More on Microsoft's upcoming identity solution ... Kim?

It's fun to see the attention that Microsoft is getting lately ... all based on the rumors of the coming Identity solution. I saw this reference tonight on the CNN web site.

I'm hoping to see some of the developer SDK stuff soon ...

Uh oh ... now I understand C# ...

Tonight is a news-reading and e-mail-reading evening. I'm way behind on my reading and responding. I've been way too busy with a new job, and I've been on the road. At the beginning of this week, however, I was in a programming class and I learned C#. I'm now moving all of my development to this new cross-platform language.

All of what I learned this week was in Microsoft Visual Studio. I can not say enough about how impressed I am with the complete Microsoft development environment. The creators of this development solution ought to be proud of what they have created.

I am also downloading and installing all of the latest Mono tools to begin the process of developing C# on Linux. I am looking forward to tracking the progress of the Mono project, and all of the various components. What I really like is that C# and the support behind it appears to be a new language - and complete application deployment platform - that will deliver where Java seemed to stumble. C# is now being actively and completely supported on the two biggest platforms on earth - Windows as the largest installed base of machines, and Linux as the rapidly growing contender. No JVM to download and install ... no strange looking User Interface.

Anyhow ... slightly off-topic ... but I wanted to comment on this. I have to admit that I see C# as a big deal in the next decade!

Slashdot slashdotted by eTech

When I was reading my aggregator the last day of eTech, I found these posts in my page of new articles. I started to wonder "How the heck is my aggregator going crazy? What is going on here? I'm not doing this!" ... and then I realized what was up. At eTech, all of the attendees were on the wireless network behind a NAT. To Slashdot, it must have looked like a lot of requests for their RSS feed from the same address. Slashdot thought this was all traffic coming from a single user ... and so they pitched the error messages out.

It's funny to see yet another way in which technology confuses technology. I'm not sure how this was solved ... someone must have contacted Slashdot to let them know. To Slashdot, they only saw the one "identity" and assumed that it was a single user hammering their servers. Yet another case where some sort of solution could be developed to encode identity into the RSS request.

Funny ...

Heading to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

Cool. On Monday I'm heading down to the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference. I am really looking forward to this. Not only is there an awesome line up of speakers, there are going to be a lot of very cool people ot talk with, and brainstorm with.

I'll be blogging the conference as I figure they will have wireless everywhere!

SkypeCasting

While reading Ken Novak's weblog, I found his post about SkypeCasting. I love it! This is a cool idea ... and continues to make me think about the future that we are quickly approaching.

I once heard a good quote that was something like "Privacy in the future will be the equivalent of living in a nudist colony. People who are uncomfortable being naked will be very uncomfortable in the future." The gist of this statement is that we are quickly approaching the "Transparent Society" that David Brin explored in his book. In this possible future, there will be little that we can do about having our every move observed, recorded, and/or reported on. So what does this have to do with SkypeCasting?

With wireless Internet everywhere, smaller and smaller laptops and computers, and software like Skype providing VoIP capabilites, the ability to "bug" almost any event or conversation increases. Add video to this, and our ability to remotely observe and listen to almost anything is extended. What got me thinking about this was this comment:

"I'd happily pay $5 to hear the music from my favorite jazz club when I can't make it; and I'd like to listen in on community or political meetings when I can't be there"

Paying for such a live feed is a reasonable thing to think about. The real issue will be that anyone in the audience of any event can become a *free* live feed of that event. In addition, anyone walking around that is near you can become a live feed of you and your activities. This will create an interesting form of verifying your identity and reputation ... in near real time.