Back on the small Idaho dairy farm where I grew up, “Culling the Herd” meant sending cows that didn’t give much milk to the slaughterhouse to make way for more productive bovine.  I hadn’t heard the term referring to getting rid of Facebook friends until I read the “Pearls before Swine” comic strip today.  A bit crass, but sort of descriptive, don’t you think?

After posting this bit of irony, I suppose I’d better not de-friend anyone unless there is a darn good reason, don’t you think?

A Lifehacker tweet caught my eye this morning:

From the ‘why wasn’t this part of it before?’ files: weather in Google Maps lifehac.kr/rntesc

What a great addition to Google Maps! For one who travels frequently as I do, the weather overlay on Google Maps is a godsend. Many times during my career, I have showed up somewhere ill-equipped for the weather and had to buy a coat or sweatshirt to survive. Now, if I can only remember to look at Google Maps, I will be much better prepared.

I wonder when it will show up on my iPhone app?

By the way, do you want to visit us in Mesa, AZ? Maybe in November.

However, although the temperature outside is verifiably toasty, my wonderfully air conditioned office registers a mere 78 degrees!

Back on July 20th, Oracle officially announced Oracle Unified Directory 11g, although it had “unofficially” been available for download for quite some time before that date.  I was part of the Oracle Security Sales Consulting team who received training on this new product the week of July 11th, the week before the official launch.

As a former Sun Microsystems employee, it is gratifying to see Oracle leverage the excellent innovation in the OpenDS project into a full-fledged strategic product. Now, from its humble origins OUD has emerged as the “Next-Generation Unified Directory Solution that Integrates Storage, Synchronization and Proxy.”  Some key highlights include:

• Next Generation: builds on the success and wide adoption of Oracle’s existing directory services solutions with five years of continuous and innovative development to address the increasing demands on modern directory servers;
• High Volume Writes: utilizes social and location-based services to increase the frequency of changes to identity data, as well as expanding the contents to include more details, including location, images, and relationships;
• Elastic Scalability and Extreme Performance: provides a global index and data distribution capabilities to deliver unmatched elastic horizontal scalability and offers high-scale authentication performance to serve an unparalleled billions of users, subscribers and devices;
• On-premise and Cloud Computing Capabilities: controls the synchronization and virtualization of the data to make data available to cloud-based applications and systems while protecting data privacy and data jurisdiction across organizational and state boundaries;
• Smaller footprint: makes Oracle Unified Directory simple to embed and easy to deploy and manage;
• Integrated: interoperates with all components of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g and Oracle Directory Services Plus Suite, while still providing standards support for application integration and scalable data management in heterogeneous environments. Additionally, it also integrates with Oracle Enterprise Manager for monitoring and Oracle Directory Services Manager for configuration.

By the way, I couldn’t find an OUG-specific graphic to use in this post.  Sun Microsystems was a bit more fun in that regard!

I always enjoy learning about a new Identity Management blog. Today, please joining me in welcoming Chad Russell, an Oracle colleague and good friend who hails from the great state of Arkansas, into the blogsphere.  He recently launched a new Identity Management blog, “Brave New Identity – Identity Happenings from the Field.”  His last four posts are both relevant and interesting:

• 3 Hot Trends in IDM (Part 1 of 3)
• Why Provisioning Is Really An Authorization Problem
• Auditing the Cloud
• Amazon boosts IdM offering for cloud

I’m particularly looking forward to learning what Hot Trends 2 and 3 are.

You can also follow Chad on Twitter at @chadrussell_idm.

By the way, the young man up in the corner is Chad’s son, proclaiming, “Love the site, Pops!“