One problem with distributed identity systems

From one perspective, using someone else's identity system sounds verynice. Imagine the convenience of being able to just use LiveJournal useraccounts on your site, or (for an example closer to home) a centraluniversity database of campus-wide accounts.

(Yes, I am conjoining 'identity' and 'authorization' here, because Ibelieve that it's what a lot of people do in practice when thinkingabout this sort of thing.)

The problem with this is that any time you use a


20070812 網摘 – 香港誌

HK


北京公幹之閉關篇




在北京過了五日四夜
除了最後一天出外活動
基本上都在開會地點和酒店房間度過
開會之前總有準備工作
開會之後又肯定有跟進工作
即使把在京的工作都做完了
又得抽時間處理澳門的事情
還有一些寫來寫去都寫不完的報告
總之在北
Continue reading...

Weekly spam summary on August 11th, 2007

This week, we:

  • got 11,040 messages from 245 different IP addresses.
  • handled 20,069 sessions from 1,915 different IP addresses.
  • received 344,743 connections from at least 97,338 different IPaddresses.
  • hit a highwater of 42 connections being checked at once.

Connection volume is down from last week .This week the volume peak was clearly on Monday instead of Wednesday:

DayConnectionsdifferent IPs
Sunday4

Adventures in network design, illustrated by our new backbone connection

Our current connection to the campus backbone is a 100 megabitconnection. While we have a (somewhat) new gigabit backboneconnection, we are not using it yet because we need to revise ournetwork architecture.

One of the issues with our current network setup is that it wasdesigned before firewalls were common. As a result, our currentbackbone connection connects directly to one of our /24 subnets, where(of course) a number of our servers live. This forces us to use abridging firewall


On the performance of Python longs being used as bitmaps

A comment on the previous entry got meinterested in what exactly cost all the time when using Python longs asbitmaps.Some poking shows that the time & takes scales up based on the smallerlong involved, and the time | takes scales based on the larger longinvolved. While this is not particularly surprising, it means thatsetting and clearing any bit has a cost based on how big the bitmap is,ie, what the largest set bit is.

(Checking low bits in a large bitmap is relatively cheap,


悲觀絕對漫長


有一天,靜下來想一想,原來生活在當下的澳門,竟然有那麼多東西叫我們感到意難平、不知所措、無能為力,然後,慢慢的開始害怕。

最簡單的例子,莫過於活在這日漸喧囂的城市中揮之不去的悲觀感覺,我們有太多不知道的

Lost in Translation

王迪詩這個名字,是祖父給我起的。一聽就知是先想到Daisy這英文名字,然後才翻譯到中文來。三十年代,我的曾祖父在上海經營洋行,把三個兒子通通送到歐美留學。二十歲那年,祖父穿著西裝、披上大衣,以一副許文強的模樣

我只想安靜(夜深人靜音樂版)

我只想安靜 (夜深人靜音樂版)〔 收聽
曲、唱: 豈能忘記
詞: 燕窩窩主

我只想安靜。
請不要問我什麼時候會出現。
請不要告訴我鉅細無遺的生活小節。
請不要讓我看無聊當有趣、
實是富騷擾意味的「笑」話。
請不要以風馬牛不


無執輸 去教書

昨天黃昏,下著滂沱大雨之際,終於開課了。

這是一個Major in Advertising/Marketing & Communication的Part-time Degree Program,由HKU Space和澳洲Curtin大學合辦,我負責教的,是Brand Management這科目。

平時出外演說也文也武,自由發揮,今回為人師表,於是便認真起來,認真得超乎平