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[I suggest my usual readers to skip this post altogether, you won't find anything useful here :-)] Romeo tagged me with this "How did you get started in software development?" quest. I was already feeling guilty, because given how swamped I am I knew I was not going to have time to reply to the tag: OTOH right now my main PC is unusable, since I am repaving a new HD on it, hence while the network install goes I can write this up. How old were you when you started programming? A quale età hai cominciato a programmare? I was 12. One Christmas parents & siblings joined forces and got me a Commodore16 : it was just *fantastic*. How did you get started in programming? Come hai cominciato a programmare? With the reference manual of the basic 3.5. What was your first language? Qual’è stato il tuo primo linguaggio di programmazione? Basic, the one that came with the Commodore16. What was the first real program you wrote? Qual’è stato il primo programma vero che hai scritto? Hard to define "real" here. I would say that the first program I have wrote for a purpose different than pure enjoyment was a control routine for a Siemens PLC. It was for a shop class, we had those PLC working in AWL-step5. Not very structured, but hey... certainly software! What languages have you used since you started programming? Quali linguaggi hai usato da quando hai cominciato a programmare? Ah, hard to remember them all. Already mentioned Basic and AWL-Step5. At the University it was mainly Pascal, C and Read More...
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It's since April that I don't write about the book (at the time we released the entire Chapter 2 on MSDN ). Last week I received notice that 2 new reviews were published: one is from the Denver Visual Studio User Group , the other is on Paul Van Brenk's blog . Both reviews are extremely nice, for which we are very grateful; I especially like the fact that in both cases the reviewers perceived our intention to deal with the problem from an holistic point of view, regardless of our affiliation with a technology or another. Thank you guys! (update: I've just stumbled in another review I didn't know about, on (in)secure magazine issue 17 . Niiiiice). In fact, in the last months various illustrious figures mentioned our book as well: David Chappell , Drummond Reed and Francis Shanahan wrote extremely nice reviews I never mentioned here until now, while I did mention the first entries from Kim and Mike . Add that to the podcast on Perspectives , the interview on channel9 with Carlo & Caleb, the podcast on SearchWinDevelopment , the bonus chapter on codeproject , the extremely nice reviews on the Amazon US page ... and again, mentions from Neil Hutson , Alexander Strauss , Feliciano Intini , Mario Fontana , ... I am sure I am forgetting something (for which I apologize). And now that I begun to hang out at Identity conferences, I can't tell you how pleasant it is to have complete strangers zeroing on you and telling you all sorts of nice things :-) I guess I am easily recognizable Read More...
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2:35AM. I landed few hours ago in Seattle, back from a successful week in Kuala Lumpur & Singapore , and of course I am totally jetlagged and I can't sleep at all. Hence I'll kill some time writing the customarily post I do every April for this feed's birthday (former installments: 2004 , 2005 , 2006 , 2007 ). Five years is quite a long time in the IT timescale. It always amazes me to see the readership stats: given the specificity of the topics I write about, coupled with my regrettable tendency to tangents & severe verbal incontinence, one would never expect a yearly total of views well in the six digits and yet.. thanks everybody for your attention & patience :-) Here there's a selection of some of the most popular's posts since last April. Considering that in the past year I've also worked on the book and spoke at many events, besides the usual customer engagements, I am surprised I managed to write almost 100 entries. Some musings The Tao of Claims The Tao of Authentication series ( I , II & III ) The Authorization Continuum Omnidirectional Identities On R-STS On ProofTokens On DisplayTokens Cloud Computing & Identity Some samples & tutorials Sample usage of CardSpace & WF's new Send/Receive WCF activities Sample usage of CardSpace & WCF's new REST style services Sample usage of CardSpace & Excel Sample usage of CardSpace on non-HTTPS websites Sample usage of managed cards for accessing a biztalk.net RP The Teched EMEA STS demo series ( Read More...
