All posts by Alistair Lattimore

About Alistair Lattimore

My name is Alistair Lattimore, I'm in my very early 30's and live on the sunny Gold Coast in Australia. I married my high school sweet heart & we've been together for longer than I can remember. Claire and I started our family in September 2008 when Hugo was born and added a gorgeous little girl named Evie in May 2010. You can find me online in the typical hangouts, Google+, Twitter & facebook. .

Windows CardSpace, Solving The Identity Crisis

Internet, Programming

Last week saw another meeting of the Gold Coast .NET User Group and was presented on Windows CardSpace by Daniel Bartholomew.

Windows CardSpace is the Microsoft implementation of the Identity Metasystem, a standards compliant platform agnostic system which hopes to solve the identity crisis. CardSpace is referred to as an identity selector, which is client software which helps create, manage and share personal information in a secure and trusted manner. Since the Identity Metasystem is platform agnostic and built upon WS-*, identity selectors already exist for Linux and OS X.

After you install Windows CardSpace, the user is then able to create Self Issued cards. A self issued card is not unlike a normal business card in that a user tells everyone who they are and they don’t have a choice but to take the users word for it. CardSpace allows a user to create many different digital business cards for themselves, with varying levels of personal information attached to them which may even represent numerous online identities or persona’s. To help solve the ‘you really are who you say you are’ problem that government agencies and financial institutions have been grappling with for the last few years, the Identity Metasystem also provides for Managed Cards. A Managed Card is created by someone who would typically has previously verified the identity of an individual, such that after receiving their managed card – the institution can assert that User A really is User A and is not simply someone posing as User A.

When using an online service, the web site developer can choose to support Windows CardSpace as an authentication mechanism. Once the identity selector is invoked on the client, the user has an opportunity to securely choose which identity to provide to the web site, such that the level of information provided matches the importance or significance of the service. An important point at this point is that if the user provides the same card to many web sites, each web site receives a unique version of that information – such that multiple web services cannot collude.

Daniel presented on an ASP.NET AJAX Control Toolkit extender for CardSpace, which gives the developer the ability to integrate Windows CardSpace into an existing site with relative ease and good flexibility on the user interface. Daniel happens to be a DotNetNuke junkie as well, the examples that he provided on the night highlighted the existing product integration point quite well. It isn’t all smooth sailing though, Daniel did point out that the developer still needs to do a little work – however the majority of the complex stuff has been taken care of.

Watching the Identity Metasystem mature over the next year or so is going to be quite exciting. Even since listening to Daniel present a week ago, questions I posed to him regarding how CardSpace and OpenID fit together are being answered already with implementations in the wings. If the online identity management scene makes your ears perk up, you can find a whole swag of information at Kim Cameron’s Identity Blog.

Automattic Acquires Gravatar

Blogging, Internet, Websites

The ever popular blogging service Gravatar started by Tom Werner has been acquired by Automattic.

For those that aren’t aware what a gravatar is, it’s a globally recognised avatar. I can hear the question already, what is an avatar and stop speaking Greek. An avatar is a little image or animated icon that people often have displayed beside their names in online forums. A gravatar is generally meant to unique to a user and is used with the intention that it’s easier of recognise a user by glancing at an image rather than by having to read their name.

Automattic acquiring Gravatar is an excellent move for the community in my opinion. In the last year or so, the Gravatar service has been failing after having a solid adoption rate throughout the blogging community. It was a vicious cycle really, as the more exposure they received the more users signed up and the more the service struggled to manage that load. The Automattic crew have quite a bit of experience scaling web sites and services out, after successfully delivering services such as Akismet for fighting spam and the massively popular hosted WordPress.com blogging platform.

A quick message by the founder of Automattic, Matt Mullenweg, points out that since migrating the services into the Automattic infrastructure, that it’s already three times faster. It seems they’ve got some pretty cool plans for the Gravatar service in the future as well:

  • Rewrite the service in PHP, the programming language of choice for Automattic
  • Move the image delivery into a Content Delivery Network, reduces their load and lowers end user latency as well
  • Push the 1,000,000 plus avatars currently in WordPress.com into the Gravatar platform so they are available everywhere
  • Integrate the newly rebuilt Gravatar services back into WordPress.com
  • Implement cleaner URL’s for each gravatar

There are a bunch of other features that are coming but those are the ones that I thought were most interesting. Congratulations has to go to Tom Werner for developing a great specialist product to start with that was worth an acquisition. I’m excited to see how that all unfolds now under the management and guidance of the Automattic team.

ASP.NET MVC Framework Coming Soon

Programming

Scott Guthrie recently posted about the upcoming release of a Model View Controller based framework or addon to ASP.NET.

