Philip Beadle's Blog

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Thanx to Sebastian for these.

West Coast Eagles have made the Grand Final again and my brother in law reckons he can sell a few of these tshirts, he's a Melbourne fan.

It's my 36th birthday today. Lorraine gave me a card that I think is Blog worthy. 

All I need now is the four months off.

A father passing by his son's bedroom, was astonished to see The bed was nicely made, and everything was picked up. Then, he saw an envelope, propped up prominently on the pillow.

It was addressed, "Dad." With the worst premonition, he opened the envelope and read the letter, with trembling hands.

"Dear, Dad.

It is with great regret and sorrow that I'm writing you.  I had to elope with my new girlfriend, because I wanted to avoid a scene with Mom and you. I've been finding real passion with Stacy, and she is so nice, but I knew you would not approve of her, because of all her piercings, tattoos, her tight Motorcycle clothes, and because she is so much older than I am.

But it's not only the passion, Dad. She's pregnant. Stacy said that we will be very happy. She owns a trailer in the woods, and has a stack of firewood for the whole winter. We share a dream of having many more children.

Stacy has opened my eyes to the fact that marijuana doesn't, really hurt anyone. We'll be growing it for ourselves, and trading it with the other people in the commune, for all   the cocaine and ecstasy we want. In the meantime, we'll pray that science will find a cure for AIDS, so Stacy can get better. She sure deserves it!!

Don't worry Dad, I'm 15, and I know how to take care of myself. Someday, I'm sure we'll be back to visit, so you can get to know your many grandchildren.

Love, your son, John.

P.S. Dad, none of the above is true.
I'm over at Tommy's house. I just wanted to remind you that there are worse things in life than the school report that's on my desk.

I love you!
Call when it is safe for me to come home.

Just found this pic Lorraine took of the Readify Crew at Tech Ed.

I have been working in the Readify website with Geoff Appleby, Kim Peacocke and Graeme Strange.  One of the features of the website is that we have an aggregated blog section where our bloggers entries show up if they are in the "Readify" category on their blogs (like this post).  The great thing about this is that people browsing the site will be able to see at least one post from each of our bloggers and hopefully glean some useful information.  It also keeps the website content fresh and Google loves links.

Overview

Yesterday I attended a one day training session on Windows Cardspace to be released in .Net 3.0 and natively in Vista.  The course was run by Nigel Watling who is a Developer Platform Evangelist for Microsoft specialising in Cardspace.  The session started out with a slide deck which Nigel promise to post next week explaining about Identity and how the Internet was built without an identity layer.  Kim Cameron who is the Architect of Cardspace has a list of Laws of Identity that many people have contributed to to make a fairly comprehensive list of laws that an Identity system must adhere to if it is to work for all situations.

The training session was very well done and Nigel obviously knows his stuff, the labs we did showed that is relatively easy to integrate Cardspace into your web sites.  The major point of the whole day was not how easy Cardspace is to use etc  or anything to do with Vista and .Net 3.0 but that Identity Selectors (which is all Cardspace is) can be built by anyone and already have been built by Sun, IBM and Redhat.  This is because they are all using the same open standard which means that there will be good industry take up and many websites will be using Information Cards soon.

One of the things I thought stuck out was that to use Cardspace on your site you will need an SSL certificate.  This is both a good thing and a bad thing.  Good in that it makes the web a much more secure place but bad in that I think this will be a major stumbling block for your Average Joe website.  There are a couple of ways to make sure all sites that require any information from us have SSL. 

• SSL is included as part of any site hosting arrangement
• Cardspace becomes so popular that any site not using it wont get any information from its users.

The demonstrations of Cardspace showed a mature product that was simple to use and control.  It will give a lot of confidence back to Mum & Dad and will make the Internet a safer place which is good for us all.  Microsoft will only support Cardspace on IE7 and will not port it back for earlier versions.  In my view this is a good idea as IE6 is at least 6 years old so its time for an upgrade :) 

Cardspace allows the creation of Self Issued Cards and the ability to install Managed Cards.  Self Issued Cards are exactly like what we do  now when we register on a website, the card contains our own claims that what we are entering is true.   A managed card is one that is issued by a 3rd Party Identity Provider such as a bank or the government.  These cards can be thought of in the same way as your drivers license that says you can drive, your bank card that says you have a bank account with a particular bank.  Now when you go to a site that requires just your name and email address you could use one of your own self issued cards to register, if you buy something from the site you would use your Purchasing card which was issued by your bank.  When you use this card your credit card details are never given to the site and never transmitted because the bank which is operating as your identity provider already knows your CC number it just looks you up on your secure encrypted Private Personal ID (PPID) and returns a transaction response to the Relying Party (the website you bought an item from).  Much safer:)

Another really cool feature of Cardspace is its built in antiphishing.  The first time you use your card at a site there is a warning that tells you you haven't been here before are you sure you want to give your details.  Imagine this scenario:  You use Bank X once a week to do your banking and then one day you get the obligatory phishing email that says some crazy story about updating your credentials online.  When you click the link in the fake email and go to the fake site and use your Infocard you will be warned that this is the first time you have been to this site.  This should be a warning to you and thus you have successfully avoided being phished. 

I have reinstalled the 95.61 drivers from Lap top 2 go and now that I have disabled the cool glass effect I am not having many troubles at all.  I have Aero running and everything works just fine :)

As part of my research for the Dummies book I looked into implementing the Href Exchanger from Inventua.  With this cool http module you can have nice URL's like www.philipbeadle.net/humour.aspx instead of the DNN format with the TabID etc.  This is good for advertising your pages and putting in emails etc.  You can also use different suffixes.  Inventua use .content like this http://www.inventua.com/dnn-hrefexchanger.content.

Try it out for free and if you like it you can buy it.

I have now added the DotNetNuke Daily Comic Module on the Humour page.  Featuring everyone's favourite Geek, Dilbert.  This module is provided by Mike Horton based on previous versions created by Francis Noël and David Kafrissen.