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No, I'm not going to offer a "login with twitter" service to coreman.com, but did want to link to this article on how Twitter is offering the OAuth authorization-delegtion protocol service. Given that I just started using the Twitter-based services at tweetree.com, I figured a link into more info about OAuth was due here...

Mom, this one isn't really for you, I'm just dealing with stuff down here in the areas of authentication and authorization....

I kind of like the user/system interaction diagram on this page. I've got to get that working locally. That is the next step. After setting up the IdP. And the SSO stack. Ok, I've got a bunch to do here.

Yes, I had to turn off comments on here for a bit. The comment-spammers were getting through the CAPTCHA, and I just didn't have time to sit down here and fix it. Will turn back on for now...

Ok, I tossed the Kuki install, and went for crunchbang linux distro instead. Also a good pick for the Acer Aspire One netbook. The distro is like Kuki in that it is based on Ubuntu, and this time the installer had no problem. Got it installed off a bootable USB, thanks to UNetBootin for WinDoze. Tips on the net were to install the Kuki kernel post-install so I did the 2.6.31-rc9-kuki kernel install, as that should smooth out any rough edges on hardware support. Just tried the Skype client and got audio, and video, so I guess we're ready to rock...!

Been working on installing the Kuki Linux distro on my Acer Netbook. Got gparted on my side to shrink the Win XP partition and create some space. Unofrtunately, the default installer chokes on the hard-disk and says I have a disk failure. Hmmm....that's odd. I liked the error message though, in suggesting that I might have a dirty CD and that I might clean it...?

It's news like this, on Facebook's updated Terms of Service that are still keeping me on the outside.

At home sick with a cold. Decided to upgrade Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10. Why not, it takes a few hours, and I am sipping on lemon-ginger tea in my pajamas.

Checked the upgrade notes and any nasty known bugs in the release notes. The upgrade seemed to go ok, but when booting into the default runlevel, X-Windows (GNOME) starts up and freezes. No login screen - bummer.

Upon doing further research, I find out that my combination of video and PC hardware is not exactly ready for prime-time here. Handy keywords to search on are "VIA S3 Unichrome Pro AMD64 ubuntu 8.10". That kind of led me into Ubuntu bug 274340, where there is a bit of a hack you can stick into /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make things work. The XaaNoImageWriteRect option got my display up.

Along the way, I learned that the old way of configuring the heck out of /etc/X11/xorg.conf is on the way out. Yes. Now they supply an X.org release that is supposed to auto-detect all sorts of hardware combinations, and if you have to get down into some nitty-gritty configuration, you go down into /etc/hal/fdi/policy, and create custom .fdi files with XML markup.

Ok....I'll dig into that later, in my copious amounts of free time for X-Windows hacking....

Just a reminder that I should check this out later, Google Apps meets Higher-Ed.

I have decided to get into twitter, at twitter.com/coremania.

Ok, so I get this message from my bank, inviting me to experience the convenience of mobile-banking, from my web-enabled mobile device. They provide me a link, which ends in a top-level domain I have never seen, .mobi.

This strikes me as rather absurd. Why should a link to some content, geared to the small screen, be hosted by my bank (which already has a domain name), at some entirely new domain name? .mobi just sounds stupid, and just confuses matters greatly, does it not? I already know how to do online banking, so why should it be any different when I connect from my web-enabled mobile device ? Why should I have to remember some other stupid-sounding domain name? Surely the web-developers putting together such small-screen apps will use what techniques we already have on the web for such things as content negotiation, capability-discovery, and content-delivery ?

So, I couldn't help but google up a search on "tld mobi". I was relieved to find in the top 10 result-set, this paper from Tim Berners-Lee. Evidently, he thought this was stupid as well, in 2004. Unfortunately, his arguments must not have been listened to, as we now have .mobi in common use.

