Man with hat.

Hi. My name is Ian Young, and this is my web site. Look around; make yourself at home. You can find out more about me or about the site, read my blog, look at some of my photography and greetings cards, or some of the software I've written; whatever takes your fancy.

RFC 6919

Submitted by iay on April 7, 2013 - 16:06

I'm in the middle of several fairly large spec-writing projects at the moment, so this year's April Fool's RFC 6919 seemed particularly apt:

The key words "MUST (BUT WE KNOW YOU WON'T)", "SHOULD CONSIDER", "REALLY SHOULD NOT", "OUGHT TO", "WOULD PROBABLY", "MAY WISH TO", "COULD", "POSSIBLE", and "MIGHT" in this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 6919.

I briefly considered making use of this and waiting to see if anyone noticed. So far, I have resisted the temptation, and am sticking with RFC 2119.

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Balloon Animal

Submitted by iay on April 6, 2013 - 18:15
giant balloon sculpture shaped like a spiral sea-shell

No, not that one. This one is a sculpture by Jason Hackenwerth called Pisces. It's made out of 10,000 balloons; apparently, the artist and his assistants had to wear earplugs during construction to protect themselves against the squeaky noises.

The sculpture is in the Grand Gallery, National Museum of Scotland until April 14th; it's well worth a visit if you're in town.

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Future of Federations

Submitted by iay on October 2, 2012 - 03:12

I'm speaking later today as part of a session on the Future of Federations at the Internet2 Fall Member Meeting in Philadelphia.

Here is a PDF version of my slides. They are really just a list of the emerging technologies I think may affect identity federations in the short to medium term future; I think things are changing quickly enough that looking further forward than a couple of years is just too difficult.

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UK federation Metadata Aggregation

Submitted by iay on August 12, 2012 - 21:25
diagram full of boxes and arrows

One of the systems I work on is the back end of the UK federation's metadata system. Although I've talked about this in several presentations, the bare structural diagram isn't very informative on its own. Here, I present a snapshot of the architecture, and go into a lot more depth on the what, how and why than you'd get from just the slide on its own (click on the image to get a larger version).

I hope that this article can perform double duty as a case study for the Shibboleth metadata aggregator tool, which acts as the engine behind the metadata system and to which I also contribute as a developer.

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