Flex Builder 2.0 on Mac OSX - First Looks!!

(File this under "You heard it here first")

One advantage to being a technical evangelist for a large company is that I get first access to new technologies. Last week, while on an analyst tour in the UK, I got access to the pre-release version of Flex Builder for Mac OSX. (Note to self: I think I just admitted to being a geek). D’oh!!!

Installation is easy, in typical Mac style. All I had to do was unzip the file and double click on the app. The installer did the rest. Flex Builder 2.0 places an icon on both your desktop and toolbar on the Mac. Launching it is quicker than on my old PC (for comparison sake, I have a Macbook Pro (intel duo core chipset) running 2 GB RAM and OSX 10.4.7+). In fact, with Finder, Desktop, Word, Excel, PPT, FireFox, Safari, entourage, Acrobat Pro, System Profiler, Preview and my Cisco VPN client running, Flex Builder launches in 4 seconds from click to completion.

The first screens are largely the same as on Windows:



I wanted to try out the Hello World Application I wrote for my talks in the UK last week to see if any bugs were encountered before getting into more complex applications using E4X and other AS3 features. I used the Wizard to create a project in no time and it flawlessly set up the project and first main.mxml file.



Switching to the Design view worked perfectly too. I was able to quickly add a Panel, Text area and Button all within seconds. I decided to test out the text functionality so I switched the alignment to centre and changed the text size. No issues.



Code completion via Eclipse worked well too.



One minor glitch happened when I became lazy and decided to go to my PPT to cut and paste the syntax for the behavior on the button. When I searched the task bar for Flex Builder 2, it was advertised but as “Java”.



Of course, this is not a major issue as it was immediately clear to me what was going on. I had made a mistake on the syntax and saved the document. When I fixed the syntax and saved it a second time, the message disappeared (this was a pre-release bug in the PC version). I ran the program and it executed without a problem and only one minor nit. On a PC, when you run the program, it opens your browser and brings it to the front of the desktop so you can see your project (*.swf file within an HTML envelope) execute. On the Mac, I had to manually switch to the browser to see it. In fact, I had hit the run button twice not knowing that it had actually run the first time.

My early observations are very enthusiastic. My gut feeling is that it runs better on a Mac (certainly faster than the similarly equipped PC I was using). Hats off to the Flex Mac team!!! Stay tuned for more.

MAX 2006 is gonna be really cool!

There are some pretty cool new things coming out from LiveCycle at MAX this year that should be of great interest to Macromedia fans. This is not simply a rehash of existing stuff. In fact, some of the debuts will be the first time anyone outside Adobe has access to the technology. I wanted to blog as the LC track coordinator to make sure you are aware of what you might see and also to prepare you to chose the tracks.

First – the new Adobe Policy Server will be unveiled. For the first time ever, the Policy Server will be able to policy protect Word and CATIA (cad format) documents. We will also be discussing our future plans for supporting other file formats. We are very eager to seek developer and business input to our product roadmap.

Second – Matt Butler will be presenting a 3 hour session on LC including a 30 minute panel session to allow developers to directly access members of the team and other key people. Matt is a “rock star” in the LiveCycle development and this presents and unparalleled opportunity to enter into direct dialog with him. Not an opportunity to be missed.

Third – the new LC platform incorporating the core tenets of SOA will be unveiled. Most of the content on the future of the platform and its embedded registry runtime environment will be explored in great detail as well as a deep look at the service container architecture and deployment models. This will be very interesting to Macromedia fans to see where technologies like Cold Fusion and Flex might fit in.

Additionally, there will be hands on session to enhance your core skills at LiveCycle. These include working with the various API’s and GUI’s. Over 75% of this content has never been taught before. Other luminaries like Ben Forta will also be on hand to teach courses and meet.

In short, MAX presents and unparalleled opportunity to see how Adobe and Macromedia are doing in their everyday life now that the marriage and honeymoon are over.

Using Adobe's XPAAJ.jar via Line Command on Mac OSX (Intel chipset)

For those of you who have been not using the XPAAJ.jar library only because you are Mac based, you may want to read this post. While the library does not claim to be supported on Mac, I did manage to get it to work but had to re-tweak a few things in the sample code and also study my Unix-Java Command line syntax. The tweaked code is at the bottom.

