Robin Wilton's esoterica

As you have probably noticed by now, this blog is not exactly an out-and-out product evangelism vehicle - though I am not sure whether Sun's product marketing teams regard that as a missed opportunity... or a lucky escape.  ;^)

But then, you also know there are plenty of other Sun bloggers (Pat and Mark, to name but two) who are far better placed than I am to communicate the facts of Sun's Identity Management offerings (as opposed to my vapid pontifications), and who do so with style and enthusiasm.

That said, there are a couple of things which I thought it was at least worth mentioning:

- Identity Manager 8.0 came out last month, updating the Provisioning element of the IDM suite;
- I had a very useful session on Wednesday with Mel Holloway of our Role Manager team, and found out some more about its capabilities in role definition, data-cleansing and the extremely topical area of audit and compliance monitoring;
- The new release of their sibling product, Access Manager 8.0 is due out in September;
- This week, we've also announced OpenSSO Express: the same open source Identity Management and Web Single Sign-on as before, but backed up by an enterprise support programme.

And as you'll have gathered there's also the the Identity Management Buzz blog, which is a great reference source for breaking news about the products.

And now, back to our scheduled programmes.

Over at An Englishman's Castle, I learn that the humble sporran may be caught up in a ban on inhumanely-procured seal-skin.

Ah, the seal-skin sporran. An ideal gift item for the environmental activist in your life. Of course, if they already have one (and who doesn't, let's face it), you could always choose them something else from the Catalogue of Politically Correct Accessories for the Modern Gentleman:

- a seal-skinning knife (with whalebone handle, naturally)
- an ebony puffin club (ivory spike optional)
- a zebra-skin safari hide
- a tiger-pizzle swizzle stick
- a nice pair of dolphin-leather off-road driving gloves

or the simple elegance of a ramin-wood recycling bin - straight from the Sumatran rainforest to your study: guaranteed so fresh that an orang-utan could have been shaken out of it this very week.

WWF Global Network -
for a living planet

Now there's a phrase I never thought I would publish and get away with it... ;^)

If you see this post, it means I've managed to configure the Flock blogging client - though I must confess, it took some help from Mark Dixon (thank you, Mark!).

I am still a long way from exploring all the various things Flock offers, and setting up the features best suited to my online life... but that's the point of it, I guess. One thing I have managed to integrate is the Flickr support, which is pretty smooth. Here's a link to my Flickr page, in case you're interested.

Which reminds me... a few weeks ago Wayne Horkan was kind enough to let me know that my blog isn't rendering very well in some browsers other than Firefox (that's the only one I use, so I thought everything was working OK). I did have a go at trying to sort it out, but without success, I'm afraid (somewhere in there I've done something clumsy to the style-sheet and ended up with a missing "end-tag", I think).

The effect is that if you use IE (and, I think, Opera too), a load of stuff which should appear in the right-hand page margin gets stuck right down at the end, after all the blog posts. My apologies for that. I will either have another crack at fixing it soon or, if I'm feeling brave, experiment with cutting across to another style template.