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Before presenting in a country I never visited I always try to read about the local culture and understand the basic do's and don'ts. Besides being IMHO a basic form of respect for your hosts, this helps you avoiding VERY embarrassing situations that you'd never ever figure out on your own. If you ever followed one of my presentations, you know that my "Identity Metasystem in a nutshell" pitch is a slide describing the msdn faceless guy having his age checked in order to get some wine. This example served me well in many events, across many countries: US, Italy, Spain, Japan, Iceland, Germany, Netherlands are the places I can conjure up but I'm sure there's more. A couple of days ago I was reading about one of the countries I am going to present in next week, and realized that a substantial percentage of the population profess a religion that may not find an example about alcohol consumption appropriate. I struggled a bit to find an example that would express the concept with the same directness, and picked the brain of few colleagues in the process (thanks Su !). The alternatives were good (movie rating system, voting) but I was not satisfied, I wanted something "disposable". Finally I got the right suggestion (thanks Aaron!): cigarettes. Perfect! It is a disposable good, hence bought in a very agile way, yet it requires age verification; and, as far as I know, it should not entail cultural problems. it may not be super popular in the US, but there I will stick with wine :-). Read More...
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Well, I really really enjoyed going to RSA. As I foresaw, more than the event itself I really appreciated the chance of meeting with very smart people: the Concordia and the OSIS events were truly exceptional in this sense. Axel captured some of that spirit here . Just to mention a few notable encounters: I spent some quality time with Pat Patterson , mainly discussing the book. I really really appreciated his honesty and his feedback, he truly read the book with attention and his remarks were always on point: we'll make sure to incorporate them in the next revision of the book, and in fact some of the points he rose are so important that I may blog about them for clarifying. I just loved the chance of seeing things through his eyes, discussing mainly with colleagues carries the risk of falling in groupthink and I feel this was very beneficial for me. Unfortunately we didn't have more occasions of sharing our views, but I hope there will be other chances soon. Thanks Pat! I finally met the famous Pamela Dingle :-) Pam is great, her passion on those matters unparalleled. She gave a great presentation on the IdM, despite it was in the earliest slot the day after the Ping party (great party BTW, thanks Andre'). We had various discussions during the RSA week. For what I can tell she has a clear predisposition to the interface & interactive aspect, while I concentrate more on the protocol angle: that makes us very good conversation buddies ;) Vijay from FuGen showed me a great Read More...
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After a remarkably quiet flight I landed in S.Francisco: the city of the Golden Gate , the Italian consulate and the theater of this year's RSA conference . I just unloaded on the bed all the swag from the conference bag (very original BTW, love the Turing theme ), and I was going through my agenda so far: believe it or not, Caleb and I actually have a book signing session (for the listeners tuning in just now, this is the book ). I already felt it a bit surreal, but when I saw our names adjacent to Malcom Gladwell ... well, I am smiling like an idiot since then. I know I know, there's more or less the same merit as being adjacent in the phonebook... but I'll smile nonetheless! ;-) Note: if you want to meet you'll also find us at the OSIS Interop demonstrations and at the Concordia events Read More...
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I am delighted to announce a slight change in my role: from now on I'll focus on identity architecture, especially in the context of S+S and cloud services. YEEEEEES!!! If you are a regular reader of this blog you may have gotten the impression it was already the case. Actually, for the last three years I worked with enterprise early adopters and connected systems (WCF, WF, CardSpace). If you ever read a case study on those, chances are I may have worked on the project in some form: I had the chance of working with the best and see a wiiide range of scenarios, I loved it (most recent example here ). It's simply that when it came to blogging I just loved to dig deep in identity topics , then the articles and the book , the sessions , so... I now have the chance of staying on the topic full time. Fantastic :-) P.S.: recently Mike challenged me to surprise everybody and make a post of just three lines (I think he was poking fun at me for the the unmanageable length of this , this and this ). I thought I could do it with this post, but it turns out I am actually unable to... scary :-) Read More...
