New Spectaclar newsfeed

By robla | Published: July 13, 2005

I’ve implemented a news feed for Spectaclar that’s a general purpose open source access control feed, that will probably also veer a lot into authentication, identity, and other single signon stuff. It includes updates on Spectaclar, but also incorporates outside blogs. It uses the reFeed component of reBlog. reBlog is very, very cool…it makes it really simple to syndicate lots of news feeds.

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First cut at BZ/OpenID integration

By robla | Published: July 2, 2005

It’s still pretty rough around the edges, but now there’s a patch to add OpenID authentication support to Bugzilla. It’s not ideal, as it still requires you to go through the email ping-pong process, but the good news is that once you tie an OpenID identifier to your BZ account, you can authenticate via your OpenID account and not have to maintain a separate password for BZ.

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daiycaja

By robla | Published: June 30, 2005

When I was running the Helix Community IRC channel, I would get mildly frustrated with people who would show up and say “can I ask a question?” or something to that effect.

Apparently, the phenonena isn’t unique to Helix, and the frustration isn’t unique to me. I’ve seen lots of topic lines on Freenode stating “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. That lead me to think “hey, there should be a term for this”, so that when someone says that, you can reply with something short and sweet.

There may already be a term for this, which would be great. Please let me know. Otherwise, the most obvious thing is to acronymify it. So, here goes: daiycaja. “don’t ask if you can ask, just ask”. I’d love to see the following exchange on IRC someday:

  • <newbie> can I ask a question?
  • <grouch> daiycaja
  • <newbie> diacaja?
  • <grouch> google it
  • time passes
  • <newbie> i can’t find it
  • <grouch> you spelled it wrong
  • time passes
  • <newbie> oh

Of course, they’d probably be pretty ticked off for getting the runaround, but they’d learn. Of course, if you’re in the grouch’s shoes, you could say “just ask” up front, but that just makes it look like you’re the only grouch in the world. Responding this way makes it a little more obvious that they’ve just violated some basic IRC ettiquette that they should learn a little more about.

This category of my blog isn’t called “nerd” for nuthin.

Posted in Tech | Tagged | 2 Comments

Spectaclar Updates

By robla | Published: June 25, 2005

I’ve been working on a bunch of miscellaneous stuff this week which are loosely related to the “Spectaclar” project:

  • A lot of wiki cleanup – I think I got most of the dead links, so that there’s at least stub articles everywhere there’s a link
  • Patch to MediaWiki – not a huge contribution, but one that really helped me understand the access control model in MW
  • Wrote a development planning doc for WordPress. There’s been a lot of acrimony this week about the WordPress development process, which the planning doc is a response to. I’m waiting for a review from Lorelle before floating it on the wp-hackers list. The acrimony has already died down, but I’m hoping this will provide some structure for requesting features.
  • I’ve installed Bugzilla/CVS (2.19.3+) – thinking about taking a stab an OpenID plugin for BZ, since I’m somewhat familiar with the BZ auth plugin model.
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Seattle Bus Monster

By robla | Published: June 22, 2005

The Seattle Bus Monster is one of the cooler examples of Google abuse that I’ve seen yet. Merges Google Maps and the funky real-time bus tracker app.

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Monster Engine – Enhancing kid art

By robla | Published: June 17, 2005

Here’s the site for a guy who embellishes the crap out of kids’ drawings. They still are very recognizable as the kids’ orginal work, but he takes them in a freaky, surreal direction.

Posted in Misc | 1 Comment

Spectaclar: Authorization first

By robla | Published: June 16, 2005

More on Spectaclar. Haven’t done much today on the site, as I’ve been working on Mediawiki and riding my bike and enjoying being a slacker.

There’s a blurb that I just added to the site that’s probably worth blogging.

The primary focus for this site, at the time of this writing, is authorization, as opposed to authentication or accounting. I plan to go with the flow, so if there ends up being a bunch of interest in authentication or accounting, I’m not going to fight it, but it’s not where I plan to spend the bulk of my time. There are a lot of folks (Liberty Alliance, OpenID) thinking about authentication and identity issues, so I’m hoping for a little division of labor.

Both authentication and authorization are big problems. The funny thing is there seem to be more solutions for authentication than authorization, probably because authentication is the first “A” in “AAA”. They tend to run out of steam by the time they get to authorization, which is why I want to start there.

However, it’s not as though there’s a specific piece of software that we’re writing here yet, and it’s not as though the “authentication” community and the “authorization” communities are entirely disjoint. We’ll see which way it really swings after a while (if it does anything at all).

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16 acres of floor space in MO

By robla | Published: June 16, 2005

Want to buy 16 acres (under roof) of warehouse space in Missouri? My parents have just the thing for you. They tend to buy a lot of things they don’t need.

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Spectaclar

By robla | Published: June 15, 2005

Well, I’m ready to start talking about “Spectaclar“, which is my new website (and hopefully community) around open source access control. I’ve written a rather long explanation of what Spectaclar is about. To summarize, I’m trying to find a few really good open source web applications, understand their access control mechanisms, and begin to try aligning them. I’ve added an announcement list and discussion list, and I’ll start bloggnig here about my progress as well.

