heavy, complex things. They break less. When they do break it's easier to fix them. Less moving parts. It is so tempting to want the bells and whistles, all the functionality and the latest cool gadgets. It is so tempting to want to solve the whole problem with one big package of things.
If you look around the software world now, you can see a definite trend toward using simpler, lighter weight technologies. I think this is what most people are referring to when they bandy about the term "Web 2.0", which I had begun to believe was simply a marketing buzzword, sort of like "scalable", "interoperable", "out-of-the-box", and (my personal favorite) "performant". I was very wrong.
Yesterday at Java One, I went to a session on JRuby, which began with a demonstration of how much less code is required when building something with Ruby than with, say, Java. Now, I don't write code, but even I could see the advantages of using less stuff to do simple, commonplace tasks. Sure, you give up some functionality, but at what cost?
It's actually the same with bikes - most people think they want ump-teen gears, even if they only use a few. When they bring in their 20-something speed mountain bikes for maintenance, they've usually managed to use the heck out of only about 4 or 5 of those gears. When you scrape through the gunk, most of the cogs and chainring teeth are relatively untouched, but a small few are ground down to sharp points. I think the same principal holds with software - that rarified breed of software which actually manages to get deployed in the first place rarely uses more than a small subset of its intended functionality.
There is another force at work here - utility (another marketing co-opted word), which is what you achieve when you put functionality where it is needed, when it is needed. Why leave simple stuff on the server when you can put it on the client? The web is becoming a place ripe with interactive, 3-D experiences, a place of visually compelling and artfully crafted user interactions. Some of this has to do with attracting an increasingly jaded and difficult to please online community. But some of it is there because new technologies have made tricky things simpler to create and, perhaps most importantly, made it possible to distribute workloads and functionality in new ways without breaking important stuff or creating needless complexity.
You can tell people are fed up with complex things because they will pay hundreds for a 60GB hardrive with a shiny white shell and a click wheel and a 1" color screen and which they happily fill up with songs using what might be the world's least functional "digital jukebox".
I will probably eat these words, but it seems harder to write crappy code, and subsequently applications that break, using things like Ruby, Ajax, Dojo, and the like. Software applications will gradually get simpler, easier to maintain- more fun to write, more fun to use. I know I spent far less time tinkering with that single speed than with any other bike I owned. I miss that bike...
Posted at 09:16PM May 18, 2006 by carlericleach in Identity | Comments[1]
Finalists
Leeds have booked a place in the League Championship playoff finals against Watford. I've been remiss in not yet properly and publicly celebrating, especially after studiously avoiding the score all last week before I could get home and watch the match on tivo.
Crossing my fingers...
Posted at 10:15PM May 16, 2006 by carlericleach in Football | Comments[0]
Java One blog number 10 billion... or Duke has an exhaust port
Ok, so apparently java one is happening. It is, um, big. I was there today, and I am either easily impressed or there are some very cool things happening with Java technology these days. Perhaps most impressive was the very new fangled looking exhaust port Duke is sporting while cruising the pavilion floor. I do not know from whence the port comes...
Speaking of cruising the pavilion floor, we had the chance to show off Access Manager's super cool integration with Netbeans Enterprise Pack 5.5 Early Access at our identity management pod in the pavilion. (Say that 5 times fast.)
Once you download the bits, you can pretty quickly set up Access Manager, Netbeans, and Sun's application server to protect messages between a web service client and a web service provider. In the example provided AM adds SAML tokens (and other WS-I BSP token formats) to the stock ticker sample application. The coolest thing is that you can add security to your applications through the IDE without changing anything about your application development model or without having to learn anything about SAML, WS-I, or Access Manager. (Of course, if you wanted to learn more about Access Manager, we probably wouldn't complain.)
I am pretty excited about this as it brings us a whole lot closer to creating the "easy" button for identity enabling and securing web, java, and web services applications. All of this, of course, will end up in OpenSSO so everyone can play around with the code.
On another unrelated but (to me equally) exciting note, this blog is being composed from my new Ubuntu machine in my home office. I managed to get everything up and running in a shockingly short amount of time. I am positively glowing with a perhaps slightly overdeveloped sense of accomplishment. It is really, really cool when technology is simple and works. There is an important product management lesson in here, and I am desperately trying to learn it.
