Archive for the ‘arch’ Category.

Yahoo’s Browser-Based Authentication service

Yahoo’s release of open access to its BBAuth authentication service (see also here and here) is a big step forward. It’s just the thing for many simple applications. It’s not as good as a user-controlled cross-provider identity scheme, but the emergence of a few real high-volume competing web services will help drive us there.

Utility { Computing, Storage, Services } Considered Helpful

Nicholas Carr and Om Malik find on-demand infrastructure and utility storage (e.g. Amazon S3) “particularly attractive to startups.”

Jon Udell continues to look at various ways of interconnecting users, applications, and back-ends — only some of which have been explored yet.

I particularly like the idea of (having the option for) the user being in control of the back-end repositories, offering more freedom to retrieve their data unharmed and replace application components without necessarily being at the mercy of an application vendor.

Storage Innovation Ahead

The existence of cheap and presumed-reliable storage services such as
Amazon S3
will cause a burst of innovation in personal and corporate storage options.
A particularly good fit: content-addressible storage schemes such as
plan9 venti
and
git,
that offer frugal use of bandwidth (important when metered), and attractive features like version snapshots “for free.”
A little searching shows one talented software developer thinking along these lines already:
Brad Fitzpatrick: wsbackup — encrypted, over-the-net, multi-versioned backup.
There will be more.

From Bauhaus to My Mouse

Keith Pleas: “Brutal” Architecture is an instant classic, about the newly-constructed Seattle Public Library, plus understated and apt commentary on software architecture.

[via Jon Udell]

wireless at University of Tennessee

Network Computing:
University of Tennessee Implements 802.11i (and MAC registration to support legacy machines).
[via
Wi-Fi Networking News]

unescaped, escaped, double-escaped

Tim Bray explores the mess related to escaping HTML/XML information:

The policy ideally should be, I think, that all data in the Your Code block has to be known to be escaped or known to be unescaped. That is to say, you always do escaping on the data at the pointy end of the input arrows, or you never do it.

I think always-unescaped is a little better, since some of those output arrows might not be XML or HTML, but probably they all are; so always-escaped is certainly viable.

and then it gets worse, as treatment of HTML in RSS aggregators varies.

The same problem presents itself in cross-site scripting and code injection attacks.
It’s the bane of macro language beginners too, whether it’s shell or troff.

Moving Away from XSLT

Sean McGrath questions the optimality of transformating XML with XSLT. He cites
Martin Fowler who finds XML easier to transform with a scripting language (Ruby in this case).

Ten XForms Engines

Micah Dubinko, author of
XForms Essentials, lists his
XML.com: Ten Favorite XForms Engines

It turned out that progress on XForms technology was happening so rapidly anything in print would have been quickly outdated. An online approach seemed more sensible.

[via Slashdot]

Vertical Hand-Off for Mobile Wireless

Wi-Fi Networking News: Vertical Handoff Has Liftoff:

A press release (not included on this site) says that TeliaSonera, Ericsson, Radionet, and the Helsinki University of Technology have demonstrated a seamless handoff across commercial networks. The benefits they cite are absolutely the case: users want uninterrupted services and no monkeying around.

Note that
the article’s links
all point to Finnish-language web sites.

The article (by Glenn Fleishman) continues:

Interestingly, if you use NetMotion Wireless software, you can achieve most of this effect today. While you’re responsible as a user for changing your connectivity, the NetMotion client and server software maintain the persistent state of the Internet connection.

Java is the SUV of programming tools

OK, everybody in the world is linking to it, so this isn’t new, but it’s a provocative note: Philip Greenspun’s Weblog: Java is the SUV of programming tools.
Make sure you
read the comments.