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A new chapter

By robla | Published: June 8, 2005

It’s official: I’m no longer an employee of RealNetworks, Inc.. I’m now starting a new phase, which is one where I’ll hopefully be a visible part of many other open source projects (e.g. I’ve already started poking my nose in on Mediawiki development).

I started at “Progressive Networks” nine years ago, on March 11, 1996. At the time, the company was just finishing up RealAudio 2.0, and was trying to solve “the firewall problem”, i.e. making it so that users behind corporate firewalls could listen to RealAudio. The “firewall problem” really isn’t solved now, so I guess I didn’t do a very good job, but somehow, that didn’t get me fired ;-)

In the intervening nine years, I wore a lot of hats. Standards nerd (working on RTSP and SMIL), QA Manager, Developer, Development Support Manager. Watched the stock split twice, and then fall down to almost the same amount as the per-share cash in the bank.

It was a pretty amazing ride, but it feels good to be off for a while. People have been asking me if this is some sort of statement about where Real is at or where it is heading. Let me say for the record, no. Things are a little tougher than they used to be at Real, but there’s a lot of persistent folks there, so they’ll be fine. For me, it’ll be nice to think about things other than multimedia for a while.

Presumably, I’ll have more time to post here. We’ll see if that happens….

Posted in Personal | 1 Comment

The Llama Song

By robla | Published: April 27, 2005

This is evil

Posted in Misc | 6 Comments

Roblag

By robla | Published: April 27, 2005

So Margaret was hovering over my shoulder, and saw me posting here. In typical Margaret fashion, she said “Roblag”. So, I changed it. (And here’s why it’s not spelled “Roblog”.)

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RedHanded � YAML is JSON

By robla | Published: April 27, 2005

My little world of alternative text structuring formats has been turned on its head. I thought YAML was pretty cool, and wondered why there was no PHP implementation of it. I then found out it’s because PHP programmers seem to prefer JSON. It’s all explained at RedHanded � YAML is JSON.

Posted in Tech | 2 Comments

The New York Times: CBS News Makeover, by Four Kibitzers

By robla | Published: April 10, 2005

Metafilter pointed out a really good article: CBS News Makeover, by Four Kibitzers. Lizz Winstead, co-creator of “The Daily Show”, pointed out a bunch of really cool things that CBS could do, but that they won’t do, such as media commentary and podcasting. However, I’m not sure that we need to wait for CBS to do it….

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SeattleWiki

By robla | Published: April 10, 2005

I’ve started a couple of edits to SeattleWiki, which looks like it’s starting to gain some good momentum. Given how fast Wikipedia is taking off, it’s only a matter of time before wikis become the next “Firefox” in terms of mainstream awareness.

Posted in Tech | 1 Comment

The Slow Crash

By robla | Published: April 7, 2005

Much more imaginative than your typical doomsday prophecy

Posted in Wonk | 1 Comment

Hearing set for splitting Washington into two states

By robla | Published: February 19, 2005

Puget Sound Business Journal is reporting that there’s a hearing set for splitting Washington into two states. Even though it has a snowball’s chance in hell, I’ve always thought this would be a great way of highlighting just how much Western WA subsidizes Eastern WA.

Posted in Wonk | 1 Comment

My new blog

By robla | Published: January 22, 2005

My ASP (Dreamhost) now offers WordPress support, so I’ve decided to try it out. Not to mention, I’ve got several places I’ve posted bloggish things, but always have such a tough time choosing which I’m going to use. So to heck with it. I’ll post here.

In part, I’m also looking at replacing my PostNuke install on Electorama with something easier to manage, and this looks like a very, very good candidate.

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Instant Runoff on KUOW (NPR Seattle)

By robla | Published: December 16, 2004

(update: 9/20/2006 – This is an old post I made to the blog on electorama.com, which I’m shutting down)

There was a great show about Instant Runoff on KUOW, the NPR affiliate in Seattle today. The guests were Steven Hill from the Center for Voting and Democracy as well as the Republican Party official who wrote the opposing view on the San Francisco initiative that passed. The great part was that awareness of Condorcet methods is growing. They also have a blog to post your comments.

Read More »

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If Debian used Instant Runoff…

By robla | Published: April 20, 2003

The last Debian Project Leader election was a very close one. Martin Michlmayr won a Condorcet-tallied election in a very close race between him, Bdale Garbee (the incumbent), and Branden Robinson. Doing analysis on these result yields some interesting observations. Among the most surprising is that Branden Robinson would have won had San Francisco’s rules for Instant Runoff Voting been used. I can’t say I’m very close to the Debian development process. I used to use a Debian box as my primary home desktop, I wrote one of the scripts that are used to tally the elections, and Electorama is run from a Debian-based ISP. However, I can’t say I’m very familiar with the individual candidates and the differences in their platforms. The conclusions I draw below are drawn from the data itself, and not from any insight (or lack thereof) in any external factors.

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