Adobe's XPAAJ:

XPAAJ is an API library from Adobe for PDF documents. The acronym means Adobe® XML/PDF Access API for Java™ (XPAAJ). It can now be downloaded freely from the Adobe Developer Network at http://www.adobe.com/devnet/livecycle/downloads/xpaaj.html. Once you download the zip, unzip it to a directory where you will work on it. The directory structure will be as follows:

Xpaaj_sdk
|
|-- xpaaj.jar
|---/samples
|---/docs

Open a terminal and navigate to the /xpaaj_sdk/samples/command-line/ConsoleSample/ directory. There you will see some sample classes and a test.pdf file. I did not have luck with all the sample files so I opened PDFExtract and modified it a bit.

For the record, my java –version is:
java version "1.5.0_06"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.5.0_06-112)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.5.0_06-64, mixed mode, sharing)
Mac is OSX 10.4.7 on the MacBook Pro.

If you want to run some samples, I recommend cutting and pasting the text at the end of this blog and saving it as the file “DuanePDFClass1.java” on your hard drive. One thing you also might want to consider is to also copy the xpaaj.jar file to the ~/ConsoleSample directory to make it easier to use to compile and run the DuanePDFClass1 class since you can simply cut and paste the line commands below.

From that directory, compile the sample by typing in the following:

javac -classpath ./XPAAJ.jar DuanePDFClass1.java

It should compile. Try typing ls –la to make sure that the resulting class file exists and that it is executable. To run it, type:

java -classpath ./xpaaj.jar: DuanePDFClass1 test.pdf

test.pdf is the argument for the test file that it will open, tell you a few tings about and save. You should see the following appear in your line command window:

duane-nickulls-computer:~/code/xpaaj_sdk/samples/command-line/ConsoleSample nickull$ java -classpath ./xpaaj.jar: DuanePDFClass1 test.pdf

Opening PDF with DuanePDFClass1...
test.pdf was successfully opened.
PDF version = %PDF-1.5
Number of pages = 1

Saving document ...
Document was saved to file : test_saved_by_DuanePDFClass1.pdf

Execution of DuanePDFClass1 has finished.

Anyhow, that is all for now. I will be demonstrating this during the Adobe Developer Week in London, UK next Wednesday. Here is the classfile text (use at your own risk, no guarantees blah blah blah....):

import java.io.*;
import java.util.*;
import java.awt.image.DataBuffer;
import com.adobe.pdf.*;

public class DuanePDFClass1 {

public static void main(String[] args)
throws FileNotFoundException, IOException
{
String inPdfName;
if(args.length != 1 )
{
System.out.println("\nCommand line format: java DuanePDFClass1 pdf-file");
return;
}
else
{
inPdfName = new String(args[0]);
PDFExtract(inPdfName);
}
}

public static void PDFExtract(String inPdfName)
throws FileNotFoundException, IOException
{
System.out.println("\nOpening PDF with DuanePDFClass1...");
PDFDocument doc = null;
boolean b = false;
FileInputStream inPdfFile = new FileInputStream(inPdfName);
try {
doc = PDFFactory.openDocument(inPdfFile);
} catch (IOException e) {
System.out.println("Error opening PDF file :" + inPdfName);
System.out.println(e);
}
if(doc == null)
System.out.println("Cannot open PDF file : " + inPdfName);
else
System.out.println( inPdfName + " was successfully opened.");


/* Try some methods here */
System.out.println ("PDF version = " + doc.getVersion());

System.out.println ("Number of pages = " + doc.getNumberOfPages());



/*Save PDF to file*/
System.out.println ("\nSaving document ... ");
int j = inPdfName.lastIndexOf(".");
String outPdfName = inPdfName.substring(0, j) + "_saved_by_DuanePDFClass1" + ".pdf";
InputStream inputStream;
inputStream = doc.save();
b = false;
try {
b = saveFile(inputStream, outPdfName);
} catch (Exception e) {
System.out.println("Error saving PDF file.");
System.out.println(e);
}
if(b == true)
System.out.println ("Document was saved to file : " + outPdfName);
else
System.out.println("Document was not saved to file.");

System.out.println("\nExecution of DuanePDFClass1 has finished.");
}

/**
method to save InputStream to a file.
*/
public static boolean saveFile(InputStream is, String filePath)
throws Exception
{
boolean retVal=false;
byte[] buffer = new byte[10240];
FileOutputStream outStream = null;
try
{
outStream = new FileOutputStream(filePath);
int len=0;
while (true)
{
len = is.read(buffer);
if (len == -1)
break;
outStream.write(buffer, 0, len);
}
outStream.close();
retVal = true;
}
catch (IOException io)
{
System.out.println("Writing the array of bytes into the file "
+ filePath + " failed.");
throw new Exception(
"Writing the array of bytes into the file "+ filePath +
" failed in saveFile");
}
return retVal;
}
/* TODO: add some more methods here?? */
}

The Emperor, his attire and a Genius

David Chappell has had a long history of stating the obvious. It sounds like an easy task but it is not when an industry tends to embrace FUD rather than fact. His ability to cut to the chase and put things in context really made me a big fan (something that does not come easily).

