My colleague Louie Pfortmiller showed me a great demo today. The Sun Spot wireless sensor shown on the left of this photo is equipped with an accelerometer and wireless transceiver. In Louie’s demo, shaking the device triggered an event management workflow process in Sun’s Identity-enabled service orchestration architecture to send a personalized SMS message to a cell phone.

A simple demo (and terrible photo), but the concept is rife with possible applications. Suppose the sensor was really a bracelet on your elderly grandmother’s arm. If she fell, you and your chosen medical provider could be automatically notified.

A pedometer/exercise meter could measure and transmit your personal workout detail to your fitness database and allow you to view results on your mobile phone or television screen.

Detected intrusion in your home could alert you and allow you to monitor your house via web cam to your phone.

And these are just a few use cases. Project Destination, an initiative I lead for Sun, is all about providing the infrastructure to deliver highly personalized, context-aware, blended services to online users across the “screens of your life.” When you couple sensor technologies with Identity, personalization and service orchestration techniques, you can get some powerful results.

Technorati Tags: Sun Microsystems, Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Sun Spots, Sensor, Personalization, Project Destination

When my colleague Brad Diggs gave an excellent presentation today about server and desktop virtualization, I got a kick out of his Macbook background, honoring the fact that he was running Linux on his Mac. This photo is an excerpt from the background he downloaded from the Tux’n’Tosh website, which itself is an entertaining little piece of work. Tux’n’Tosh was created “as a small gift to all Linux and Mac users.”

Technorati Tags: Linux, Macintosh

According to a Fox News article today, the soon to be announced Chevy Volt sounds pretty exciting: “GM says it will be able to travel 40 miles on electric power alone, but carries a small gasoline engine on board to recharge the batteries on longer trips. The combination of the two power sources gives it an effective efficiency of over 100 miles per gallon.”

It’s a far cry from the ‘57 Chevy with a 4-barrel carb my wife drove in high school!

Technorati Tags: Chevy, electric automobile, hybrid

Eve Maler’s latest Venn diagram highlights a crucial characteristic common to the disciplines of Digital Identity Management, Social Networking and VRM – that “differentiated app behavior” depends on “special aspects of you.”

Although Eve mentions personalization only with regards to Digital Identity Management, I propose that the Venn intersection indeed represents personalization for all three disciplines – making the functionality and performance of network applications highly personalized – responsive to and adapted to individual attributes, context, preference and permission.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Social Networking, VRM, Eve Maler

Three weeks ago, the crash of a light plane in eastern Arizona instantly changed the lives of a young couple and their four young children, who until recently lived just down the street from us. Still in critical condition in a Phoenix, AZ, hospital burn unit, Christian and Stephanie Nielson have a long road of recovery ahead of them. During that process of recovery, we are connected in an active virtual network of mutual hope and support with their family and friends – through the blogosphere.

An article in the New York Times today explores how Stephanie’s blog, the NieNie Dialogues, had inspired readers around the world before the accident and how cyberspace is uniting many people across the globe in acts of kindness and hope for this young family. Stephanie’s sister’s blog provides a focal point for updates about the condition of Christian and Stephanie, announces of special benefit events, and invites people to contribute to their recovery fund.

It was via the blogosphere we learned of last week’s coordinated effort to launch balloons in a gesture of hope for this young couple.

We invite all of you to join with us in prayers of hope for Stephanie and Christian.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Hope

While searching for the photo of our “Murphy’s Law Sofa” I blogged about yesterday, I stumbled across this photo of the first computer I ever built. Back in 1976, while we were sophomores in engineering school at Brigham Young University, Larry Langdon (pictured) and I built a 16 bit computer completely out of TTL logic gates and flip-flops. It wasn’t very elegant, but it ran the specified instruction set just fine and got us “A” grades in the digital electronics lab class.

This was so long ago that bell bottoms and aviator glasses were still in style!

Technorati Tags: Computer, BYU

A recent blog comment exchange with Sun colleague Melanie Gao on The Value of Integration Testing reminded me that not all encounters with Murphy’s Law must turn out badly in the long run. Sometimes, a worst-case scenario can become the best case …

Many years ago when we lived in American Fork, Utah, we ordered a custom sectional sofa for our basement family room. Only when it arrived did we find that it was too big to fit down the stairs and turn the corner into the room!

So, we tore out the offending wall … and liked the look so much we retained the open area we had created to get the couch into the room!

This photo of the couch was taken from the place where we removed the wall. I couldn’t find a photo of the cut-out wall itself.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge since this old photo. Three of the kids whose Christmas stockings are shown now celebrate Christmas with little kids of their own!

Technorati Tags: Murphy’s Law

As the Identity Management market matures, the wealth of experience gained from successful implementation and operation of Identity Management systems should progressively yield sets of Best Practices, which outline how to successfully implement and operate these complex systems.

However, our friend Dilbert expresses a different point of view:

You can have Dilbert’s daily wisdom drop into your email box by subscribing at dilbert.com.

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Best Practices

As the mobile Internet arrives, Identity becomes paramount, points out Andrew Jaquity, Security Program Manager, Yankee Group, in a compelling article in last Friday’s RCR Wireless News. A few of his statements impressed me:

“As the mobile Internet becomes a reality, it will pull identity issues along with it. Users will take their identities (user names and passwords, personal attributes, location) with them on their phones. Vendors can significantly ease user pain by working together.”

“Mobile operators should add identity management features to give users more control. “

“Security-software vendors should ally themselves with trusted parties, rather than compete with them.”

Technorati Tags: Identity, Identity Management, Digital Identity, Mobility

When I was growing up, AT&T was affectionately (or disparagingly, depending on your point of view) called “Ma Bell.” Over the past several years, it has been interesting to see the court-supervised breakup of Ma Bell into the “Baby Bells”, followed progressively by recombination of several of these entitites, along with some new business units, into the “new” AT&T. Perhaps Stephen Colbert explains it best in this video from http://schomer.vox.com/:

Note 1: Sorry, but this video seems to have disappeared from cyberspace. I’m still looking. Perhaps AT&T didn’t like the publicity! 🙂

Note 2: I found a YouTube link that seems to work. However embedding has been disabled “by request.”

Technorati Tags: Telecommunications, AT&T, Ma Bell, Stephen Colbert