Monday, January 27, 2003

Application Firewalls.. Beth Blakely's article introduces the issues surrounding application-level firewalls for web services, and explains how they're different from the network firewalls we're all used to. Referring to a report by Gartner analysts John Pescatore, Matthew Easley, and Richard Stiennon, she also looks at who will likely be the long-term provider of these devices. Will it be the speciality startups such as AKheron, Flamenco Networks, Forum Systems, Reactivity, Vordel, and Westbridge Technology? According to Blakely, "Gartner predicts that as organizations evaluate security requirements, more will implement more than one kind of firewall, spurring demand for integrated centralized administration," such as provided by Check Point Software Technologies. [Source: TechRepublic. Free, but registration required] [Doug Kaye: Web Services Strategies] 10:24:08 PM    comment []

Relationship Density. An interesting article on Network Science in the NY times [g!]: ...Yet just which network model describes human society remains a subject of fierce debate. Mr. Barabasi [Linked] believes the human social network is scale-free with the expected smattering of richly connected hubs. Mr. Watts disagrees. "If you asked people to list the number of people they recognize, that could be scale-free, everyone recognizes Michael Jordan," he said. "But if you said, `Who would you trust to look after your kids?' That's not scale-free. As you start to ratchet up the requirements for what it means to know someone, connections diminish." From "Six Degrees" (W. W. Norton) A network cluster in which Ego has six friends, each of whom is friends with at least one other. Is society a small-world network of the sort Milgram was interested in? Mr. Watts spent the past year trying to test that idea, using the Internet as a proxy for the world population. Whatever the results, he says, it's clear that human psychology has not yet adapted to the implications of a connected world. "We like to think of our world as full of atomized individuals," he said. "But decisions people make and the actions they take are so hopelessly entwined with the behaviors of everyone else that it's difficult to draw the boundaries around the individual." When it comes to choosing a CD or explaining the success of Harry Potter, your preference may matter less than the network's. But some scholars dismiss the network hypothesis altogether. Judith S. Kleinfeld, a psychologist at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, prompted a flurry of media attention last year when she published an article questioning the validity of Milgram's small-world findings. Given the prevalence of networks — from power grids to airports to the Internet — it's tempting to assume that human society is a network as well, she says. But ultimately, that is impossible to prove. "Duncan assumes the world is a matrix," Ms. Kleinfeld said in a telephone interview. "He wants to know how you get from one point on it to another. But what if the world isn't a matrix? What if people aren't all connected? What if they're islands in space?" ... The world is a matrix, you just can't see it.  However, for the big world point of view, see Kleinfeld's Six Degrees and Could It Be A Big World After All? Watts raises an interesting question: if a relationship requires a certain density of connections, does it change the distribution of the network? If you want to help answer this question, one way is to participate in Watt's Small World Research Project.  If you want to learn about Watt's supposition, his new book is Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age. [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] 9:01:00 PM    comment []

Universal Personal Proxies are Alive!. A couple days ago, I just dusted off some of my UPP code and started working on it again. Little did I know that Les was doing the same thing! Awesome! BeanShell rocks - and, oh yeah, a personal proxy in Java Have I mentioned lately that I ♥ BeanShell for Java? I haven't said much about it lately, but I'm still working on my PersonalWebProxy - only this time I'm playing with Java and all the goodies I was wishing for while in Python. I've got Jena and Lucene and HSQL and BSF and Quartz and Muffin and... well, a lot of stuff that feels pretty nice to me. But, with respect to BeanShell in particular, I've got a lot of the nifty live hackability that I had with the things I was playing with in Python. With no more than 5 lines of code, I've tossed a live interactive shell into my running proxy, into which I can telnet or access via Java console in a browser. With this, I can get into the machinery before I take the time composing a UI, inserting/removing plugins at will, tossing together new proxy filters on the fly, composing RDQL queries adhoc, tweaking Lucene searches. Fun stuff, and so easy. But, sorry, no further code from me yet. It's very ugly, and barely works, but it's just a sketchpad at the moment. I hope to have a little something before the end of the month to pass around, should anyone still be interested. Wow! Cool news! I thought Les had gone off and was playing with Python, but he's now switched to Java and is using basically the same tech I am. That's some great news. Now, the reason I'm taking time away from Symbian dev and working on the UPP again is that I want to host a local Web Server with SynchML capabilities so I can communicate to it via Bluetooth from my Nokia 7650. Basically the phone is meant to synch and to upload photos to a website and has all that functionality built in. But if you're at home, you can just do that to your PC, but only if your PC has a little http server running on it. Since I first downloaded Userland Radio over a year ago, I've been sold on the idea of a personal web server, and though I've been talking about doing something similar in Java ever since, I've never gotten around to it. The reason I've never done it? Feature creep. I keep thinking of neat things to do with a local server that I can never seem to get started. But now I have a specific goal, so I'm going to do the Simplest Thing that could Possibly Work and get it out there. I think this is great that Les is working on the UPP too because I think at some point they'll be easy to combine since all the tech we're using is basically the same. Cool beans. This is going to get cool quickly. -Russ [Russell Beattie Notebook] 8:03:32 PM    comment []