You know how a lot of people, when they post presentation slides, say that it’s really difficult to “get” the presentation from just the slides? Well I mean it. Seriously. My slides have very few words. If you’re still interested, be sure to check out the actual paper (pdf).

I don’t use PowerPoint or the like, instead I use a XUL application that runs in any Mozilla based-browser (like Firefox, Camino, Netscape etc.). In order to see the presentation, you’ll need to use one of those browsers.

This presentation was given at the Digital Identity Management Workshop of CCS in Virginia on 2 November 2007.

Reputation Presentation at DIM 2007

To download the presentation to view it locally I’ve also bundled it into a zip file

These slides were presenting the paper Using Reputation to Augment Explicit Authorization

• no authorization
• authentication as authorization (where you can do anything if you are only able to log in)
• explicit authorization where someone has to manually grant access to another person.

The first two can be automated, no manual intervention required. The gap between the second and third is considerable. We believe that reputation can be used to bridge that wide gap giving systems many characteristics of explicit authorization in an automated way, so that the system itself can be self scaling (in terms of authenticating users).

UPDATE By popular demand the presentation is also available in PDF form .

The summary:

MountainWest RubyCamp 2007
Saturday, November 17th 2007
1:00 PM – 4:00 PM
Salt Lake City Library
Level 4 Meeting Room

The organizers have asked that if you’re coming to put your name on the wiki page

I’ve never been to a “Camp” before but I hear they are like “unconferences”. I go to the Internet Identity Workshop which is an unconference, and the results have been fantastic. Those who come are actively involved in the discussion, it’s quite refreshing.

I don’t know if I will present or not. I could lead a discussion and get people up to speed with the digital identity landscape—OpenID, CAS, InfoCard and some secret sauce :)

If you’re interested but a little put off that it is specifically about “Ruby” you should come anyway. Ruby is a good excuse to get together and rub elbows, it’s not an excuse to exclude interesting people or ideas.

Yeah I know, this is supposed to be a technology blog. This one’s for posterity.

I get severe canker sores. Huge. They hurt. They are no fun. It’s technically called Apthous Stomatitis . I’ll get open canker sores about the size of a dime or worse that last for several weeks. That wikipedia link and other sites enumerate many attempted treatments. Some things that work for one person just has no positive effect for another. I’ve tried most of them and none of them seem to help.

When I was growing up, baking soda applied directly to the sore would help it heal faster. It hurt like heck though. My cankers get larger nowadays and the baking soda technique just hurts like crazy and doesn’t help at all.

My contribution to posterity is to merely document a treatment I heard about which has helped me. I got this home treatment from my cousin, who is a doctor. I’m not a doctor so don’t mistake this for medial advice.

The treatment is to use a styptic stick or pencil. They’re not as common nowadays but you can still find them in drug stores. They’ll be marketed as a way to stop bleeding if you’ve nicked yourself shaving.

You run a little water over the styptic pencil and then apply it directly to the sore. It chemically cauterizes the sore. Sometimes it stings a little bit, but not terribly so. It’s nothing compared to the hurt from baking soda or salt. You will get a pretty potent taste of citrus.

So, if you are one of the unfortunate sufferers of recurrent severe cankers and nothings seems to work, using a styptic pencil might be worth a try.

I know I’m not like some people who get 600 hits in one day from Reddit . I’ve been told that the true measure of “getting on the map” is when spammers take notice of you. They’ve noticed my blog, probably due to my incredibly massive readership. I thought I had my blog settings to moderate comments, but I was mistaken. Sorry if any of you were exposed to some of those terrible comments over the last couple of days.

My current blogging engine is Mephisto which has built-in support for Akismet . So far Akismet has taken care of the problem. I’m getting several hundred spam comments everyday, but none are getting through. None of the comments were particularly clever, but the volume is just no fun to keep track of by hand.

My university has a content filter (Dan’s Guardian) which uses blacklists as well as phrase weighting. I hadn’t thought about it before, but one drawback of using filters on the content is that when I went to remove spam comments, the comments triggered the content filter and kept me out of my own blog when I was trying to delete those very comments. Fortunately a semester ago they allowed a bypass that logged your action and let you through. Without that safety hatch I wouldn’t have been able to rectify the situation.

I was on the phone with my Mom and she had a document she wanted to send me.

Devlin:

Mom, you’ve got a scanner. You can email it to me.

Mom :

Laughing It would be easier for me to send it in the mail!

She’s telling the truth. Yes my mom is a very competent computer user. It’s just not easy enough. It’s not just her, it’s me too. The number of programs and such that you’ve got to get to work together is too many. The single button touch thingeroos on new all-in-ones don’t cut it. The software to listen for the scanner’s “convenience buttons” gum up the whole works, they consume insane amounts of memory and don’t ever seem to work right anyway.

It’s a sad reflection on the state of usability in software when the postal system, the POSTAL SYSTEM of all things is easier to use.

Witnessed on campus this morning.

A girl saw a friend and tried to get her attention by yelling, “Jennika! Jennika!”

No response.

Thinking that onlookers must think she’s crazy for yelling at apparently the wrong person, she she looks over at us and succinctly explains why the friend is oblivious.

“iPod. What can you do?!”

This blog, The Daley Devlin, was almost named Half Baked. I still haven’t ruled out the possibility of renaming it. In the conversation I have with myself, my mind says that I can really write about topics that I haven’t completely worked through, but I don’t feel like I can yet. I’m OK with some fairly unpolished prose, but I haven’t been able to force myself to write about unpolished ideas. We can’t always be right. It’s OK to be wrong, as long as we learn from our mistakes, right?

This post is just me trying to get psyched up for actually doing it.