Posted at 10:06PM May 16, 2006 by carlericleach in Access Manager | Comments[4]
Cultural Lag, Open Source, and the power of community
If you believe the theorists and pundits, it takes a human society about one hundred years to catch up with significant technological advances - you know, things like the plow, the stirruped saddle, the balloon tire, electric lights, and iPods. Which means that most of us are stranded somewhere on the historical ebb and flow between agrarian society and the "super information highway". I think I'm personally stuck on history's timeline just to the right of the bicycle (which incidentally has not changed its fundamental design or characterizing features in over 100 years - don't believe me? check out the brilliant full suspension designs from the 1880s and 1890s in Pryor Dodge's excellent book The Bicycle).
Where am I going with all this? I think its safe to say that things are evolving, uh, rapidly these days. The pace and breadth at which change is distributed is unprecedented - hah, global even. But within this staggering pace of innovation, technologies continue to commoditize. Why is this? One reason is because we continue to emphasize the value of technology based on features and functionality. Except, this isn't the real value provided by technology. Technology is valuable because it changes the way we interact, improves our understanding of one another, creates a bridge between what is merely passable and what is interesting and innovative.
I recently read Joe Trippi's book The Revolution Will Not be Televised, his account of transforming presidential politics using the Internet, blogs, and the power of social networking. The message was simple - even when the features and functions of your product are compelling, there is nothing more valuable than a vibrant and dedicated community.
The software industry is undergoing a similar change - value is emerging through participation, innovation, and the development of communities, not the development of features. If you have ten products, all the same, the one with the biggest or strongest community is clearly the one that will emerge above the rest. This is why open source is the preeminent transformational force in the software industry today. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem the industry has realized it is undergoing such drastic changes. (Ah, I knew we'd make it back to cultural lag eventually.)
The really important fact is that people are empowered by involvement, participation, and the sense of satisfaction engendered by contribution. This is an old feeling, an old phenomenon, which gains power and significance when applied in new and interesting ways to new and interesting problems. Like software.
It's not a trend, it's a movement. (Listen to me, full of the enthusiasm of the newly converted...)
Posted at 09:40PM May 04, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source | Comments[0]
Calling the Whaaaa-mbulance (LUFC Edition)
Do you hear that? Its the whaaambulance, duly dispatched and arriving with haste.
This is what happens. Last week I complain at never having any Leeds fixtures on TV, and here I am this morning in smiley-tivo-land watching Leeds v Preston live from Deepdale. Well, Tivo thinks its live anyway. (Benefit: I did not have to get up at 5am to watch. Thank you Tivo.)
Ok, so its the last match of the season. Which means I've managed to see the first match, victory against Milwall, a couple in between including a somewhat dire draw against Sheffield United way back in October, and now the final match. Plus, the two-leg playoff semifinals and then hopefully the playoff final. Wow, I can nearly double my match tally in the next two weeks alone.
The question now, of course, is can any of the potentially promoted League Championship teams manage the 45-50 points that will likely be required to safely avoid immediate relegation from the Premiership next season?
Posted at 10:38AM Apr 30, 2006 by carlericleach in Football | Comments[0]
How to buy "free" enterprise software...
Last July I spent a lot of time thinking about open source, "free" software, and how enterprises buy software. I did this mainly to prepare for our announcement that we would be open sourcing some of our identity management software. (See: OpenSSO)
Then last November Sun announced no cost access to our software portfolio through something we call the Solaris Enterprise System. This got me to thinking again.
I started to wonder, who is satisfied with the process of selling and buying enterprise software? Enterprises? Vendors? SIs? Developers? Architects? CIOs? CEOs? Wall Street analysts?
Today, the typical enterprise follows what might be described as an obfuscating process when selecting software. This process includes defining a scope for the project and outlining required functionality, drafting an RFI reflecting that scope, using the responses from individual vendors to narrow the field of potential solutions, drafting an RFP that asks vendors to better define how their technology meets the specific solution requirements, selecting a shortlist of vendors to participate in one or more proofs of concept, selecting a vendor (and possibly a services partner) to deliver the solution, defining the solution implementation and project plan based on the selected vendor's technology capabilities, designing and deploying a pilot, and finally, rolling the desired solution components into production.
Whew.
While this process describes “how it's always been done”, what usually unfolds is a cat and mouse game to get vendors to reveal the true capabilities of their products. After yet more thinking, I concluded that there simply isn't enough real transparency in the software selection process.
