Tags: Barcamp

Last Sunday, I had the opportunity to attend Barcamp, a great technology grassroots get-together. Kudos to all the folks who brought it together - the best 6 hours I've spent geeking out in a long time...

In blatant imitation of #joiito, I hereby announce my own IRC channel, #GabeW. This is on the freenode network (irc.freenode.net).

If you don't know what IRC is, or how to connect (try clicking on the link above first - it may just work depending on software you have installed), go see the #joiito intro to IRC wiki page.

My state senator, Joe Simitian has authored a bill which is intended to keep the state or any local government entity from using or issuing identity cards with contactless communication facilities that don't meet strict security standards. It also outlaws completely the use of contactless data communications for certain types of identity documents (e.g. drivers licenses) for a period of 3 years.

The bill has the support of EFF, ACLU, and a number of other organizations. It also has my support. Please visit EFF's Action Alert for SB 682. And if you are a fellow consituent of Joe Simitian, please do contact his office and express your appreciation!

Tags: xri, technorati

Kevin Burton and a few other folks make a good point in talking about problems with the new Technorati tagging system. One thing that bugs me in particular is that it's basically a technorati-only solution that is a metadata standard based on a site-specific URL pattern. This seems brittle and more than a little hackish. I mean, great start, don't stop, but lets come up with a better solution.

Tags: xri, technorati

Seems like using XRIs with Technorati tags might be an interesting fit, especially with the "+" XRI namespace reserved for "concepts". For example, xri://+love xri://+war xri://+vanilla - things that aren't really meant to be "resolved" but are either used "as-is" (ie to refer to the thing everyone commonly knows the identifier to be - ie "love", "war", or "vanilla"), or used in the context of something else xri://=GabeWachob*(+father).

OK, so now I get to try to put in my first technorati tag(s). Lets see if this works.

Well, I upgraded to Drupal 4.4

I don't see any new features, maybe there'll be some speed or bug fixes... I'll have to get some modules and play around with them.

Time for me to go to sleep.

ATOM is the specification for syndicated content feeds.

One could say that creating a feed is the "splitting" of the original content from the blog, hence FISSION.

Putting the feeds together in an aggregator is therefore FUSION.

Hows that for slick wordsmithing.

Wow!

The Dean campaign announced the formation of an advisory panel for policy issues surrounding the Internet. And the list of members is impressive: Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, Dewayne Hendricks to name a few.

Its about time these issues got addressed seriously at the presidential level. I'm waiting for other campaigns now (of course, they'll have to pick from the rest of the experts - Dean's got many of the best already!).

I proposed a radically simplified XRI resolution mechanism that relies only on HTTP, leveraging caching for efficiency, and providing a clear path for using a REST architecture to use XRIs. In other words, this resolution is RESTful, and could be used in a RESTful application.

I've gotten fairly positive feedback about it so far and I'm hoping its now within the comprehension of mere mortals. While I was really jazzed about DNS and especially DDDS, its become clear to me that the newness of using DNS for generic identifier resolution is proving to be an impediment to any serious review of the XRI resolution document.

Did you know that RFC 2616 (HTTP/1.1) defines the HTTP protocol to operate on any type of URI? This opens a lot of possiblities how different identifier schemes can be used.

In my role as co-chair of the XRI effort, I do a lot of research into existing specifications. I want to reuse them. Specifically, I want to reuse HTTP since its probably the most widely implemented specification out there (except maybe TCP/IP).

The Realization

According to my reading of RFC 2616, the on-the-wire protocol can use any URI. For example, this is legal according to 2616: