Wow and Flutter

Heard on NPR this morning-

"Scientists have developed a new atomic clock which is accurate to within one second every 200 million years. This is in contrast to the current official atomic clock which is only accurate to within one second every 80 million years."

Those people need to get real.

Translation-

"Please don't leave after we close this deal, or my payout gets reduced"

No, I'm not talking about the Fleetwood Mac album- I'm talking about Microsoft offering to buy Yahoo.

Let's say the deal goes through- Yahoo dies (too much culture clash), Microsoft looses a lot of dough (they can survive it, though, easily), and much of Yahoo's top talent takes a short drive and gets hired by Google.

On the other hand, let's say the deal doesn't go through- Yahoo's shareholders are pissed, their employee morale is completely destroyed (think of all the people there who were underwater on their options, then woke up Friday morning to suddenly find they were in the money), and much of Yahoo's top talent takes a short drive and gets hired by Google.

I can't see any winners here except Google.

Got news this morning that Sun is acquring MySQL AB- what an unsettling way to start the day.

To me, this move by Sun signals their total desperation. Their hardware business has been decimated by the commoditization of high-performance computing, as well as by virtualization technology. Their software business has been decimated by their own mismanagement of some real innovations, as well as the rise by Linux to almost complete domination of the non-Fortune 500 datacenter market (that is, while Fortune 500 companies might buy Sun's overpriced machines, the Fortune Other 50000 use mostly commodity servers running Linux). So now, Sun is desperate for some traction into those other 50000 companies.

Given Sun's history of how they manage products, leaving innovation to wither and die while they chase the million-dollar service contracts at the Fortune 50, I'd say things may not bode well for MySQL.

I had a great time today at Day Two of the Internet Identity Workshop. I attended most of the OpenID-related sessions, covering OpenID Authentication 2.0, OpenID Attribute Exchange, and OpenID Assertion Quality Extension.

Apart from listening to the really smart and personable people presenting, what I really enjoyed most was the Unconference structure. This is my first Unconference and I am really loving the amount of interactivity and idea exchange that comes along with it.

What I took away from today's sessions, at a very high level, was an increased conviction that OpenID really has it right. While extensions like Attribute Exchange and Assertion Quality are important and will make OpenID even more attractive to end-users, OpenID is first and foremost about authentication. And the great news is, OpenID authentication works today- this isn't a spec with a real-soon-now implementation- the implementations are out there now.

I've explained the user benefits of OpenID authentication to several of my non-technical friends and they all got it immediately. That's a great sign that, given a critical mass of sites that can use OpenID for authentication, the end users are ready and willing to move to these new user-centric digital identities.

I had a great discussion with Scott Kveton of JanRain today, talking about how sites with existing user databases can adopt OpenID and allow federation between existing accounts and OpenID identifiers. Based on that discussion, I hope to add OpenID support to Lingr very soon.

Tomorrow, I'm looking forward to Dick Hardt's talk on OpenID roadmap, as well as a talk by Joseph Smarr on integration of OpenID into sites with existing user databases.

Protocol Battle Royale (hold the cheese)

Today I attended Day One of the Internet Identity Workshop, 2006b. Today's half-day agenda consisted of introductory presentations by some of the key players in the space- Microsoft, Eclipse Foundation, Sun/Liberty Alliance, OpenID, etc.

Before I give my opinionated review, let's be clear as to the perspective I'm coming from- I'm a website operator who would like to support open identity standards, so that my users have to trust me less (that lowers their barrier to using the site), and so that I have to code less (that lowers my barrier to providing the site).

I couldn't care less about the technical details of the protocol. In the past, I would have cared a lot about the technical details, but that was before I quaffed the getting real juice. Now, I just want what's easiest for me, and what's most attractive to my users. I have adopted laziness as a key working strategy, and it's working out splendidly so far :-)

So here I am, the skeptical pragmatist, listening to presentations, trying to distill it all into a practical approach to what seem like, at points, competing solutions. On one side I see the SAML/Liberty Alliance gang with their proposals, and on the other side there is the OpenID/Sxip gang with theirs.

And then it really struck me- something looks awfully familiar here. Substitute J2EE for SAML, and Rails for OpenID, and the comparison looks pretty much the same. Whereas Liberty and SAML seem to be trying for a comprehensive approach which can serve almost any situation, OpenID and Sxip are instead opting for the simplest solution that does what users and developers actually want now. And you needn't look too closely to see where my sympathies lie in that type of battle.

OpenID has some outstanding issues, for sure, but things seem like they are really moving forward. For example, from what little I heard about it today, the new Assertion Quality Extension seems like a big step in the right direction.

The momentum seems to be clearly with OpenID now- I'm eager to learn more over the next two days!

One might have been forgiven for having a hard time distinguishing between the United Nations and The Big Apple Circus this week. On Wednesday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez addressed the UN General Assembly, wherein he called George W "the devil". The next day, addressing a church in Harlem, Chavez called Bush "an alcoholic and a sick man".

There has been plenty of political commentary condemning the things Chavez said, from both parties. But the one thing that strikes me as supremely ironic is that, by staging his circus on American soil, Chavez has directed and starred in perhaps the most effective commercial for democracy ever produced.

Consider this- if an American President (or Senator, or Mayor, etc.), went to Venezuela, publicly called Chavez El Diablo, then went on to insult him about cheating on his first wife, how well do you think it would go over? How long until that American was deported, or worse?

Yet, in America, Hugo Chavez not only can say it, he gets it broadcast to the world for free. Hugo, if you're reading this, I've got just one thing to say to you- You're Welcome.

On a side note, there is the curious fact that, attending the Harlem church address, and publicly embracing Chavez, was actor Danny Glover. Combine Glover's penchant for communists with Mel Gibson's penchant for fascism, and you can't help wondering what the lunchtime discussions were like on the sets of the Lethal Weapon movies. Messrs. Glover and Gibson- the moviegoing public thanks you for putting aside your political differences in the name of art.