.:MattTopper.com:.

2Mar/112

Taking a Techcation, Want Some Ideas

So Jake over at the App Lab has been known to take many a staycation in his time.  I'm notorious for never taking any of my vacation (been at my 180 hour cap for close to a year). So I'm going to start a new trend taking a "techcation."  My goal is to take a week away from the office to play with a different technology every day and blogging my progress at the end of each day.  My target week is that of March 13, so I have 2 weeks to prepare.  There's been a bunch of different things on my desk and in my mind that I've been meaning to find time to play with, but as with everyone, works been taking all my time lately.  So I'm going to stay home and play with something new every day.  So far here is my list of things I'm thinking about:

  1. Arduino something (Thanks Chris)
  2. Hadoop 101
  3. Cassandra 101
  4. MongoDB 101
  5. Android 101

This is a very tentative list.  Anything else people think I should be looking at?  I'm looking for something that I can get a basic knowledge and have a working "something" up and running within 8 hours.  Feel free to hit the comments with suggestions.  As much as I love the identity world I'm hoping to stay far far away for the week.  I'd love to see this idea take off, even better would be if people started pairing up or doing it in small groups.

I might drop one of the days to work on the 280Z or my truck if its nice.  I've had two pairs of speakers sitting on the floor of my office to go into each vehicle for about 6 months now.  I've also got a bedslide for the truck thats been taking up garage space for over a year.  I'm sure my wife would appreciate that one.

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14Feb/114

The Next OpenID Platform

We're repeatedly seeing more and more accounts of accounts being hacked and passwords being stolen across the web.  Take a look at the recent Gawker hack and all their hashed passwords being posted to torrent sites.  People should also realize that there are many lists out there that take millions of common passwords and run them through all the standard hashing algorithms.  This allows a hacker to quickly search through a list of hashed passwords and come up with the actual password you're using.  How many of us use this same password across multiple sites, or a very similar variant of the same password.

A few years ago I envisioned what the next generation OpenID platform might look like.  I've shared this with multiple people over the years and they all ask me why I haven't built it yet.  I honestly just haven't made the time so I feel like its time to give someone else the opportunity.  OpenID is great in that it allows you tohave a single strong password to authenticate you against multiple sites.  Many of you will have used Facebook Connect to go to websites and this is a very similar technology  Some of the things I noodle in the attached diagram TheNextGenOpenIDPlatform include stronger hardware based authentication devices, delegated account access, digital personas, linking of devices that can be remotely de-authorized, an analytics dashboard to find out who is using your identity and attributes, and synchronizing your attributes across all the places you go.

If there are any VCs listening I'm more than happy to start an angel round of investing and start building, I already have the team I'd use ready to go. ;-)

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