I don’t normally post about ASP.NET, as on the whole I don’t find it quite frustrating. It isn’t a problem with the the .NET language, it works just fine; however I find the implementation of ASP.NET pretty lacking on many fronts:

  • Requires JavaScript, I realise that most people have it enabled but come on
  • Rendering, well it needs a lot of work – by default it produces rather nasty HTML
  • Request routing or dispatching, meh
  • Crufty URL’s, why can’t they just be squeaky clean
  • Tight coupling by default

The majority of those you can work around if you feel inclined to put in the effort, however out of the box it is lacking in my opinion.

Enter the MVC ASP.NET framework and you’ve suddenly got:

  • True Model View Controller pattern, so you have a clear separation of concerns in the application. You can do that with the default ASP.NET, so it isn’t something new but I expect that the MVC framework is going to make that a whole bunch easier. If nothing else, the separation and testability that it might afford the development community has to be a good thing.
  • Clean URL’s and they don’t require the nasty ASP.NET extension anymore.
  • Customisable URL dispatch, you can now map any URL into anything you want. I expect this to be a little like the URL dispatcher that Django implements.
  • Related to the customisable URL’s, the existing postback model is gone – you now just route requests into the appropriate controller.
  • Pluggable, don’t like how the MVC framework implements something – unplug it and plug in another one

I’m sure there is going to be quite a lot of buzz surrounding the imminent release of the ASP.NET MVC framework and I know that I’ll be keeping a close eye on how it develops in the coming months.

Jonny Wilkinson & The Frustrations

Sport

I love rugby union, in fact I like nothing more than seeing a fast running game with plenty of big hits. When the referee refrains from blowing the whistle too often and plays the advantage, it can produce some very exciting rugby union as the continuity of the game is maintained and the ball keeps on moving. In stark contrast to the running game, rugby union is also synonymous with the kicking game; where at times it can become nothing more than aerial ping pong.

Anyone that follows rugby union will be familiar with the name Jonny Wilkinson, he was the man that pretty much won England their first Rugby World Cup in 2003. Jonny Wilkinson has built himself a name as being one of, if not the greatest kicker of all time in the rugby union scene world wide.

The frustration associated to his famous left boot has come in the 2007 Rugby World Cup as at every given opportunity, the ball is kicked. Throughout the Rugby World Cup, we’ve seen the English team take penalty kicks from 40m, 45m, 50m and even 55m. Of course, that luxury if afforded to the English rugby union team by Jonny Wilkinson, as it is generally accepted that few other kickers in the world rugby scene are capable of such feats.

When the England rugby team have their kicking game turned on, I find the match horribly boring to watch. If I were a paying customer at the match itself, I would be quite angry as the constant kicking disrupts the flow of the game. In support for England, they would also be foolhardy not to capitalise on having such an outstanding kicker on their team – but it really does detract from the viewing of the game. I suppose it could be largely avoided if the opponents of the English rugby team didn’t give away so many penalties, however throughout the Rugby World Cup in 2007 it has been quite difficult for certain teams not to.

Credit has to be given where it is due though, Jonny Wilkinson is masterful when putting boot and ball together. In the Rugby World Cup semi-final between France and England, Wilkinson hit a field goal in the closing minutes of the match which was amazing. The ball was fired out to him from the back of the ruck, the French defensive line was coming down on him at a rate of knots. I’d estimate that the ball wasn’t in his hands for more than 1 second and in that time he managed to catch the ball, set himself and kick yet another great goal.

The incredible skill of Jonny Wilkinson does make me wonder how much the English rugby union team rely on it. I’ve heard the commentators at the 2007 world cup talk repeatedly about how calm the English team is and their willingness to grind out a win. I would argue that their calm is in part facilitated by Wilkinson; knowing you have someone on your team with his kicking skill allows his team to do certain things that their opponents are not able to replicate. While the no one could argue at the skill of the forward pack for England, I do wonder how their game style would change if Jonny Wilkinson wasn’t part of their team.

Measure Once, Cut Twice

Humour, Life

Have you ever heard the saying that you should measure twice and cut once, well this afternoon I measured once and cut twice.

The windscreen wiper blades on the car needed replacing, as they had started to become brittle and crack. After picking up a new pair from Super Cheap Auto, I set about removing the old ones and fitting the new pair.

Ordinarily when I replace wiper blades, I remove both windscreen wipers, cut both and then refit them. For some reason today, I removed one and replaced it; unfortunately for me – I happened to remove the shorter of the two blades first. You can surely see where this is going, when I removed the first wiper blade I stupidly cut both at the same time and of course one of the blades was about seven centimetres too short.

Moral of the story:

Always measure twice and cut once. It’s easy to measure a second time and very difficult to uncut something.