David’s latest post exposes a few similarities with a popular activity a decade or so ago and SOA. In 1996, everything was an “Object” and if you didn’t make your IT infrastructure into objects, you were doomed. Well, its’ ten years later and many are claiming the same thing with SOA and services. Zapthink’s book also puts this into perspective (good reading – I encourage you to take a look).

Rather than repeat David’s article, I whole heartedly encourage you to read it. It should stimulate some thinking on SOA. Some of my thoughts follow.

Rather than pitch “reuse”, I like to think of “re-purpose” as the goal of SOA. Reuse means you simply use something again where re-purposing it has far stronger business connotations. Juxtaposing reuse with repurpose, I prefer the latter for accuracy’s sake but want to clarify that I did infer the meaning in David’s Opiniari.

David asks a very pragmatic question – “If an organization reuses only one in five of its services, why is it building the other four?”. Do you like my new services / clothes? What do you mean I am naked?

There is of course the business driver of isolation. Using a service as an action boundary that cleanly separates two systems or pieces of functionality does make it easier to maintain those two pieces. The service isolates the functionality behind it and the consumer on the other side of it in a concept called Managed Transparency, a core component of Chris Kurt’s Web Services Architecture book. As long as a new piece of functionality replaces the existing one AND supports the service interface, you should be able to replace it or amalgamate it with another system without ripple effects on the other side of the service. Many business people have touted this as a win scenario to me. David and I are not alone, other great thinkers like the brains from Redmonk also see this pattern.


I think David’s article can be summarized in one sentence – “Think about what you are doing before doing it”. Like the carpenter’s axiom “measure twice cut once”, IT shops have to start looking at the layers above and below [ pick one: {objects || services || web services || API’s || whatever_we_call_it_tomorrow }]. Some of this starts with business process analysis. If a corporate analyzes their processes and discovers several use the same functionality (like single sign on), that is often a good candidate for “re-purposing” and might make a great service. Others, such as finding a specific telephone number for an employee’s cell phone, are probably too specialized and easy to solve via other means and would not be ideally suited for building into a service. A more generalized service to find any employee’s phone number of “number-type” might be a better consideration.

To those of you who are panicking to make everything a service, heed David’s words about the object craze. Slow down, think about what you are doing. To those of you who are advocating everything should be a service, look in the mirror to make sure you not naked.

Ciao!

San Jose Semaphore Solution Theory

After reviewing the posts from Jo, Kelly, Ben and Joann, I think I have a theory that might solve the cryptogram. The critical piece of information is that there is no repeatable pattern of both glyphs and alpha-numeric content that are synchronized (other than short term repeats) and repeated and that two people can observe totally different streams simultaneously. If two people are seeing different broadcasts, then there must be a dynamic key. There are also mechanisms that can force a pattern to break (reloading a web page or a plane flying overhead).

Here is the theory:

Assuming the 16 by 16 grid concept is legitimate, each repeatable block of string-integer points at a coordinate. However, that coordinate is only a partial solution. The glyphs modify the partial solution by stating a path that the solver should take on the grid from that place. I suspect that the glyphs point in sequential order to a path that you would map. For example, if the sequence Kilo 02 is stated with the glyphs - - / \, you might go the grid position of k2, then go one square to the left or right, another square to the left or right, one square immediately to the right and above and another move to the right and below. That would land you on the correct answer.

This theory is supported by Kelly’s observation that “While both listening, we each got completely different combinations of letters, glyphs, etc”. This probably indicates that the observable signals are computer generated and random and combine two or more keys with the cyphertext. This would be a good cryptographic technique because it avoids anyone seeing patterns and/or potentially introduces patterns that might mislead someone trying to solve it. Given Ben pointed out that the creators have cryptographic experience, I suspect they would not use linear keys (too easy to break).

