ITU-T IdM

ITU-T has formed a new Focus Group on IdM, with the first meeting being organized on February 13th. It looks like this group, taking a telco-view to the IdM issues, will develop its own use cases and requirements, and then reference a lot to the existing standards, such as Liberty Alliance. Or this is what I hope for, because yet another framework for IdM seems to be a waste of time and resources to me. Well, we'll see what happens once this group really kicks off and starts to work.

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New year, new things

First of all, happy new year 2007 to everyone, who happens to read this blog (only me? ;-) Second of all, I think I will broaden the area of discussion to cover other things than what are in the scope of the topic of this blog. Why? Well, I'm not sure, but maybe I'm thinking of having just one blog for all the thoughts. And also, as the new Blogger allows to tagging of blog entries, it is quite easy to filter things to find and read what the reader is interested in.



Well, let's follow these new lines, and begin by writing about something that is totally out of scope of semantics and identities: health and exercising. I think I haven't mentioned this before, but I'm on my way to reduce body weight and getting into a better shape. From last summer, my body weight has gone down by about 10 kilos, but my aim is to further lower it by some 5-8 kilos. In the same time, the idea is to workout at the gym, thus, getting back the muscles I used to have when I was younger. Well, at this age this might be very hard, but I will do my best. While working out will give me good anaerobic fitness, I will also improve my aerobic fitness. Playing icehockey helps a lot, but because of its infrequency, I will need to do some jogging aside it. A couple of 10 kilometer loops in a week should keep up the base aerobic fitness level. And finally, going to work and back to home with bicycle will also help, because it will give me 22 kilometers of bicycling for the week days.



Now I just have to get back to gym, and get that jogging back to my schedules to make all this happen. I will try to post some news about my progress more or less regularly.

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Services anywhere, anytime, and anyhow?

We all have different kinds of computing devices; desktop computers, laptops, handtops, PDA devices, mobile phones, you name it. All these devices offer different kinds of usage patterns and allow accessing services in different ways. What would be really cool is to have the services be available, in a way or another, for all the devices capable of producing content for those services. Confusing? Maybe, so let's have an example.

I have multiple devices for taking pictures. Or for producing content for blogs. For instance, I take pictures with my Ixus digital camera or my mobile phone. I also write content to blogs using desktop/laptop computers and mobile phone. How could all these be integrated in such a way that for instance I could take a picture with my mobile phone, attach some text to it easily, maybe include some context data, and finally post the whole thing to my blog? Well, one way could be to first take the picture and upload it to some online picture album, such as Flickr or PicasaWeb. Then I would write the text, and upload it to the blog. Finally, I would attach the picture from the online picture album to the blog, and maybe tag the blog entry with some context-enabling keywords. Quite complicated?

At the moment, interfaces to all the services, or parts of them, are provided by different service providers. Flickr allows uploading pictures with various ways, and with various devices. Similarly, blog providers allow inserting entries with different kinds of interfaces; web upload, email, etc. What is missing is the real "glue" between all these, so that I could have a client from which I could just aggregate the service access with some nice way. Maybe Semantics and Web services, or preferably a combination of them - Semantic service composition - would provide an answer to this?

Testing with new Performancing

Performancing 1.3.5 should now support Blogger Beta, let's see if this shows up...

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Liberty meeting in Hong Kong

The Liberty Alliance is having a plenary meeting in Hong Kong. The Fidelity project was presented in the form of a general presentation during the opening plenary and demonstrations during the networking reception. Antoine de Poorter from Ericsson gave the general presentation, where the main emphasis were the findings from the Fidelity project in terms of Liberty specs and Liberty products.

The demonstrations comprised of three demo stations; one showing the authentication methods implemented in the project (presented by my colleague Jarkko Kaura), the other demonstrating our Inter-CoT (between TeliaSonera and France Telecom) use case called Book a Hotel and also the Nearest Restaurants use case (presented by me), and the third showing the Spanish services developed by Ericsson for the Amena's CoT (presented by Antoine).

Both the general presentation and the demonstrations were received well, and some further actions for cooperation between the Fidelity and Liberty were planned.

Google Reader gets even better

Those of you that already use Google Reader may have noticed that the tool has experienced a serious face lift. The user interface is far more intuitive, and the AJAX technologies even more used. Try for instance the shortcuts g then t and g then u, and see the cool popup selector.

For those of you, who have not used Google Reader before, but are following RSS/Atom feeds, this tool is definately recommended. And yes, one nice thing more; Google Reader works very well in mobile phone browsers as well. Check out the mobile version!

Liberty-enabled Google, Flickr, ...

When I'm logging into my blog, the Blogger Beta redirects me to the Google authentication, which usually just notices that I'm already logged in, and then redirects back to the Blogger Beta. Sounds familiar? I must admit that I don't know the details about how this really works, but it would seem like it could make use of Liberty technologies; Google authentication would act as IdP and all the other (Google) servies, including Blogger Beta, would act in the role of a SP?

Another thing is the integration of Blogger and Flickr. That is, you can post pictures from Flickr to Blogger. Now, if I remember correctly, the "linking" of these accounts required that you will get some sort of authentication token from Google authentication for Flickr. Flickr then uses this token (including credentials for posting to Blogger) when it sends pictures to the Blogger.

In fact, Flickr resembles IdP as well. If you would like to post pictures from other applications/web sites, you have to fetch an authentication token from them, and then inject this token into your posting application, which then presents it to the Flickr every time you post pictures with it. I would love to see Liberty taking care of all this!