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]