The questions to test this theory:

Given the glyphs are ambiguous as to direction, I suspect that there is another key in the voice or music tones. For example, if the woman’s voice “sings” the number, perhaps that signals that all horizontal moves and left to right, rather than right to left. The tones might also come into play. If the tone is higher than the previous tone, the vertical moves are from bottom to top, if lower than previous, top to bottom.

Also the question remains as to the characters in the grid itself. Is it simply the alphabet repeated over and over? Is it the ASCII table? There might be two grids as well. One with the alphabet vertically laid out and one with it horizontal.

So far I have put about 5 hours into solving this (perhaps a bit more given I think about it sometimes). I suspect that it could not be this easy given the statement that it should take about two years to solve. Either that or Ben, Joann, Kelly, Jo and myself are a good team.

I probably won’t have time to test the theory this week given I have to write several presentations for Adobe Developer Days (Yes - I am Adobe's security technical evangelist) in London the week after next, but I’ll try to map this out and test the theory.

Patterns for solving the Adobe San Jose Semaphore cryptograph

After putting this down for a few days to work on a new session on Adobe’s Security Architecture for the upcoming Max 2006 show, I came back to the Semaphore Website and observed some patterns. This time, I have the benefit of actually being able to both see the semaphore as well as hearing the codes. For each 7.2 second change, I noted the position of each of the four glyphs and the string-integer code. There is a repeated pattern of both the visual and audio clues synchronized. The following characters are used to denote the glyph’s position: | - vertical; \ top left to bottom right; / bottom left to top right and – for horizontal.

-| \ - K02
\ --- M 14
-/// L09
\|// O10
|\\/ B01
-||| K8
-/-/ C10
\\|/ E2
/|-- N11
\//\ G8
|/|/ K2 (note that even though K2 repeats, glyphs are different)
/\\/ M14
|--| L (5 or 9 – was not sure)
//-/ O10
- ||| B1
|//\ K8
|-\| C10
/|/| N11
/--- G8
--/| K2
\||| M14
-\\\ L9
\-\| O10
|//\ B01
---- K08
-\|\ C10
\/-\ E2
/-|| N11
\\\/ G8
|\-\ K2
///\ M14
|||- L9
/\|\ O10
---- B1 (note the glyphs repeat but not the alpha-numeric)
|\\/ K8
||/- C10
/-\- E02
/||| G8
-|\- K02 (First in sequence of compelte repeat. Duplicate with first entry.)

From here is repeated the entire cycle over. Given it started repeating a third time in a row, I got an idea. Perhaps it repeats a certain section of the code specific to each client. Some aspect of the interaction between the client and the server for Semaphore “seeds” the semaphore to produce a specific set of codes. Being in the mood to test, I hit “reload” and low and behold, the alpha numerics were the same but the glyphs were different. CAVEAT: I did not go through the entire cycle to verify it.

Hypothesis:

If Semaphore reacts to it’s environment, it might use some unique aspect of web based interactions to seed the pattern to avoid pattern detection between multiple clients. Maybe this hypothesis is too nerdy and over-analytical but I would be very interested in the abilities of others to see this. I also would be interested to see if the real world live Semaphore is synchronized with the simulcast. If someone could go in front of the Adobe building with a laptop connected ot the internet and visually verify whether or not the Semaphore’s glyphs are the same as on their laptop screen, it would be useful information.

Anyone else get the same patterns online?

Semaphore's mystery: Background on Cypher Creation

So as Adobe's Technical Evangelist for Security , I should probably share some background to you Semaphore solvers. One of the things that seems more than likely is that the cryptograph is encrypted using sequential "rounds". The concept of rounds is used in most modern cryptographic techniques such as AES. In my earlier post explaining how to build AES cyphertext using Rinjdael's key algorithms, the process is explained. For those of you who don't want to understand the gobblety gook on that blog entry, here are the basics.

The first round takes your normal text and renders it as cypher text using a "key". An example of this might be to take the phrase

"I have solved the San Jose Semaphore"

and encrypt it by moving all the letters forward (+) 8 values on the ASC II text table using the digital reference as a guide. The resulting text would be now encrypted as:

"Q(pi~m(|wt~ml(}pm([i%20(Rw|m([muixpwzm"

You could now employ a second "round" whereby each cypher text character is substituted for another using some lookup table or algorithm. In fact, in many second rounds, the key for the first round is actually encrypted as part of the cypher. An example could be to take the string above and transpose the case from lower case to upper case or substitute characters on a querty keyboard two spaces to the left of the keys needed to re-create the text.

