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October 05, 2004
Grand Central Hosts SOA Developer Contest
Grand Central Communications is sponsoring the Golden Spike Developers contest which offers developers an opportunity to submit entries in three different categories. Multiple prizes will be awarded, and the grand-prize winner will win their "dream workstation" worth up to $10,000. The categories are:
- Best Business Process
- Best Use of SOAP APIs
- Best Use of Rich Client
The contest starts October 18th in conjunction with the Early Access Program and continues to December 10, 2004, with the winners to be announced in January 2005. I've been asked to be one of the judges, along with Tim O'Reilly (O' Reilly Media), Jason Bloomberg (ZapThink), Ron Schmelzer (ZapThink), Bill Appleton (DreamFactory), Tony Hong (XMethods), Phil Wainewright (Loosely Coupled), and Halsey Minor (Grand Central Communications).
If you're interested in SOAs and have a good idea for how they could be used in one of these categories, see Grand Central's Early Access Program page for more details.
02:57 PM | Recommend This | Print This
The 100 Hour Board Tackles Single Sign-On
BYUSA (student association) runs a group blog, of sorts, called The 100 Hour Board where students can submit questions on any subject and a group of pseudonymous writers answer them. I wish it had RSS. The question for Oct 5th is "Is there any good reason why we are required to log in with the same account at least two times whenever we want to access the information on Route Y's Blackboard?" Route Y is the intranet and Blackboard is what exactly you'd expect a corporation to produce as courseware. Its bloated, slow, and poorly designed. Still, it gets used.
The 100 Hour Board asked someone in the Office of IT, who said essentially "the Blackboard software doesn't allow it yet" which isn't much of an answer. Actually, the real answer is that Blackboard was purchased, installed, and operated outside the purview of OIT and so the whole logging in thing is just an after thought.
This sort of thing is not uncommon in large organizations. One way to deal with it is to get nasty and insist that all enterprise applications have to be bought and operated by the central IT organization. That usually doesn't work. A better way is for the central IT organization to work with business units to create and an identity management architecture, the context within which every one agrees to buy and maintain applications that use the digital identity infrastructure. I will cover this in some depth in my upcoming O'Reilly book on digital identity.
Update: Steve Spigarelli writes to inform me that indeed, The 100 Hour Board does have an RSS feed so if a daily dose of answers to other people's questions about BYU is your thing--you've now got it in a convinient format. The RSS feed is advertised on the home page in small type at the top. My old eyes aren't so good at seeing small type in cyan on white.
02:48 PM | Recommend This | Print This
Mount St. Helens Webcam
On my window sill, I have a baby food jar of stuff that looks like grayish talcum powder. Its ash from the eruption of Mount St. Helens in May 1980. I was a student at the University of Idaho in the northern panhandle. We had over six inches of ash dumped on us. Unlike snow, ash doesn't melt. It can be a real delight to drive in and makes keeping your apartment clean difficult. Fortunately, I wasn't too worried about those things then. :-) I found a Mount St. Helen's webcam that gives you static pictures taken every 5 minutes.