D – 1

One day to go before IOC decides who will host the 2012 olympic games…

© REUTERS. Photo prise le 5 juin 2005.


I’m crossing my fingers like the vast majority of French, and hope that Paris will get them.
I was in Albertville in 1992 for the winter olympics (and my wife was a
volunteer helping in the press center in La Plagne on the bobsleigh
track), and we had such a great time living 2 weeks of olympic spirit,
that I’m looking forward to be part of it again. And I’m not the only
one.

Go Paris2012… Go.

OpenSolaris Opening Day

went live today.
Congratulations folks !

I’ve been surfing through the site and went directly to the source
browser to check the LDAP library. It’s there. In fact there are 2 of
them.
The libldap5 which is the most recent one (integrated for Solaris 10) and is based on the same code that is used for the Sun Java System Directory Server 5. And there is the libldap4,
integrated a long time ago. For sure, I know this code because I
wrote the LDAPv3 part of it back in 1996, for the Sun Directory
Services 1.0 product.

By the way, I’m really impressed by the speed of the source browser and the search feature…[ Nice work Chandan !]


Technorati Tag: OpenSolaris
Technorati Tag: Solaris

Planet Identity

I’ve been running a Sun internal version of Planet Identity for about 6
months now, as a way to follow the very interesting discussions about
Identity that are covered in several blogs.
And then came SuperPat and in a couple of days he registered the planetidentity.org domain, got the Planet software installed and configured and Planet Identity is now live.
There are already lots of feeds aggregated on Planet Identity, but if you know some that should be there send a note to Pat.

BlogEd test


This is a test of the new beta release of BlogEd
made available by Henry
Story
.


Nice work…


A wizard in the blogosphere…

There’s a new blogger on blogs.sun.com and not an ordinary one (if there is any ordinary person @ Sun), it’s a wizard, the Wizard of Identity Management

Don
is the product line manager for Directory Server and there is always
some kind of magic in his eyes when he speaks about his favorite
subjects: Directory and Identity. I’ve been with Don for several years
(nearly 4 now), and he’s sharp, passionate, technically savvy and so
enthusiastic that working with him is real fun. Plus, Don and I share
something more personal: in our respective homes, we’re only surrounded
by women.

Welcome Don and spread the word about our great Identity Management Solution and Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

Pretty close to be the winner

Sun Java Directory Server Enterprise Edition 2004Q2 was a finalist in the annual eWeek Excellence Award competition, in the Authentication and User Management category but in the end didn’t win, RSA Federated Identity Manager did.

Anyway, Sun won 2 awards in this competition:

Solaris 10 on the laptop ?

Mark has installed Solaris 10 on his Toshiba Tecra M1 laptop (which is exactly the same as mine).
He is still in the process of configuring the various pieces and
installing the required software to be able to work anywhere, but it
really look promising (and it really looks nice).
I’ll wait until he has managed to get WiFi to work on this centrino beast to install it on mine…

THANK YOU for blogs.sun.com

A big THANK YOU for the team [ Will Snow, Simon Phipps, Dave Johnson, John Hoffmann, Tim Bray, and Patrick Chanezon ] that made blogs.sun.com such a cool place to be.
The chairman award is well deserved.

iGalaxy Directory Server

There was an article a couple of days ago here on Information Week about open sourcing Sun Java Enterprise System is , with quotes from our COO, Jonathan

But little is said about the on-going effort to make soon to be open-sourced Red Hat Directory Server (formely know as Netscape Directory Server) and Sun Java System Directory Server 
converge to a single open source code base to provide the best, most
performant and scalable directory service, with complete
interoperability on all OSes: the iGalaxy Directory Server.

Been there…

Thanks to Rich and Pat for pointing to this fun site.

Except Thailand, these are places that I stayed for more than a few hours between air planes.
And like Pat, I came to claim China for a day spent in Hong-Kong.

Is this going to be the meme of the week ?

Freemind…

I just saw that Simon Phipps wrote today about FreeMind.
This must be a coincidence, but in an effort to get better organized
and efficient, I’ve just started to use FreeMind a couple of days ago
and I already love it. Not just because it’s open-sourced, truely
multi-plateform, 100% Java brewed, but also because it’s easy, fast and
easy to lay down tasks, ideas and links to files or URLs.
My mind map is not fully dumped yet, but I already start to get the
benefits of this simple tool. So if you’re looking for a way to reduce
the amount of postit notes around your screen, FreeMind is really worth trying.

Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition presentations

As Pat as already mentioned here, there are new marketing presentations of Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition publicly available from http://www.sun.com.
First there is a Sun Net Talk,
a less than 10 minutes presentation on Directory Server Enterprise
Edition by Don Bowen, Product Line Manager for Directory Server.
And there is this white paper detailing the Directory Services that are offered by Sun Java System Directory Server Enterprise Edition.

Both presentation are re-enforcing the fact that Directory Services
play a central role in Identity Management, as directory veterant Dave
Nesbitt recently pointed out in this article published in Digital ID.

The use (or non-use) of DSML…

SuperPat aka Pat Patterson, one of our expert on Sun Java System Access Manager,  is asking if anyone uses DSML ?
After co-authoring the DSMLv2 specifications with Microsoft, we implemented it in the Sun Java System Directory Server 5.2 nearly 2 years ago, provided some client tools in the Directory Server Resource Kit,  and still we haven’t heard of any customer’s deployment using DSML.
I did get some reports from the field of some evaluation of DSMLv2, got
a few questions with regards to security and authentication, a couple
of queries on the performances… but still I have not heard from any
use in production.
And the last time I discussed about DSML with a friend who works for Novell, he basically said the same thing.

Still DSML is coming back in conversations some time to time, like
today as DSML was mentioned on the OpenLDAP mailing list with a proposed implementation of the client and the server side.

So, I’ll re-iterate Pat’s question: Is anyone using DSML ?

blogs and journalists…

Mark refering Tim Bray‘s conclusion about blogging not being dangerous for your job is asking “why go read a journalist’s article about something when you can get it straight from the horse’s mouth (or blog)?“.

Well, first I don’t pretend to be a writer (unlike Mark who is our lead Technical Writer for Directory Server
and who did a wonderful job with some of the programming guide) and
clearly it takes me some effort to lay down my ideas on paper or a
blog. I usually end up throwing raw technical material, with a little
background and short conclusion rather then a compeling story with
illustrations, anecdots… not mentioning style.
My wife being a journalist,
I perfectly understand the difference between an expert talking it’s
mastered subjects and a writer expressing someone else expertise for a
targeted audience. Writers and journalist have the skills and practices
to adapt their article to different audiences, depending on the values
that need to be passed on, while engineers tend to go for the details
that they find “cool”.
As a result, I believe that we will still need people to write about
what we do for different audiences, as I will keep on relying on Mark’s
skills to describe what our products is doing.