The advantage of using two rounds is an exponential gain in complexity for those trying to solve the equation. Adobe uses AES in most of its' Livecycle products which uses 4 separate rounds of encryption resulting in so many combinations that it is physically impossible to crack the code using a brute force method. In fact, assuming you could build a machine that could crack one DES key every second by brute force, it would take a billion trillion years to crack AES at the 128 bit strength. That is why I scoffed in my earlier blog entry on some people who were under a mistaken impression they could circumvent Adobe's PDF encryption techniques using Gmail. The idea is preposterous!!!

The linear substituion demonstrated above is of course is a very poor encryption algorithm. For starters, it is linear so any patterns that are used in the original text are present in the cyphertext. For example, all spaces in the original text are displayed as "(" characters. This leads to easy recognition of patterns for things like double characters in words (example:" two "t"'s in "pattern").

A much better approach is called "non-linear substitution" whereby each character is substituted with its’ cipher text character using a dynamic map rather than a static linear map (such as Shift+8 characters on the ASCII chart). There are many ways to build this that avoid patterns being recognized from the original text and even introduce confusing patterns to those who want to crack the cipher. In the Semaphore broadcast, the tone of the woman's voice could be a key that acts as a "shift" and the tone could act as an offset on a chromatic scale. A great example of this might be to create a 16 by 16 grid and have multiple allowances of the assessors for each cipher substitute. The chart could look like this:


Now imagine you wanted to substitute the same phrase "I have solved the San Jose Semaphore". You could take it into the first cypher round and transmit it as a tied hash (ignoring space characters for now):

Alpha 9
Delta 13
Lima 7
Lima 2
Delta 9
Oscar 15
Kilo 15
Foxtrot 10
Juliet 8
Kilo 5
...etc...

Notice that patterns that may have existed before can be dissolved. For example, the "e" in have and the "e" in solved can be keyed to two completed different coordinates (both Kilo 5 and Oscar 15 correspond with "e"). I have additionally introduced what appears to be a pattern by using two Lima coordinates side by side.

The text above is very similar to what comes out of Semaphore if you listen to the live broadcast. I mapped the above grid to the broadcast from Semaphore earlier today and found there are now some astounding patterns present. By "astounding", I really mean statistically abnormal. Here is what I decrypted:

Lhsvezh vbdktppbtk vbdktppbtk lbpelsxhsllbpelsxhilhbl tnfddnnhbl tnfddln

Note that the repetition of the characters "vbdktppbtk" is statistically abnormal and probably deserves more attention. I am not 100% sure this map is correct as I was on a conference call during the time and may have misheard a character or two but this is substantially accurate.

So what should the table contain? If Semaphore is in fact a 16 by 16 grid for one round of encryption, it probably doesn't just contain A-Z repeated. Extended ASCII itself has 255 characters which is one shy of 16 times 16 (256). Could that be the answer? If someone cares to take the ASCII table and overlay it on the grid and map out some of the broadcast, I would love to see the results although I suspect the results are going to be in cyhper still. One thing that *could* be gained by such an exercise is to find out the finite length of the broadcast. If you think I should do it, please leave a comment on this blog.

So what are the second rounds? I picked up my guitar last night and played the notes as they are broadcast and found a lot of them are middle "C". Perhaps the offset on the chromatic scale from C is a second round key? What part does the airplane detection play? Why are the patterns broadcast at exactly 7.2 seconds apart? Why am I writing on this?

More to ponder.... Back to the drawing board.

I think I'm getting hooked on this project.

More Semaphore clues - cracking the Adobe Semaphore Cryptograph

In response to a questions I received from a woman on my earlier blog entry, I have made an incorrect statement (although I did say it was a guess). Joann asked if "semaphore's discs spun faster when an airplane flew overhead". I replied it was probably coincidental however have since been corrected.

Siri (no last name) who worked on the project internally at Adobe emailed me and stated " I saw in the last blog you were discussing the reactions of the semaphore when planes flew by - there actually is an antenna on the roof that registers when a plane goes by and causes the semaphores to spin wildly". I stand corrected. The only thing that comes to mind is what does it have to do with the cryptogram? Theories anyone?

Stay tuned for another blog post with some new theories on the subject.

Ciao!

Semaphore Solution? A 16 by 16 grid?

After thinking about cracking the Semaphore cryptograph a bit more, I noticed that the string-integer codes both use values that seem to range from 1-16. No numeric value I have encountered is over 16 and neither are the letters using a=1, b=2 etc.

