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As I said in my previous post, I’m currently in Denver and not sleeping. My body seems to be rejecting the idea that it’s 6:30am.

I’ve had a few interesting experiences over the past couple of days, some of which I recounted in that post, but there were some general comments and observations I wanted to make as well. Some of these only serve to highlight the differences between us!

My first comment about Denver is that it’s cold. I can’t think of a way to describe just how it feels without resorting to swearing. It’s absolutely f*cking freezing. Walking back to the hotel from the restaurant last night was the coldest I’ve ever been in my life. I checked the temperature when I got in (about 11:30pm) - -12C! Current temperature is apparently -16C. I can’t even think of words to describe that.

The city itself is very different from a British city. My home city, Leeds, (which is a typical example) has a very vibrant and fun city centre - a great selection of bars, clubs, restaurants as well as some fantastic shopping and businesses (particularly legal and financial services) - people live there as well. During the day the focus is on retail (and business, of course) with the restaurants and bars providing a diversion. There’s an out of town shopping centre which provides a choice - depending on my mood I can decide how to shop. My local out of town shopping centre is one of the last ones built in the country - there was a distinct policy to stop them. At the time I disagreed with this - thinking that they should be built and if people preferred them they would be successful.

Having spent a full day in Denver I completely retract that. Denver has the 16th Street Mall which, I believe, along with the Pavilion (located on the same street) is supposed to have the pick of the in-town shopping. It’s appalling and I’m not a serious shopper. On the positive side there are some good restaurants and bars which obviously make it a popular place on an evening (even in the ridiculous weather), but I was amazed at how busy they were during the day. Apart from a couple of shoe shops, book stores and Virgin I could find practically nothing, yet all the restaurants were busy. It took me a while to realise that people weren’t there to shop - they were there to eat and maybe if they got bored for a few minutes they could go buy something. Outside of 16th Street, there’s very little to interest a casual visitor to the city.

We headed to Cherry Creek shopping centre, which is about 4 miles from downtown Denver (I think) and wandered around there - not a great selection of stores (men’s clothing seems much more focused on sportswear here), but some interesting ones - enough for me to make a couple of purchases (including a cut-throat razor, which I’ve been looking for).

In general, people working in the service industry seem so polite, but I really get the impression that they’re not paying attention when I say anything not directly related to the transaction at hand (with the occasional exception).

Entertainment last night was, as I mentioned before, at the Comedy Works on 15th Street followed by a pretty good seafood meal. The comedy was a bit hit and miss - I missed a few cultural references, but the biggest shock was the way that Mexicans appear to be fair game for any jokes (closely followed by the jokes about the Irish and potatoes - very 19th century). Very different from the approach taken in Britain (this seems to be the equivalent of jokes about Pakistanis). The difference in attitudes to alcohol was also apparent - with the big drinkers in the audience covering the “two item minimum” (what is that about anyway?). This is reflected by the minimum age and ID policy. I agree that there’s a bit of an alcohol problem in the UK (and Ireland), but frankly, the fact that comedians can joke about crystal meth usage (and that the audience get it) says more about a “society” (crystal meth, has, despite a few warnings over the past couple of years, never really made it to the UK). Another huge cultural difference was highlighted by the sign on one place “No firearms permitted on these premises”. Thanks for that.

At least I felt reasonably safe walking the streets (Worryingly I tend to be a bit blasé in these situations and blindly walk through armed gangs asking them politely to excuse me), with the greatest danger coming from the cold. I’m pretty sure that a couple of times I was ready to give in and just sit down in the snow. Now all I have to do is find something to occupy my Sunday.

I’m currently in Denver, CO (local time is 5:11am, home time is 12:11pm - I should probably be asleep) with a colleague, for what should be an interesting few days with the guys at Ping. I’ve got a few comments and observations about what I’ve seen - which are split into two broad categories (obviously with some overlap) of “social/environmental” and “identity”. I’ll deal with the latter first…

One of the first things that struck me upon arrival in the airport on Friday evening was the complete disaster that is US immigration. Coming from the UK we have some of the most relaxed immigration requirements into this country, but my patience was stretched to the limit by the process (although I get the impression that losing ones temper with the nice people of the DHS would probably not have helped). On checking in at Heathrow I was asked questions about the purpose of my trip, and had to provide the name of the hotel where I would be staying. Obviously the lady at the check-in desk already knew what date I’d be leaving. Once on the aircraft I was handed two forms - one for immigration, one for customs - I filled in both - duplicating a lot of information across them AND with the data provided to the airline (which must go to immigration). On arrival I queued for more than an hour behind a bunch of people (who can’t follow basic instructions and fill in forms correctly - these were the same people who couldn’t follow the instructions at security pre-boarding) to get let in. I also had to have my fingerprints scanned and a photograph taken. In America, everyone gets treated fairly - as a potential criminal.