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It's that time again. Few months ago the Italian government fell, and as a good citizen I am called to the right-duty of casting my vote for electing the new one. There's a little detail, though: while in the past that meant taking a short walk through my scenic little home town and meet few old friends at the voting office, the fact that I am now a resident of the Washington state in USA makes the walk a little too long. Luckily, technology comes to the rescue: I can cast my vote via mail :-). Since it is an interesting exercise in transmitting sensitive data, regardless of the transport, I thought it would be worth to go through it. Friday I received in the mail an envelope with all the stuff depicted below. The two voting slips are the forms on which I can express my preference for our two government chambers. Both slips are realized in thick paper, covered by a lines pattern that prevents to see what was the vote even if held against a bright light. You may think that it is an attempt of guaranteeing confidentiality . The two voting slips should be closed inside the voting slip envelope. Once closed, reopening it will irremediably ruin the envelope thus giving away the fact that the votes were seen or possibly spoofed. Again, you may think of this envelope as a mechanism of enforcing integrity . The voting slip envelope goes inside a preprinted mailing envelope, addressed to the Italian consulate. In the same mailing envelope goes the Tagliando Elettorale, which I loosely Read More...
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Jon Udell recently launched a new interesting format on the website perspectives.on10.net. Perspectives is a series of in-depth conversations with passionate innovators. Most work for Microsoft; some work elsewhere; all are advancing the state of the art in areas as diverse as robotics, digital identity, e-science, and social software. Information technology is the common thread, and Perspectives appeals to the technically-minded, but the show also aims to tell stories in ways that make sense to a wider audience. Each installment of Perspectives is delivered as an audio podcast, and supplemented by a partial text transcript. The first episode was an interview with two guys from the Robotics Studio team, Tandy Trower and Henrik Frystyk Nielsen. The quality of the interview is clearly top notch, the scope of the topics strategic & forward looking but still solidly rooted in technology: Jon's editing makes things flow beautifully, and the transcript is incredibly handy for speed readers & search engines. In short, I LOVE IT :-) Hence, it is with ill-concealed pride that I announce the subject of the second episode : it is a chat I had with Jon back in December , just days before the book came out. The casus belli was the book itself, that Jon was so kind to read in prerelease version, but we ended up talking about identity on a much wider sense. We touched on certificates versus managed cards, omnidirectional vs unidirectional identities, WS-*, openID... Jon is a *great interviewer*, Read More...
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Well, don't get fooled. I'm not going to make any big philosophical considerations about technology and privacy (though I may do that in the future), but I will talk about the little project I've put together after three gintonics & the MIX party at TAO . I am often on the road. When I am homesick I often open a terminal server session with one of my home machines and fire up the webcam; sometime I am in dramatically different timezones, so it's nice seeing that where I am it is dark but back in Redmond it's just dawning, and similar mellow stuff. Before leaving for Vegas I thought it would be nice to access the image directly, without having to fire up an entire remote desktop session for that. Hence I wrote some code for taking webcam snapshots (thanks Scott for putting together a nice WIA sample ), exposed it via WCF service, generated a certificate on my test CA, wrote a binding that uses cardspace... and I had it working. About 1 hour, during which I also managed to watch some futurama . Once I got to Vegas I was too busy with the MySpace session for playing with those things, but yesterday's atmosphere at TAO restored my playful/timewaster attitude: after the party I made the necessary adjustments for accessing the service from outside, calibrated the UniqueID from the selfissued I want to use for authenticating with the service... and it was done. One hour of distracted development, 30 mins of fiddling with the config file (after abundant party's beverages) and now Read More...
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Few days ago I've been notified that the 2nd chapter of our book "Understanding Windows CardSpace" is now available for free online , on the pages of Code Project (takes some time to load from my connection, don't give up). That's a very big chapter, for architects and business decision makers, focused on showing how the identity laws and the identity metasystem are addressing many of the challenges presented in chapter 1. It also shows the role played by WS-Trust & friends . There's not much of Windows CardSpace in this chapter, apart from its positioning as the identity selector that comes with Windows: in fact I like to think that the same text could have been used in a book about Higgins or any of the of the projects in this space. (BTW, Paul says extremely kind things about the book here . Thank you Paul !). Many of the topics in the chapter do not have a natural order of presentation, but they all sort of depend from one another in a way which was pretty difficult to disentangle. Furthermore it is important to introduce all the new concepts in the right context, in a coherent discussion, without forgetting anything important just because you approached the matter form one angle rather than another. To give you an idea of the planning effort it required, I fished from my archives one of my mindmaps for this chapter: Pretty wide, eh? I just *love* MindManager ! See, that's the essence of a discussion I had almost one year ago with my good friend Gianpaolo . We were discussing Read More...
