About Scott C. Lemon

I'm a techno futurist, interested in all aspects of humanity, sociology, community, identity, and technology. While we are all approaching the Singularity, I'm just having fun effecting the outcomes of the future!

Live from Singapore …

Well … I got here in only 24 hours!  We left Salt Lake City at
~11:15am on Sunday, and got here to Singapore almost exactly 24 hours
later.  It was a great set of flights, and a nice trip.  We
took Singapore Air from Los Angeles through Tokyo, and then on to
here.  What a great airline …

Anyhow … I’ll be blogging more.  I was able to read the entire
book Blink … very cool book, and I have some thoughts that I want to
write about.  I also got my new Zire 72 working, and am going to
see if I can get the GPS operational …

Anyhow … good night for now!

Darwin slow down

I’ve stopped working with Darwin and OpenDarwin again … at least
for a while.  It’s funny, but I report various bugs and problems
and I get that there just in not much interest from the community – or
Apple – in fixing them.  No big deal … although I really think
they would gain from making sure that these distros worked in more
environments.

I’m getting things working in Virtual PC 2004, but with a lot of
effort.  And then I hit some roadblock … like I have right
now.  So I lost interest again for now … I’ll pick it back up in
a while when I have some time to play around.

Heading to Singapore

Well … I’m on my way to Singapore!  As part of my work at Agilix Labs I’m going to be attending the e-Agenda International Roundtable.  It ought to be a fun trip … I haven’t been out of the country in a while.

It looks like I’ll be taking a quick flight to LA, then on to Singapore
via Tokyo.  I’ll be flying Singapore Airlines, and so it appears
that I’ll have wireless Internet along the way!  Woo hoo!

I’ll have to see if there is any way to re-charge my laptop batteries
along the way … although Internet access is there for everyone, the
power connectors are not in “Economy Class”.  Bummer.

Longhorn Beta 1 installation update …

Well … hours later … I almost have it working!  I was able to
get Beta 1 of Longhorn – Windows Vista – installed in Virtual PC. 
I just added the VPC Additions to get my video driver working. 
I’m going to shut down and save the image … it appears to be good
enough to have a decent installation to work with.

I’ll probably check it out further and play with it over the weekend as I have some time …

GoBinder 2006 and the SDK are in Beta!

I almost forgot to post it here … our products have entered into a
Beta!  We have our GoBinder 2006 product, and the new GoBinder
SDK both out in the hands of users and developers, and we are getting a
lot of feedback.  It’s still early, and we are finding bugs …
but that is what Beta is all about.

I’m most excited about the SDK.  We are now going to see just how
creative the developers are our there … and what they think our first
target market – students – really want.  On top of that I am now
taking suggestions for what plug-ins people want to see developed …
you can register and chime in here on our Forums.

If you want to check it our Beta, send me an e-mail at Agilix!

Installing Longhorn Beta 1 – Windows Vista

I downloaded the Beta 1 of Longhorn – Windows Vista – and am installing
it today.  I want to get an idea of what Microsoft has created,
and how things are coming together.  It’s funny … I don’t recall
the same for Windows XP, but this really feels like the Beta of Windows
2000 … so much hype and uproar about the whole thing.

What is funny to me is that it seems that the Linux community it giving
Microsoft and Longhorn/Windows Vista the most airplay!  They talk
about it constantly, they compare their features to it, they continue
to frame it as the “thing to beat!”

I’m installing it in Virtual PC as usual … this is now my preferred
platform for all testing, etc.  We’ll see how it goes … so far
the install is just chugging along.

New Palm Zire 72 … and new applications!

Well … my Handspring Edge died.  I have now gone over a month
without it and I just can’t go any longer.  I have been using Palm
devices for a long time, starting with one of the original Palm
Pilots.  I find that it is just plain useful.

While growing up my father was always keeping lists.  Writing down
everything that he wanted to do each day … lists of errands … 
shopping lists.  Even to this day when I vist him at his home,
he’ll have a list of tasks, topics, and questions for us to
share.  I obviously picked up the habit from him … but I have to
admit that I moved from paper lists to the Palm.

I had to do some looking around, and although I had a lot of people telling my to go with the Treo 650,
I just really had no interest in having a larger phone.  I also
have heard a lot of complaints about the Treo devices.  In digging
around, I finally chose the Zire 72.

The Zire 72
has got a lot of nice features.  First off, it’s a Palm device
that will do everything that my old Palm did.  Plus it has a color
screen, is a digital camera, can play MP3 music, and has a SD slot for
expansion cards.  The one other feature that really hit me was the
Bluetooth wireless support.  It will actually talk to my Nokia
cell phone and allow me to send and receive SMS messages, and even dial
phone numbers from my Zire address book.

It is this last feature that really got me excited.  While
ordering I began to think about what possible applications I might
create where I have my Zire sending SMS messages for me … Hmmm. 
During the checkout process they of course pushed all of the various
accessories that I could purchase … and I did buy one – a SD
GPS!  I’m thinking that I want to create an application that
allows me to send and receive GPS data via SMS from my Zire 72.  I
can’t wait for it to arrive to begin to explore what is possible …

Claims based Identities

I’ve been too buried in my other work lately to come up for air. 
However, we are now getting close to a product release, and I am
anxious to begin to experiment with the new Microsoft SDK and Kim’s
work.