This may imply a 16 by 16 grid. The changes in tones of the voice could be markers for new words or other punctuation, case etc. The lighted glyphs could eassily be used to demark a 16 * 16 grid too, given each of the four glyphs can indicate 4 positions (vertical, horizontal, slanted right, slanted left). This is consistent with the Semaphore flaggin system. I would presume that this gives each of the four glyphs the ability to communicate either A-P or 1-16. How does this sync up with the broadcast message?

I have made a 16 * 16 grid and used letters of the alphabet laid out in a number of ways on the grid to reference the targets but the message is still cypher text. Perhaps there is a dual stage to the encryption. This leaves the tones of the music and the ladies voice to use as clues. The tones that begin each segment seem to be rather limited to only a few notes as does the ladies voice.

More later. Anyone have any theories?

Adobe LiveCycle 8 gets SOA right

A lot of vendors are claiming to be “SOA compliant”; whatever that means. Unless you have made such a claim within the context of an established metric, such as the OASIS Reference M odel for SOA or IBM’s Big Red Book of SOA Patterns, such claims are largely hollow. At a recent Syscon event in New York, my colleagues and I howled in laughter as we overheard someone talking about how with their company’s offerings, within 3 years many people might be able to do SOA, AJAX and ESB together. So before I make ay claims, I want to quantify a few things about SOA.

The OASIS Reference Model for SOA, a well scrutinized committee specification, provides the context for the rest of this blog entry. The RM alone is not sufficient to make the claim I have in the title, so I will augment it a bit. For SOA to be done right, a ubiquitous set of protocols must exist to facilitate the widest possible range of service bindings as possible with the minimal set of complexity. Once a large group of services exist using a common set of protocols and/or standards, a virtual bus exists where services may be consumed by consumers supporting the set of protocols and standards. This is what is often called a “service bus”. Additionally, a common processing model and a common set of invocation patterns aid the virtual bus in providing consumers an easy onramp to use the services on the bus.

Adobe LiveCycle has matured a lot in version 7.0+ and lots of SOA-ish behavior is present in the current version, but some real breakthroughs are coming in LiveCycle 8 as it gets a specification for service developers to use to create such a bus. This is partly due to SOA in general maturing and Adobe’s vigilance in keeping atop the standards around SOA and Web Services.

For starters, simple tasks like standard naming conventions for services across the entire platform are part of the core design specifications. This makes is far easier for developers to intuitively find services via the service registry. The service registry itself is a major step forward from LiveCycle 7. Event though LC7 employed a service registry, it was likely under-optimized for use within the platform and largely tasked with form management functions in LC 7. In LC 8, the core service registry is a central resource that can be used by the entire platform for registering and referencing services.

In LC8, Services are layered more consistently. Rather than each component simply determining its’ own level of abstraction for an API, the unified service designs classify services into different layers. The lowest layer is the native API’s for a component (such as a Java Interface) and connectors bridge the gaps to map the endpoints from various wire protocols to the underlying interfaces. Managed transparency is present and the interfaces are also agnostic to the wire protocols used by consumers to deliver their requests to the service container.

LiveCycle 8 will be previewed at the MAX Conference this year in Las Vegas by Matt Butler. I look forward to attending the talk and finding out more. It should be a pivotal moment in the life cycle of Adobe LiveCycle as the SOA story continues to mature.

Semaphore - Clues to cracking the Cypher: is Slashdot smart enough?

For those of you who love a challenge, Adobe has sponsored a whopper. The Semaphore art project in San Jose is where art meets technology. Four large round glyphs rotate their position every 7.2 seconds while a simultaneous low power radio broadcast emits a coded message. Artist Ben Rubin’s mind shred’s message seems to follow a pattern. Each broadcast segment contains an audible analog tone, an audible analog pattern, followed by a string-integer hash. Several items vary during the broadcast including the tone of the woman’s voice as she speaks the integers. The tones also change.

Here is a pattern:

Tone, dot pattern, click(ping), string, integer, ping

Here are some general observations that might help those trying to decode it. I also want to state that while I do work for Adobe, I have in no way had any internal knowledge of this project nor do I have any keys to the answer.

Background:

Semaphore is an ancient flag based signaling system. A person holds two flags and uses one rotational angle to act as a key while using a second flag to indicate a specific value. The comparison to the rotating glyphs cannot be ignored.

1. What is the significance of the glyphs changing position every 7.2 seconds? This could be a key or it could be incidental to the entire exercise. I would suspect that due to its’ precise timing, it is a key.

