Six months later and Mr McNamara from Australian Property Monitors is at it again.  In a short piece titled “Rents in Australian cities will soar in the next four years” he once again singles out Gen Y as the cause of rising rents.

APM general manager Michael McNamara said rental supply was tight as a drum.

“As Gen Y leaves home and strong migration patterns take effect, our construction sector struggles to keep up the supply of well-located, affordable property to accommodate a growing population of renters,” he said.

Of course people are moving out of home, but to somehow come to the conclusion that because someone born post-1980 rather than pre-1980 will somehow impact the rental market more is simply ridiculous. There’s not some backlog of youngsters living at home that are all suddenly going to move out at once!

(source) (previously)

James McGovern recently linked to Anil Saldhana’s summary of IDTrust 2008 with the following comment.

It feels as if the RSA Conference will be repeating the Oasis XACML interoperability challenge already conducted by The Burton Group. I wonder why Hal Lockhart and others couldn’t come up with something that shows more thought leadership? How about demonstrating XACML interoperability with non-security products such as BPM and ECM?

I don’t know where James got the impression that the RSA Interop will be a repeat of the Burton Interop. The scenario is much more in-depth. Instead of the XACML TC inventing a simple scenario, the US Department of Veteran’s Affairs is the primary scenario driver. The scenario covers using XACML to protect confidential patient data, and the associated controls around emergency over-rides.

Anil’s written a quick overview, and the IDTrust presentations by IBM’s Tony Nadalin and Axiomatic’s Andreas Sjöholm give a more in-depth overview.

I personally think the scenario is interesting, in-depth, and demonstrates the flexibility that XACML can provide in a complex domain.

Update: Anil has also responded to James’ comment.

An article in The Age today, titled “Lightning internet on way“, makes the dubious claim that the Australian Goverment’s subsidy of a fiber-to-the-node network will allow connections of 100 times faster than what is currently available.

Sounds good, right?

Not so much when they consider “what is currently available” to be 256 kbits.

But by deploying VDSL, (also known as Very High Speed DSL) technology, Senator Conroy said the new network would be able to carry up to 25 megabits per second.

Most broadband users currently receive only 256 kilobits per second — 100 times less capacity than 25 megabits — using ADSL technology.

Seeing as ADSL2+ has a theoretical maximum of 24 megabits, I think what they meant to say is “no faster than what is currently available.”

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a fantastic new show set in between T2 and T3. It’s really starting to grow on me, especially after the T2 circle-jerk that was tonight’s episode.

The opening quote annoys me though, mainly through the use of the word “programmed”.

In the future, my son will lead mankind in the war against Skynet - the computer system programmed to destroy the world.

The thing is, Skynet wasn’t(*) programmed to destroy the world! The very point of Skynet was that it was self-aware, thinking for itself and making it’s own decisions. Saying it was programmed implies human intent, a programmer that made Skynet what it is.

I know it’s nit-picking, but how hard would it be to change the opening quote to a variation of the following?

In the future, my son will lead mankind in the war against Skynet - the self-aware computer system intent on destroying the world.

Much better.

* Or should that be isn’t? Stupid time-travel tense.

I’ve decided I’m going to take advantage of the death of HD-DVD through the inevitable clearout of stock.  A few web stores are having clearance sales, one example being dvddownunder.com.au which is clearing stock at $9.95 per disc. I plan to buy at least a few movies during these sales.

My primary reason for buying more movies, rather than abandoning the format completely, is that I was a late adopter - but not so late that I got any advantage out of the reduced player prices.  I bought an XBox 360 HD-DVD drive late last year, and a few movies a couple of weeks later.  Including christmas gifts and the bundled King Kong, this means I only own 5 movies in the format.

Doing the sums, this means that I had effectively paid roughly $65 per movie. Ouch!

By buying at least a few more movies over the next couple of months I hope to bring the cost per movie down to a reasonable level.  After buying another 6 discs, the cost per movie is now around $35 per movie.  This is much more reasonable, and will at least let me get some decent use out of a player that will hopefully last a couple of years.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Previous articles:

• ASP.NET Authentication using LTPA and Tivoli Federated Identity Manager (TFIM)

The Burton Group has finally released it’s report about the XACML Interoperability Demonstration held at the Catalyst Conference in June this year. If you have a subscription, you can download the full PDF.

The summary:

Burton Group hosted the first-ever eXtensible Access Control Markup Language (XACML) interoperability demonstration at its 2007 Catalyst Conference North America. XACML 2.0 was formally ratified in March 2005, but no interoperability work had been attempted until early 2007. At that time, the XACML Technical Committee (TC) of the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) accepted the challenge of coordinating this inaugural event. In cooperation with eight vendor participants, OASIS demonstrated fundamental interoperability in two usage scenarios: policy exchange and authorization decision processing.

The successful outcome of this demonstration event proves that basic interoperability between XACML-based products can be achieved, which is timely, because interest in and adoption of XACML continues to increase across the industry. However, one demonstration does not replace a program that certifies interoperability as more vendor products adopt XACML. In addition, work is underway on XACML 3.0, which will introduce new functionality to test.

I’ve previously written about IBM’s involvement in the event.