Looking at the Wikipedia entry for .mobi, it would appear that a vast group of corporate entities in the mobile space are backing this new TLD. I guess they just couldn't resist trying to carve out some of their "own" real-estate on the Web.....

sigh

Always interesting what people borrow from your web site. I think this is Vietnamese, but I can't be sure.....what they have done is rip off a picture of the plum tree in our back yard at Stewart Ave. I can't read the page, so not sure what the attraction was....other than it was a darn nice picture of the blossoms that come out in the spring on that tree....

A system called Biopassword, that provides a second-factor authentication mechanism through identifying you through your typing rhythms - cool....

This procedure on Cleaning A Clogged Printhead actually worked. Had a bit of an issue with Mom's Canon ip4000 bubble-jet printer not printing from the magenta tank. Several tips out there, and this one hit the jackpot. The guy I talked to at Canon was also very helpful, but didn't provide this insight. However, he did provide me with a coupon code for a discount on products in the Canon eStore.....

Yes...there is much to say right now. So much going on. Not spending a whole lot of time here pouring it out. Am conflicted about offering up stuff online lately.

Might not have helped to attend the big Reboot Conference last week in Victoria - the annual event on Privacy, Security, and Identity - all the good stuff. Lots was said about privacy and social networking. Basically confirmed a bunch of thoughts I've already had about what the "Google generation", among others, are doing out there, and what that might mean for the rest of us. Like seriously, people are putting way too much stuff online about themselves and others in these social networking arenas. Heard about these social graph APIs that are coming out that allow developers to acquire and use information found in social networks for all kinds of stuff. Heard a bit at the conference about reputation-tarnishing and social-networking, and what having all this stuff about you online FOREVER might mean in your future.

Hmmm.

Yea, that's probably why I'm not big on the social networking scene. I've only dipped into it a little on my LinkedIn profile. Find it if you can. I put some career history stuff up there recently, only to find that it had been scraped by some third-party people-finder site, and was now "over there" somewhere. I probably consented to that somewhere along the way. I find I'm much more interested in reading privacy policies and terms of use. If I can get through the verbage, I find I often DO NOT ACCEPT the terms of usage. So. I am not using Google Groups. I'm not using a bunch of stuff out there in fact. There's little I can do but sit on the sidelines. Ok, I guess I could submit fake identity to all these sites, and just get on with it. I have recently been experiencing great joy but submitted my phone number all over the place : 867-5309. That's EIGHT SIX SEVEN FIVE THREE OH NIYEEEE--YINE.

Here is basically what I had to do to get this install happening on this laptop :

more...

This is a test. Over this wireless network I just configured up in Mill Bay. Yeah - site visit for this one. To get the new gear online, and am now testing from various seats around the pad. Seems to be working. I don't do much with wireless networking, but I got this one going with WPA-PSK wireless security, turned off the broadcast of SSID, and limited host connectivity to 1 MAC address. Hope that does the trick.

Last night I was working on Justine's Toshiba Satellite laptop. The Windows XP scene there is getting pretty tragic, so, I did a backup of all required data and started working on an install of XUbuntu. Should be able to breathe a little more life into the box that way. Windows has been getting very sluggish, and it needs a tune up. Probably in the form of a re-install, but we don't really need to be running Windows, now do we? No. We mostly need email and web functionality. I moved my Quicken over to the Linux box, and am running it fine under CrossOver Office. Treats me right. Anyhoo, I think I will go with a dual-boot setup to start, and then take it from there. I'm thinking I can squeeze a bit more life out of the box, but if not, then we'll be looking at other options....

There. Finally got the PC in the office hooked up to the multi-room amp in the living room. Want to take my favourite audio streams off the Internet and enjoy them throughout the house. I'm making the connection from PC line-level output to the amp over ethernet, using a pair of Niles Audio Corp. Stereo Audio baluns. Sweet. The wired-home project is going well.