2. Ben Rubin’s education should probably be factored in. There are no details of him ever studying cryptographic techniques. Accordingly, I would presume the cypher’s key to be less complex than Rinjdael’s (AES) et al. I did find his master’s thesis entitled “Constraint based cinematic editing” which may be a clue into his mind.

3.What possible significance does the tone of the woman’s voice have? It seems to speak in two tones – one about one octave higher than the other. It this significant of some kind of logic gate?

4. What are the string-integer pairs. Here is an example:
India 02
Kilo 08
Echo 06
Delta 01
Charlie 05
Mike 03
Mike 14
Echo 06
Delta 04
Delta 04 (note repeat)
India 02
Kilo 08
Echo 06
Delta 01
Charlie 05
Mike 03
India 02
Delta 15
Delta 04
Mike 14
Alpha 10
Delta 04
Delta 04
Alpha 10
Charlie 16
Delta 15
India 02
Delta 15
Delta 04
Mike 14
Alpha 10
Delta 04
Delta 04
Alpha 10
Charlie 16
Delta 15
Delta 01
Pumpkin 02 ??
Kilo 03
November 04
Charlie 11
Charlie 16
Lima 03
Echo 06
…..

Note the pattern repeats certain characters (Delta 04’s seem popular). There are alsio patterns of repetition that seem to repeat above a statistically normal basis. Based on this I would aver that the answer is a value of text. The same values suggest double letter combinations in the resulting text (example = Challenge has two “ll”’s)

While the Semaphore Flag code uses only 9 positions, note that the numeric values scale much higher. Could this be a revision of the code based on some key (7.2) to reflect the glyphs ability to provide a more precise rotational index? I did not encounter any numeric value over 16 while listening.

The Semaphore art uses the NATO phonetic alphabet.

A: Alpha
B: Bravo
C: Charlie
D: Delta
E: Echo
F: Foxtrot
G: Golf
H: Hotel
I: India
J: Juliet
K: Kilo
L: Lima
M: Mike
N: November
O: Oscar
P: Papa
Q: Quebec
R: Romeo
S: Sierra
T: Tango
U: Uniform
V: Victor
W: Whiskey
X: X-ray
Y: Yankee
Z: Zulu

Note that “Pumpkin” is not actually part of the phonetic alphabet. Perhaps I heard it wrong.

Good luck - anyone with Theories, please post them back to this blog. Maybe we can get lucky....

Finally - a standard for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)

After almost 14 months of intense work, over 6000 messages posted to hundreds of threads, 6 face to face meetings and 34 conference calls by over 225 members and observers from approximately 89 different companies, the first true public standard to describe SOA now exists. The OASIS SOA RM TC closed a final ballot with a successful majority vote to unanimously approve the current draft as an official OASIS Reference Model for SOA Committee Specification.

The Reference Model is not itself Architecture, it is more like a template to guide archtiects. Unlike most definitions of SOA which rely on specific examples, the SOA RM is also entirely abstract and not tied to any one technology family or specifications. Those architecting SOA or BPM as the governance layer over top of SOA will probably find it the most useful as it points out the entities and patterns required to allows SOA to work and support the governance layer.

Some general notes on the RM:

Web Services: Although it is not tied directly to any standards, it is highly optimized for use with WS-*, the web services set of standards, protocols and technologies.

Business Process Management: In order to facilitate BPM as a layer over SOA, there are certain minimal things yoour SOA should have. The RM describes these in an abstract manner - architects can decide on the best way to implement the patterns.

Architectural Patterns: The RM for SOA is essentailly a large set of reusable patterns. By itself, the RM illustrates what makes SOA different from other architectural paradigms and provides the patterns to help illustrate the concepts.

Architecture: Although the RM is itself not architecture, there is a sub TC now working on building a Reference Architecture.

This standard should help clear up some of the perceived FUD in the Tech sector regarding SOA.

Try Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server online.

I guess this is a great follow up to my last post pondering whether or not the theft of Coca Cola recipes was preventable. Adobe has now offered the Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server as a service. Aside from trendsetting by offering software as a service (SAAS), this provides an excellent opportunity for anyone to test drive the functionality without having to download, install and configure the Policy Server.

The service is easy to use and can be used with Acrobat 6 or 7 although 7 offers higher security by utilizing the AES encryption standard in 128 bit cyher strength.

