Romanian Trip

I just returned from a trip to Romania. The purpose of the trip was to visit our development centre there. Its an amazing experience to see what's happening there as I believe its the beginning of an amazing journey in economic terms. They're low cost, educated and in Europe (and soon the EU). For the trip I travelled business class. What stuck me was the stupidity of the current security model within airports. At check-in they take anything that could (and most of the time its a stretch) be used as a weapon. Razor blades, nail scissors, tweezers have all been confiscated during this check. Then at meal time on the airplane they give out stainless steel cutlery to their business class clients. These would be a far more effective weapon that some of the material removed in previous checks. Can anybody explain this contradiction? Maybe the airlines feel that business class is too expensive for the average terrorist?

Tags: airport airline security romania weapon terrorist

Productivity Increases

Everytime I log in to yahoo mail I try and remember to use the secure login. I find its a real pain that they don't automatically redirect you to a https server like gmail does. Since installing Greasemonkey I don't have to bother, as this one line script does the job. This is fantastic. I also installed the Blogger Technorati Tags script so this post will put that one through its paces. Update: The Blogger Technorati Tags does not work in the Blogger compose view. To get this working use 'Edit HTML' when creating posts. Update: Checked if tags were picked up by technorati but nothing yet. It reckons it's 21hrs since the last update. I never changed the date and time of this post after the last update (where I got technorati script working) so I'm assuming thats the reason. In this update I've decided to change the time and date of the post.

Tags: greasemonkey userscripts technorati

Architect's Forum in Dublin

I recently attended the OpenGroup's IT Architecture Practictioners Conference in Dublin. What I was really hoping for was a silver bullet. Something specific that pointed out Architecture as a science. What I came out with was very abstract, there was a lot of individuals talking about how they went about Enterprise Architecture at a high level. One of the positive things that they are trying to do is define the role of IT Architect, and further to that provide certification programs. The job 'Architect' means different things in different places. Everywhere I've worked has different levels of capability working within that catch all job title. In fact Javaworld has covered this as well. I've had similar experiences in the past to the author. My first interview for my current employer included a java test. I explained that I wasn't a coder, but did the test anyway. It was one of those tricky tests that had questions around stack trace order etc... In a perfect world the roles, and responsibilities and the differences would be properly represented between Architect and Developer, though in some smaller organisations that will never be feasible.

Reach Public Services Broker Goes Live

Reach the agency formed by the Irish government to build the public services broker (a key underpinning of the eGovernment stratgy) has gone live with the latest release. Up until 3 months ago I had spent most of the last two years working on this for BearingPoint. It is an absolutely mammoth project and a great achievement for the company, for Ireland, and for the people involved. Although it may seem a fairly standard portal under the hood is an integration broker for cross government communication and business process orchestration. Its been a long time in planning, so now we should see widespread adoption.

Single Sign On

Jon Udell has referenced a solution for providing simple single sign on. Its so elegant and simple I have to wonder why I didn't think of that. If you use the same password for multiple web sites and think this is risky I recommend looking at this. From a security perspective this is a no-no. Though as Bruce Schneier has stated

"It's an old story: users disable a security measure because it's annoying, allowing an attacker to bypass the measure."

Having to think of different passwords for different sites is annoying so we don't.

XML Schema and Namespaces

I gave a workshop to my colleagues on W3C XML schema. The goal of the workshop was to give a foundation of all the stuff in the toolbox so the approach was breadth rather than depth. The illogical and complex notation of W3C XML Schema aside it was going reasonably well until we came to namespaces. Trying to explain the various combinations of using targetNamespace, xmlns and elementFormDefault went over a lot of heads. I believe the problem with namespaces are that we (at least the majority) are by design concrete thinkers. Namespaces are far too abstract. I've offered to do 1 on 1's to clarify. In the interim I need to think of some concrete examples to explain.