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[synopsis for the English readers: a financial newspaper in Italy published an article about CardSpace ; I make some considerations about it] Cari lettori italiani, e' parecchio che non scrivo un post nella lingua natia... come e' parecchio che non trovo il tempo di pescare qualche collega italico e immortalarlo per Italia9 ; provero' a fare qualcosa a fine febbraio, ma non prometto nulla :-) Comunque. Oggi sono passato dall'ufficio di Kim Cameron , per portargli una copia del Libro (autografata :-))e ringraziarlo ancora per la sua lusinghiera prefazione. Mentre stiamo amabilmente discutendo come sta andando il libro (bene, grazie!!! ;)) improvvisamente si interrompe ed esclama "ah, I've got something to show YOU". Woah, chissa' cos'e'.. non gli sara' piaciuto qualcosa che ho detto nel video uscito ieri su channel9 e mi vuole bastonare? Si mette ad armeggiare con la stampante e mi porge il printout di un articolo su cardspace ... in italiano! Quando e' passato dall'Italia lo scorso Novembre (Feliciano ne ha parlato qui ) e' stato intervistato da ilSole24Ore, che oggi ha pubblicato un articolo al riguardo . L'articolo e' ben bilanciato, e IMHO riesce bene nel comunicare l'essenza del problema anche ai non addetti ai lavori. Sono davvero felice che una testata prestigiosa come ilSole24Ore contribuisca a portare il problema all'attenzione di tutti e soprattutto dei business decision makers. L'unica cosa che mi sento di sollevare e' lo spelling sbagliato del progetto Higgins ("HiggHins"), Read More...
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I know, with all this new distribution channels, new media, CTPs, rough cuts & similar the moment of publishing something blurred, hence lost a bit of its ceremonial aspect; and yet, it's a very important event for a book ... also because it is the moment from which the availability of printed copies begins. While I reserve the Veuve Clicquot for when I'll put my fangs on my author's printed copy, the least I can do is celebrating the publication with a blog post :-) Amazon maintains that the publication date is January the 6th, however the switch from "Preorder" to "Add to Shopping Cart" happened slightly later. Naturally we obsessively F5-ed the page since then, to see how things were going (are all authors like that at first?), and how things evolved truly surprised us: Only 1 copy left in stock, and just in few hours! Well, not knowing how many copies Amazon got for the first batch we can't really quantify the phenomenon. Yet, making some general supply chain management consideration I'd infer that more people wanted the book than Amazon estimated at first; and that's enough for making me happy :-) Dear reader, I have to apologize with you. I know I blogged a lot about the book already, and I foresee I'll have the tendency of doing more of it in the near future. It's that it was a lot of work, and took a long time to come out; and now that we are finally there, I just can't help blabbering about it and exchanging tons of mails with Caleb and Garrett on the smallest details... Read More...
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[warning: this post does not feature any identity related content, and it's probably useless] I feel for the UMPCs an unhealthy (walletwise) attraction, since the very moment they came out. In fact, if you dig in the early years of this blog you'll see I am a gadget freak: I am still proudly going around with my JasJar , even if it means having a fanny pack around my waist for the delight of my mocking colleagues (one day I'll give them proper grief about all the fashion mistakes they make according to Italian tastes, but that's another story :-)). During the black Friday I went, like many fellow geeks, in the annual pilgrimage to Fry's . Here, among unbelievably long lines and empty shelves, I saw the U810 : an exquisitely small convertible laptop, small enough to literally fit in the pockets of my jacket but with a keyboard big enough to support the parody of 3-fingers touchtyping I do. I have already seen it on engadget , but having it right there, with all the Vista icons so tiny in the 5.6" 1024x600 WSGA Crystal View... that day the line was too long, but the day after i just had to go buy it :) And here it is, shown together with my wife's 30" monitor: Tiny,eh? As soon as I got home I flattened the sad, sad Vista Basic that was on by default, for a more proper Vista Ultimate: promptly followed by Visual Studio 2008, Office, ArtRage , Live Writer , ZoomIt (especially zoomit, this thing is minuscule) Messenger, Paint.NET ... you get the picture. Below there's a screenshot Read More...
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