Entries from January 2008 ↓
January 28th, 2008 — Australia, Money
Housing affordability is something that I’ve become passionate about, and the amount of coverage the issue got during the 2007 election was great to see. It’s obviously an issue that plays on the mind of many Australians, a fact that was reflected by the popularity of my previous posts on the issue.
Despite the widespread interest, housing affordability in Australia continues to go from bad to worse.
Demographia has released its 4th Annual Housing Affordability Survey (PDF), and as last year Australia is well represented in the top 50 least affordable markets. There have been a number of changes, however:
- Mandurah, the Sunshine Coast, and the Gold Coast are more unaffordable than Sydney;
- Bundaberg, Cairns and Mackay are in the top 50;
- Bundaberg is as unaffordable as New York City;
It appears that the reason Australia features so prominently compared to last year’s survey is the simple fact that Australia now has more markets surveyed. Only 8 Australian regions were surveyed last year, as opposed to a full 28 this year.
Time will tell if the Rudd Government’s promised policies can have any effect. Any solution needs to focus more on land supply rather than increasing buying power, and fact that I’m not convinced will actually happen. Australians as a whole aren’t short of a coin or two - reflected by the interest rate rises by the RBA attempting to slow inflation.
Don’t give us more money to buy houses, make more houses available for us to buy!
January 23rd, 2008 — Technology
Two of my colleagues have a new article on IBM developerWorks:
SOA: Managing identity contexts across service requests
Identity propagation considerations in a SOA environment
Businesses embrace Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) to help their IT meet the needs of their business. The loose coupling of services and their distributed nature across organizations and trust boundaries presents a number of challenges. When it comes to the reuse of existing applications or service connectivity across organizational or technological boundaries, the identity systems can vary and so can the credential systems. Managing, mapping, and propagating identity across these environments is necessary. This article discusses the business challenges when managing identity contexts in Web services and SOA. It outlines the importance of creating solutions based on standards. The security token service (STS) capability in IBM® Tivoli® Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) is a key building block that can be used in solutions to address these identity propagation requirements. This article explains the capabilities of the STS and outlines architectural approaches using TFIM to solve these needs.
Check it out here.
January 15th, 2008 — Online
A friend of mine, Daniel Sangermani, has his photography work online at Red Eclipse Photography. The work on site ranges from the more conventional through to fetish and bondage.
If this is your cup of tea, the blog Sex in Art links daily to art, in all it’s forms, portraying and exploring sex.
January 10th, 2008 — Technology
Another article I co-authored has gone live on IBM developerWorks.
SOA authorization using Tivoli Federated Identity Manager and WebSphere Service Registry and Repository
This article describes a service-based approach to authorization in Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) environments using IBM® Tivoli® Federated Identity Manager (TFIM). This approach extends existing IBM solutions for identity propagation in SOA by leveraging Tivoli Access Manager (TAM) as the authorization policy decision point. A software utility to discover services from the IBM WebSphere® Service Registry and Repository (WSRR) to enable the authorization solution will be provided to simplify and accelerate deployment of this authorization solution.
The primary piece of development for this article was the automation of extracting WSDLs from WSRR, then using the WSDL2TAM tool from TFIM to populate the TAM object space.
See the article here.
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