Finally getting around to completing the in-house wiring here, and today I finally got 8 more ethernet cables tested up in the attic. Once I patch all the ethernet down, I'll be ready to turn my attention to the video-distribution side of things. With multiple video sources (CATV, VCR, DVD, PVR) that I want to distribute, I'll need a way to modulate the inputs onto select channels so that all the TVs can pick them up on the output side. I found this 4-Channel S-Video Modulator with MTS Stereo Sound - SVM-24 and the page there has full specs and a system diagram that shows how everything fits together. That unit is a little more advanced than what I thought I'd need, but it does allow remote control features that would be nice (IR pickups, etc).

So we're making an enterprise move to MS Exchange at work. I decided to make the jump this week, leaving behind my former email environment and getting an Exchange account. Before, I was having sendmail deliver mail into my enterprise /var/spool/mail, and then I would use fetchmail to bring it onto my work-station, where I would read locally via pine, my preferred text-based email client. You know pine rocks hard when it comes to searching for messages, archiving messages, and other stuff like Bounce message, lookups to LDAP, and keep things nice and easy in the text-based world. Oh yeah!

At the same time as the mailbox move, I've upgraded the local workstation to Fedora Core 7. Yah, yah, I know FC 8 is out.

I'm not ready.

So, I thought I would try out some new email client action. Leave Pine behind for a bit and take Evolution for a spin. Why not? See if I can get my email and calendaring integration - you know : THE DREAM. My Evolution is kind of unstable. Bummer. It used to be quite stable talking over IMAP to my spool. Now it's talking to Exchange fairly well most of the time - until it crashes for no reason - sometimes gives me this thing called the Bug Buddy, where I can send in a trouble report. Nice : make the bug your buddy! Well, I filed a couple of reports, but it is crashing for no reason on various actions. By cruising various forums, I see I'm not the only one. I'm gonna try out this evolution-brutus plugin and see how that goes....

Ok, Thunderbird - I'll spark that up for a bit. I've also been trying out Outlook Web Access Light via Firefox. Not too bad there actually - no weekly view in the Calendar - which is my preferred view on the current enterprise scheduling system, Oracle Calendar.

So - will I return to Pine ? Might do.....we'll see how it goes...the thing I don't really want to do is open a remote desktop to a Windows box and run Outlook.

I'm not ready.

Ok, so I'm involved in a SharePoint deployment at work. To help me get into the groove, I've recently started a SharePoint blog about Identity and Access Management. Of course it's one of those work-only blogs, so I won't link it in here. Once you start boogeying around in SharePoint, you quickly learn about the importance of setting up permissions for users to access your stuff - and where you don't have permissions to view other user's stuff.

I have recently finished reading Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams. An excellent read, and one I am really appreciating at this point in my career. Chapter 23, "On the Chemistry of Team Formation", was excellent, and has crystallized my own ideas on what makes teams work. Perhaps I should have read this book years ago, but the ideas in there are resonating particularly well right now. I have returned the book to its owner, and will now have to pick up my own copy. I've been wondering if Lizzie or Kaptain K have read this one....

After reading that book, I had a bunch of momentum, and decided I would really go for it. So, I grabbed my own copy of The Mythical Man-Month, and have decided to re-read that bad-boy. Had to read portions of it during undergrad, CSC 365, on Software Engineering. But, I wasn't ready for it then. Now that I'm involved in enterprise systems development, what he's saying makes much more sense. Chapter 1, 'The Tar-Pit' - yeah, good stuff. I see why it takes 9 times as long. I'm now in Chapter 4, soaking up the importance of a system's conceptual integrity...

I'm still not in Facebook - I don't really know what is going to happen in there with my identity information, bogus or not.

Others are also musing. Here is a link to Doc Searl's blog : What does the Microsoft "partnership" with Facebook mean for users? | Linux Journal

I have some interest in the ASUS Eee PC right now. I got my first try last week up on campus. Very cool. The screen was quite easy to read. Made me think of how cool it would be to read electronic documents with in on the bus - currently, I'm not packing a laptop, or any other mobile computing device, so print to hard-copy when I take stuff on the road.

I'm finding lately that the commute on the bus allows ample time for reading.....