Now, forgive me if I’m wrong, but I was already in possession of a perfectly good biometric identifier, with an asserted identity from a trusted party - it’s called a passport. My passport has my name, date of birth, country of birth on it. It also contains a photograph (the biometric), which was verified against my actual face by one of the most advanced and capable visual scanning systems in existence - the DHS officer’s eyes and brain. Immediately the implication is that either I’m not trusted, or my country tends to issue wrong passports (now I trust my Government about as far as I could overthrow them, but I thought there was some agreement on these things). Just what is all this rigmarole meant to achieve? As it happens, my hotel booking was incorrect and I’ve now moved to a different hotel anyway. In addition my return flight seems to have been cancelled (thanks BA), which means that most of the information I provided is now wrong.

My second identity experience was during the course of yesterday when I decided to take advantage of the relative values of the pound sterling and the US dollar. After unsuccessfully attempting to purchase something in the city itself (I’ll comment on this later) we headed to a “mall” where I made a few bargain purchases. I decided to use my debit card - as the safest and cheapest way of buying things. At home the use of “chip and pin” has actually improved the card purchasing experience (It might actually have reduced fraud as well) so I’d forgotten just how lax the process of using a card is here. Why do they even bother to get me sign the slip when the signature isn’t verified? The strangest experience was on the highest value item I purchased - I handed over my card and was asked for ID (I assume there’s a lower limit where this is done). After I explained that I don’t carry around ID (and helped by the fact that another assistant in the store had spent time in England when she was younger) this requirement was waived. Is it just me that appreciates the irony of waiving an identity check when it’s most obviously needed - a foreigner with a card that “looks strange”? Still, at least the store might have accepted my passport, unlike the Government.

A third identity related incident came following my night out at the Comedy Works - in order to purchase tickets or buy a beer I was asked for ID. Having never carried any on a regular basis in my life I was somewhat surprised, but knowing my own date of birth seemed to be enough - I am in my 30s after all! On entrance to the (mildly funny) show I remembered that I actually had my driving license in my wallet, just to prove it. The point that struck me here was that I imagine they don’t see very many UK driving licenses in the club - how many Americans could even say what one looks like? Verifying the authenticity of the identity document itself becomes difficult - unlike the immigration officers who must see UK passports quite regularly. Having people carry around such documents is a good way to soften them up for ID cards - is this why we in the UK have started to become stricter on these matters?

One final note is that on the inner front page of my passport there is a statement, it’s the standard thing about allowing the bearer to travel, but there’s a peculiarity with the UK passport - “Her Britannic Majesty’s Secretary of State requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty that…” (emphasis mine). I wonder just how far my Government would go to assert that requirement on my behalf?

Just testing something… nothing to see here, move along. Go on.

Despite the fact that I get bombarded with Americanised spellings almost constantly and especially the word “authorisation” I insist on using the “correct” form.

There’s been an ongoing debate, which I’ve only caught up on over the past couple of days, started by James McGovern, and picked up by Pat Patterson, Conor Cahill and Justin Peavey (and possibly others) about federated authorisation (here, here, here and here - as examples (I’ve missed some!)). I’m obviously late to the party on this, but I have a few opinions on this topic.

Firstly - there’s a policy aspect - I can’t see many situations where a service provider would actually want to allow the IdP to determine access controls. There’s a benefit to allow federated authentication (in terms of user provisioning, password management and attribute management), but no so with authorisation that can’t be dealt with in other ways.

Secondly - the bandwidth and connection may be a problem. Authentication is a one-time (per session) act, authorisation could (and most likely, would) happen many times in any user session - how many references back to the policy point would be required and what happens when that connection is not available?

