Times are changing, and people have to change with it. Doh - another pearl of obvious wisdom, but there is an interesting application to the work life: while regular employment might change rather abruptly, business and community relationships usually do not. So while you might no longer be working for a particular company (say, Sun, for example), you would still be interested in continuing your work in a particular area of interest (say, identity, for example).

In this spirit, I decided to join the Liberty Alliance as an individual member. The new structure of the organization, combined with a reasonable fee schedule allows me to continue my formal relationship with one of the more comprehensive identity consortia currently in existence. While I have not yet quite made up my mind on how this engagement will be, I know that there are a number of current project in TEG and IAEG that stir my interest.

One of the most interesting developments in Liberty right now is the realization that a RESTful approach is quite necessary to extend from an enterprise-centric identity management system to one that can scale up to the needs of health care providers and governments. The need for a lightweight IdM and federation framework is indisputable, and the GSA and Internet2 have already demonstrated that the existing feature set in SAML2 is sufficient to build a meaningful federation. However, it will take the legal and business rules framework of the IAF and related efforts to extend these technologies into the realm of social networking and eGovernment where you cannot rely on having a mutual trusted partner in identity.

So, going forward, it will be a lot of fun to dabble with the same technology, only now from a slightly (or not so slightly) different angle. 

tags: project liberty identity rest

Wow - what a week this was... I have been through quite some ups and downs, and that is not even mentioning the fact that the U.S. got a new administration.

Bad news first: not only did I have a mild form of food poisining (not that there was anything 'mild' about it, but I heard it can be much worse), but I am also affected by the workforce reduction at Sun. Yes, that's right... after a meager 11+ years I am on to new adventures elsewhere. To all those that I have been working with: it was a very interesting and mostly fun ride. I really had a sense of being able to work on something big and accomplish a lot, but the energy and the creativity at Sun was very inspiring. I met a lot of smart people there, and I hope that I will have the chance to continue working with them, one way or another.

Going forward, I see myself continuing on the themes that I have been dealing with for a while now: interoperability, web-centric (now cloud) computing, and the related identity and security aspects. There is a lot of work ahead, and I am quite determined to continue contributing. 

Since my age-old email at Sun will cease to work soon, you will now be able to reach me though an interim alias: work-at-removethispart.beuchelt.com^[1]. I am also on Facebook and LinkedIn, so please feel free to connect with me:

http://www.facebook.com/people/Gerald-Beuchelt/615829807

http://www.linkedin.com/in/beuchelt

With more time on my hands for now, I will also start spamming your RSS readers... just kidding - but I will write more here now, so stay tuned.

But now for the good news: yesterday my application to become a U.S. citizen was approved and - assuming all goes well - I will take my Oath in early March. Contrary to its horrible reputation my experience with USCIS (formerly INS) was actually quite good: yes, they are bureaucratic (you should have seen the piles of files they had on me), but overall the process was quite efficient and fast: it will have taken less than 6 months from sending in the application to my Oath ceremony.

Interestingly enough, my becoming a U.S. citizen will also open new doors on the job market: as of March I will be able to get a security clearance, work on certain government contracts, etc. The timing could not have been better.

tags: identity management naturalization workforce reduction

[1]Sorry for putting the "removethispart" subdomain in - obviously it is only beuchelt.com after the @ sign. 

UPDATE: Many thanks to Tim Bray for highlighting this note in his (most unfortunately rapidly growing) Stray Sunbeams series!

There has already been quite some discussion on how to get Windows 7 to run under VirtualBox (bottom line: it works - just install it). Here is a litte add-on to this discussion: Running Windows 7 Beta 1 under VirtualBox on Solaris 10 U5 over a SunRay terminal (exhale....).

Now, since I had tried Vista under VirtualBox, I was not expecting anything (except abysmal graphic performance), but - lo and behold - I was quite positively surprised: the install was complete smooth, and the VirtualBox Vista drivers worked like a charm, once I was using the compatibility mode with Vista (right-click the executable on the mounted ISO image, select Properties and the Compatibility tab, select Vista, close everything and then simply double click to install). Without this trick, the VirtualBox installer would complain about not supporting Windows 7 yet.

Overall performance was pretty much as expected: a lot better than Windows Vista, and about the same as Windows XP. Now bearing in mind that the SunRay system is not exactly targeted at power users for CAD applications, and you will arrive at a the conclusion that Windows 7 Beta 1 under VirtualBox is a logical step from running Windosw XP in the same scenarios to deal with those 7 applications that you just cannot find in open source. If Windows 7 actually came in a freeware version, it could actually be worthwhile upgrading those legacy HDD images. But then, Microsoft has shown over the last few years that they are capable of learning, so I will not loose my hope ...

Seriously: if Windows 7 has a similar performance and resource demand profile as the beta versions, it has a good chance of convincing me to attempt another upgrade. Just one thing will be crucial: application backward compatibility.

tags: Windows 7 Sunray Solaris VirtualBox

The workshop on Open eGovernment is starting right now. Here is my slide deck, for all that might be interested:

MIT MediaLabs - Open Identity Archtecture.pdf (1.01 MB)

Soon after this is complete, the entire workshop will be posted on the MediaLab webpage - please stay tuned for the link.

tags: identity management policy

As part of the new U.S. administration's BigDialog and Open Government technology agenda, the CommunityCount web forum is polling for issues that are relevant to the identity management community. If you want to make you voice heard with the transition team and the next CTO and science office staff go here, put in your questions and issues, and vote on the others.

Here is my contribution - please vote.

tags: identity management policy