I really like this terminology about “claims based identity” since that
is all identity is, IMHO!  This fits completely with the Axioms
that I have (slowly) been working on, and it supports that – “Identity
only exists in language.”  (On a side note, it hit me this weekend
that all words represent an “occurring” … not a “thing”.  It is
how something occurs to me that I name … although we often do not
think of it this way.)

Anyhow … I like the “claims based identity” since this is a nice
“two-way” model … I can make claims about my identity, and others can
make claims about my identity.  In both cases, it is up to the
recipient of the claim to do what ever verification that they feel is
appropriate.

Another important apsect of this is that a “claim” is in no way “true”
… it is merely a claim.  This relates to the topics of
reputation, etc. which are not something that a “person has”, but
instead are something that a “person is given”.  I am given a
reputation by others … they are the ones that say that I am a
particular way.  My actions merely occur in a particular way to
others …

Anyhow … I’m following things on a background thread and am about to
reprioritize.  I want to get the new identity code working within
our GoBinder product.  Our new version – GoBinder 2006 – is
going to hit the market this fall.

Kim … thanks for the great work!  I’m looking forward to leveraging your work!

Location as an identity claim.

Once you get your head around expressing identities as
sets of claims, you can easily imagine expressing a user’s location as
one of those claims. In the identity metasystem, the relying party
could indicate in its policy that it requires several sets of identity claims
one indicating who the user is, and another indicating where the user
is. The claims might come from different authorities (e.g. an
enterprise and a trusted location provider). These would be implemented
as two Security Token Services (claims transformers). Both sets of
claims, taken together, would identify the user from the point of view
of the relying party.

[Kim Cameron’s Identity Weblog]

Phil’s CTO Roundtable Breakfast

OOPS!  I forgot to complete editing this before posting …  🙂
==========================================
It’s that time again … and I got here on time. This morning was
again Phil Windley’s CTO Roundtable. There is a good group of
people here, and as usual the conversation went from topic to topic.

  • Cogito – we talked about a local company here (since some ex-Cogito people are present)
    and what is going on. There has been a huge management shift at
    Cogito, and a lot of people left. This lead to a discussion about
    the confusion of the thinking behind the investors choices.
  • Google
    – we spent some time talking about Google, and where they are
    lately.  I think Phil brought up that they recently added RSS
    Feeds to their Google Personal Hompages.
  • WiFi – We then took a turn into the discussion of whether
    long-term WiFi will be free or not.  Or, maybe we’ll see that both
    will exist?  I think that overall, it was agreed that both are
    going to be around … there will be some folks who want to offer free,
    and others where you get what you pay for.

I had to step out and take a phone call with some researchers at
CMU. At Agilix we are now working with a large number of
researchers in eLearning and Tablet PCs in education. CMU is
doing some amazing work in eTextBooks, etc.

  • Anti-Spam and e-mail addresses – we talked about the various
    services that people are using to create unique e-mail addresses for
    everyone that they give their e-mail address to. Some folks are
    using PostFix, I use Qmail, someone brought up PookMail.
  • We ventured into storage issues … terabyte hard disks, SanDisk’s new products, and how to backup all of this data.
  • Wireless
    in the home – there was talk about whether fiber in the home, or CAT-5e
    in the home, is still going to be big … or can we go all wireless
    within the home?  I really think that all of the interference
    issues will be solved … wireless rocks.
  • Jumping
    on Open WiFi – I brought up the 2600 article, that I read, about all of
    the data and identity information that was gathered from someone on an
    open AP.  It’s amazing in this day and age how little people
    understand about security and encryption.  This led to the next
    topic …
  • Using clear protocols – we talked about
    how little SSL is being used, and how many people and company still use
    “open” SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4 for e-mail!  Crazy!
  • Phil brought up Make magazine – mini Linux server … very cool stuff!

That was about it … I did bring up that I am looking for some
PHP5/MySQL talent, and also that Agilix Labs is looking for some C# .NET
developers who want to make some side money creating plug-ins for our
new GoBinder SDK.

Overall … a great meeting as usual!

New Agilix Support Forums

As we continue to accelerate towards our new release of GoBinder 2006,
and the GoBinder SDK, there are numerous new things happening around
here at Agilix.  First … I’m about to get my new Tablet PC …
the HP tc4200
One of the other people working here got one and loves it … he said
it was worth the wait.  I’m hoping that I’ll have it soon …

The other thing is the “birth” of the Forums @ Agilix Labs
… the new support forums for GoBinder, InfiNotes, and everything
Agilix.  I’ve been working on the installation and experimenting
with the various forums software, and we finally just got going with
something.  If you happen to visit and register, please get me
some feedback … I’m working to make this a useful place for the
exchange of information and ideas!

P.S. We’re cranking out another build of GoBinder 2006 today … it’s amazing to see the product really coming together!