Finally (and this links back to my first point in many ways) - An SP can partially allow control of authorisation to the IdP and still set overall policy by the mechanism of role mapping. This is standard in federation scenarios - the use of roles makes access control policies much easier to handle - the SP sets the policy for the role and IdP determines the role membership. What could be simpler?

I’ve got more comments on roles to come…

I’ve been using Google News as my primary RSS reader for a while now, my only real complaint was that is wasn’t possible to sort the order of entries, with it automatically displaying newest first, which frankly was a pain. After catching up with over 400 items over the past couple of days I realised this evening that they’ve now added an option for sort order - which makes it a LOT easier to catch up with conversations from over a period of a couple of weeks

Well done!

Whilst I finish catching up there were a couple of trivial things that caught my eye -

First up, this wonderful facial recognition tool from MyHeritage (seen by by Charles Coxhead), which performs matching against celebrity faces and returns results such as this -

(Although I’m not sure I should be worried that there’s a woman’s face in there!)

Secondly, inspired by Jason Kottke (here) - my year of music, from the last.fm rolling chart. Reasonably accurate, I think.

1 Blur
2 Radiohead
3 The White Stripes
4 Red Hot Chili Peppers
5 Queens of the Stone Age
6 System of a Down
7 The Rolling Stones
7 Metallica
9 Green Day
10 Pixies
11 Nirvana
12 Foo Fighters
13 Muse
13 The Strokes
13 Oasis
16 Black Rebel Motorcycle Club
17 The Raconteurs
17 My Chemical Romance
19 The Prodigy
19 Slipknot
21 Tenacious D
21 The Hives
21 Gorillaz
24 Kings of Leon
25 Franz Ferdinand

Best album of the year - Costello Music by The Fratellis

Mind Hacks: Freedom is slavery
An excellent ongoing debate. We all know where this ends though.

A big news item this morning was that of MI5 starting to “provide” terror alerts by email. Whilst I’d generally say that giving people information is a “good thing” there surely has to be cases where it’s superfluous at best and dangerous at worst and, IMO, this is one of them. The general question about terror alerts is what is a person supposed to do with the information?

If I receive traffic alerts then I can plan my journey around them and use them to make judgements about whether to avoid certain roads. I can receive weather alerts to help me plan my day. Alerts (in various forms) about for shopping, travel, news and sport can be useful or informative to us. What exactly am I supposed to do with the information that the terror alert status has been raised to critical? Maybe I’m supposed to hide in bed all day and not venture out in case Al Qaeda attack that day! Maybe with some context it could be slightly more useful and allow a proper risk assessment, but that brings me on to the point (which I’ve made before, but obviously never posted on) that the idea of even maintaining a threat level is pointless when it gets used the way it does.

Ever since the introduction of published “threat” levels in this country they’ve been maintained at a ridiculously high level. If it’s really the case that we’re under constant threat then maybe we should all panic a little more, but I think we all know that’s not the case and it’s starting to become like the “boy who cried wolf” - the situation in August with “suspected” terrorist threats certainly hasn’t helped.

Of course, it could be worse. I noticed the American DHS are now delivering terror alerts through RSS!

I’m a week late for a start. I’ve still not caught up with everything from before Christmas (the break was busy for other reasons), but I’m starting to make progress and have a couple of proper posts in me already. Once I’ve digested all the news I’ll feel like writing!

Over the past couple of days I’ve upgraded wordpress on the blog again (2.0.6 now) and updated a couple of plugins, as well as adding some more - including the rather nice “Ask Me“, which generates this page - I’m still waiting on my first question.

For Christmas itself I was given a new iPod - rather nicely the iTunes scrobbler plugin I use for last.fm updates my recently played list when the iPod is synched, which means that every song I listen to now gets listed (even more useful since I also got an MP3 player FM transmitter for the car!), plus a replacement camera (I unfortunately lost mine just before Christmas). I was going to use the camera to take shots of the Hogmanay festival in Edinburgh that I attended with my girlfriend, but it got cancelled due to bad weather (who’d have thought that an event in December / January in Scotland might have weather problems?!).

On to a new year - some exciting challenges and opportunities in both a personal and professional sense!

Microsoft bans Scroogle | The Register
Not really, but it’s another good example of a failing automatic censor (just ask the people of Scunthorpe!). Scroogle certainly seems to be getting more popular though…