SuperWonderBang

I was sick on the 4th of July. No great big deal as I’m not a huge celebrator of holidays, but I was sick the next day, too, which meant I had to work from home. It seems like things are more hectic when I work from home, than if I am at the office. That’s odd to me.

To make me feel a little better, my wife bought me Guitar Hero II for our Xbox 360. I ended up playing until my hands were cramping. I’ve done the same thing tonight and writing this post is much more difficult than it should be. To that end, I’ve been reading up on the possibilities for secure RSS feeds.

We are looking at using RSS feeds at work, not just for basic public information, but for account-specific work as well. It seems that the jury is still out on RSS in the enterprise. Much of it is focused on letting employees access enterprise data. There is little information out there regarding a user of a service authenticating and receiving data in a feed based on who he or she is while also encrypting that data via SSL/TSL.

Most solutions munge some combination of HTTP basic authentication or LDAP or propriety authentication with the industry standard SSL over HTTP. This doesn’t do much if the feed also needs to indicate to the system what data it should return. So, that’s like three levels of interaction.

In addition, we are wanting some of the feed data to be available when the application is not. Things like maintenance feeds or outage updates. These feeds are more “public” in nature but need not rely on our app or database to be accessible to function correctly.

I’ve looked at some offerings from Worklight, Newsgator, Attensa, and KnowNow. I don’t have a good feel yet for which of the products can actually do what I need. In the end, I suspect I will be rolling my own because of some thorny business needs for which these products don’t seem to have built-in answers.

Technorati Tags: rss, enterprise rss, worklight, newsgator, attensa, knownow, secure rss, guitar hero, xbox 360

Write AIR easily with Aptana

With Bush’s recent commutation of the jail part of Scooter Libby’s sentence, one would hope Americans would once and for all see that this power-mad bully has finally destroyed any sense of legitimacy he may have had left.

Bush’s behavior is that of the sycophant who finally is able to grasp the reins of power. At that point, this putrid person gives all his cronies free passes for whatever transgressions they may have committed during that climb to the top. Additionally, it must be clear to nearly any thinking American that Libby was simply thrown under the bus by the Bush administration with the firm knowledge that Bush is above the law and would be able to pardon him of any punishment he might receive.

Sure, there is no pardon yet, but the only punishments  Libby will receive are that of a $250,000 fine and some probation time. One can only guess where that $250,000 is going to come from. I would to see the paper trail on the funds behind that check. Let’s not forget that Libby has gotten rich as the benefactor of Bush’s inner sanctum. So, he gives a little back. Who’s counting?

This is just one more example of George Bush and his administration making themselves above the law. Add to this Dick Cheney’s asinine assertion that the Vice President is not part of the Executive Branch while out of the other side of his mouth, he claims executive privilege over any documents that might give us a glimpse of the criminal activities being perpetrated in the White House.

We can’t wait until 2008. We must impeach Bush now!