Then last week, I had a very interesting conversation with Stephen O'Grady, James Governor, and Michael Cote - the very smart analysts from Redmonk. To paraphrase, they contend that the power structure of enterprise technologies has fundamentally shifted from the CIO to developers, architects, and IT. This is happening because real people are using the real technologies they need, not what they are being told to use.
I wholeheartedly agree, and owe them thanks for so concisely stating what I had been mumbling about under my breath for months.
The value of more transparency to developers and architects is obvious: they are selecting software to support security, compliance, enterprise operations, and line of business solutions. Sometimes their customers are impacted directly. These are critical solutions that can make or break their company. As a result, these architects/developers/IT'ers involved in the selection process stake their livelihoods and careers on which solution (identity or otherwise) is right for their enterprise. Architects/developers/IT'ers need to know, without a doubt, whether the products, solutions, and services will perform as advertised (and as we all sometimes too painfully know, often they don't).
And so it goes. If the objective is transparency, I think open source obviously helps. So does no cost access to pre-integrated software. As does integration with developer tools and IDEs. But these are just starting points, Darwinian adpatations of big-ish software stacks. Ultimately what will result from the transparency trend is simpler, easier to use, lighter weight software components that people can actually adopt and use.
And now I'll go think about that some more.
Posted at 08:42PM Apr 25, 2006 by carlericleach in Open Source | Comments[3]
Leeds United
Ok, so a series of end of season draws and goal-free performances notwithstanding, Leeds have qualified for the League Championship playoffs. This is significant because, if they return to the premiership next season, I can cancel my one off subscription to Setanta Sports. They've shown exactly 3 Leeds United fixtures all season, which means about $44/game, which is roughly what it costs to sit in an actual seat at Elland Road these days, only without the cold wind, rain, and the universally cheerful disposition of the good people of Yorkshire.
The good news is Leeds will have the services of Eddie Lewis, although I am sure Leeds/England fans will watch with sick hearts when the US storms to victory in this summer's World Cup, upsetting Sven's prediction of England's triumph.
Posted at 07:24PM Apr 25, 2006 by carlericleach in Football | Comments[2]
Reputation: My opninion of the general opinion...
I pray thee -- and I'll pay thee bounteously --
Conceal me what I am, and be my aid
For such disguise as haply shall become
The form of my intent.
Viola, Act 1 Scene 2, Twelfth Night
I've been thinking about reputation a lot recently, particularly after reading something in Dave Kearns'
I love bold, passionate statements such as these as much as the next guy, don't get me wrong. And I think reputation is a useful way to qualitatively measure the efficacy of a given individual's identity in a particular context, especially on blogs and in other (relatively) non-sensitive online environments like social networking. But to suggest reputation will replace trust just didn't make sense to me.
I think it says something that reputation and mistaken identities are the basis of our great comedies. And I suppose that is what led me to Viola, who pays well to have her reputation established as Cesario - and hoo boy what folly ensues. I could have just as easily settled on Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot, or Tom Hanks in Bosom Buddies, but Shakespeare is always a useful fallback device when trying to make a point (lernt that in skool).
Reputation is spontaneously bestowed and functions well in dynamic, interactive environments. I get that. Communities bestow reputation - and in some situations that is radically more valuable than having some measurement of an idividual's identity dictated. I get that too. But reputation is often unreliable, as we've seen, and I think there are certain situations when trust - based on strongly identifying systems - are the only way to have a safe interaction, especially when the outcome of that interaction potentially puts people at risk or in danger.
Is reputation always enough, even in dynamic and loosely defined situations? What about when a group of young men show up at a disaster site wearing fatigues bearing the insignia of a National Guard unit? Based on the reputation associated with the National Guard, those young men might be granted access to communications systems, be granted the privilege of distributing food and water, and be provided with the means to preserve order and the rule of law.
I would love to believe that reputation is enough to establish those rights and provileges for those young men, but I cannot. Blame it on my liberal arts education. Call it cynicism. Call it what you will, but I need more. (I suspect FEMA does, too.)
Perhaps the statement that reputation will replace trust ought to be conditionally applied here, perhaps limited to situations where favors and obligations, trust by association, and similar forms of social currencies are acceptable.
I'd prefer to see a discussion where reputation and trust are considered complementary parts of a system that can reliably ascertain and interpret identity.
Posted at 11:56AM Apr 23, 2006 by carlericleach in Identity | Comments[0]