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.

I don’t know how I missed this when it was put up, but there’s a podcast with a recap of the XACML Interop in July on the OASIS site.

OASIS XACML InterOp Recap

The podcast contains interviews with all the participants, including Rich Levinson of Oracle, Anil Saldhana of JBoss, and myself.

Thanks to Anil for the link.

These are my links for December 1st through November 14th:

• The Complete Playboy - Massive collection of Playboy images from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s
• Wooster Collective: Another Crate Piece from Melbourne -
• Wooster Collective: Crate Art in Melbourne -
• Greetings from Idiot America - Esquire - “There’s never been a better time to espouse, profit from, and believe in utter, unadulterated crap.”
• Big Blue eyes on Asia potential | Australian IT - Interview with the head of IBM Australia Glen Boreham
• The Global Sympathetic Audience - New York Times - Interesting article about microblogging, primarily Twitter
• Johnny Cash on Sesame Street - “According to legend, Cash attacked Big Bird with a broken whiskey bottle backstage.”
• It’s A Fat World After All | Autopia from Wired.com - “If there’s a sadder commentary on the state of American society, we can’t think of it — we’ve grown so fat we sink the boats of It’s A Small World.”

The Brisbane Times today has an article on South-East Queensland’s car theft hot spots.

The worst locations for car theft are on the Gold Coast, south of Brisbane and in Ipswich.

“Most stolen cars are used for joyrides, to commit crimes or just for transport,” he said. “Usually they’re dumped reasonably close by but often they’re severely damaged.”

Motor vehicle theft in Queensland has risen 7 per cent from the previous year, with Southport, Surfers Paradise, Biggera Waters and Ipswich the hardest-hit local government areas.

Older cars without mobilisers are frequently stolen, with early 1990s model Commodores hot property.

You know that feeling you get when it seems like something was written about you, specifically? My car was stolen earlier this year, joy-ridden and dumped relatively close with enough damage for insurance to write it off. I live in Southport, and my car was a 1989 VN Commodore Wagon.

Damn…

Moblock is a fantastic alternative to PeerGuardian for Linux systems. Running some form of blocking software is important to protect your privacy when using P2P applications like BitTorrent and Gnutella; if you’re not using anything, you should be.

Unfortunately, in it’s default configuration the filtering can be a little aggressive. There is nothing whitelisted (explictly allowed), so any IP address caught in the filter is blocked. This list of filtered IP address ranges includes addresses belonging to Microsoft and Google, meaning that all traffic to those companies is blocked - including HTTP traffic and instant messaging.

To enable both MSN and Google Talk, find the following line in the file /etc/moblock/moblock.conf:

#WHITE_TCP_OUT="http https"

Now, remove the ‘#’ from the start and add the ports as follows:

WHITE_TCP_OUT="http https 1863 5222"

Presto!

The numbers 1863 and 5222 are the port numbers for the MSN protocol and XMPP protocol that Google Talk uses. If you have another application that is being blocked by Moblock, you should be able to find what port it uses here.

For installation instructions on Ubuntu, check out this Ubuntu Forums thread.

An article I co-authored just went live on the IBM developerWorks site.

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

In this article, we show you how to enable your ASP.NET applications for federated single sign-on utilizing the IBM® Tivoli® Federated Identity Manager (TFIM) 6.1.1.1 to translate LTPA cookies set by IBM WebSphere® Application Server. We show how to create an ASP.NET HTTP module that extracts the LTPA cookie then uses TFIM to translate the token into a username via WS-Trust.

Check it out here.

The LOLcat Bible Translation Project is a fantastic example of internet memes taken to the extreme.

From Job 1:

21. “Teh Ceiling Cat giv me cheezburger, teh Ceiling Cat takded mah cheezburger awai. I stil laiks teh Ceiling Cat.”

For bonus nerd points, there’s also a Klingon Bible Translation Project.

Blaming “Generation Y” for everything seems to be the order of the day, especially on news.com.au. The latest problem to be caused by this generation?

Rising rents.

Mr McNamara blamed the rent rises on Generation Y hitting their late 20s and moving out of home.

“Inner city markets are experiencing rapidly rising rents through the influence of Generation Y,” he said.

He believed Generation Y tenants would rather “pay exorbitant rent in inner city locations than live in what they see as the cultural wasteland of suburbia.”

If only those pesky youngsters would buy an overpriced house in the suburbs, the sensible older generation wouldn’t have to pay so much rent!

(source)