The Protected PDF service is now available as a public beta (users need to create a free trial account). You can access it either via the Create Adobe PDF Online service https://createpdf.adobe.com or directly via https://policy.adobe.com/spdf/login.do

Policy Server protects PDF documents and will not allow them to be rendered unless the policies declared by the document owners have been satisfied. Even then, APS might not allow certain types of interactions with the documents such a printing or copying parts of the document.

What I like doing is also using it as a tool to see how many people actually read the stuff they ask you for. Any PDF document can be audited to see who actually read it, for how long and what other actions they took.

Wouldn't it be fun to ask someone to summarize a document you sent them when you know for a fact they haven't read it? Oops - now my prankster side is emerging.

Another preventable theft of IPR? Maybe.

In my position as a technical evangelist, I often get opinions flying at me left, right and centre (note "correct" spelling of "centre") of issues. One recent issue that blew me away was in response to a news bit about how the FBI allegedly stopped an espionage ring from stealing a secret Coca-Cola recipe and selling it to rival Pepsi.

Given I usually talk about how using Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server could have prevented such things, many people were eager to come up to me and express that I should write about this. I am hesitant to make any such claims for a number of reasons. First - if you are dealing with people who have access to information and they are really intent on betraying your organization and leaking the information outside, there is little you can do to stop them. Employing some advanced information assurance technology like Adobe Policy Server or Microsoft’s Rights Management Server will do little to thwart someone with a pen, paper and access to the recipe or a digital camera. Secondly, if you can render something once, you can capture it and re-serialize it to distribute electronically later. The side channel art of deception is also commonly referred to as "Social Engineering".

People looking at Policy Server need to be very clear on their expectations. Policy server can do a number of very important things to protect digital property. Looking at the scenario at Coca-Cola, I would have recommended the following:

1. Any recipe document should have been policy protected and available only to a very small list of people who were supposed to have access to it. I would also place a large watermark on the document so each of them know that if they release the document it can be traced back to them.
   
   
2. I would audit the list of people who have access rights and immediately suspend rights to anyone who no longer needs to have the information.
   
   
3. When the document is stored, it would always be encrypted using the AES 128 bit cipher.
   
   
4. I would regularly audit the trail of document interactions to see if there are any patterns that would indicate a problem such as an employee repeatedly rendering it and trying things like Printing, Control-Printscreen, Cutting and Pasting etc. If these patterns persevere, it could be indicative of a problem.
   
   
5. In the event that the recipe did leak out, I would immediately make that document non-render able.
   
   
6. Each document involved in the process would have it's entire process model documented and would be immediately deprecated and non-render able once it is no longer required.
   

In short, no matter what security system you put in effect, someone can and will find a way around. What Applications like Policy Server do is make it more difficult for people to do front channel attacks, often drawing more attention to themselves as they have to develop side channel tactics.

On a side note, no one has yet claimed the $500.00 I offered if this Adobe Policy Server protected document could be rendered. It is still up for grabs if anyone thinks they can defeat Policy Server. The cash is sitting here – waiting for you.

Johnny Rotten, Artificial Intelligence and LiveCycle

My new photo, taken by Matt Mackenzie, has caused a stir in the tech community, but in my own true fashion, I really don’t care. So What!! The concern seems to be that I have a striking similarity to Johnny Lydon a.k.a. Johnny Rotten of Sex Pistols and P.I.L. fame. Of course - as a punk musician, the Pistols were one of my all time favorite bands and a major influence. In fact, my new band, F.L.U., is heavily influenced by a sound created by the Pistols. I also find that P.I.L was imenseley more musically interesting than the Pistols. Therefore, I find any comparison to Johnny a major compliment and there are some similarities:

1. Neither of us is complacent. If something is broken - do something about it.
2. Both of us are musicians who write and perform politically driven music.
3. We both push the boundaries. No society advances without someone constantly provoking it. People hate it but it needs to be done.
4. I guess there may be a slight resemblance between my picture and some from his site but you judge. I personally thought I was more like Billy Idol from Gen-X. Met the guy once - we do look alike.



Do we look alike? !!! Or do I look more like this:



So what the hell does this have to do with artificial intelligence and Adobe LiveCycle. Artificial Intelligence is a huge waste of time and will never work. What is promising is the concept of Computational Intelligence or getting computers to aspects of mimic intelligence based on our expectations. There are two very important and almost always neglected aspects of CI. One is the lack of context. Context is everything, especially for inference. Look at the Sex Pistols putting out Never Mind the Bullocks made a lot of people at the time very upset for a number of reasons. It was insulting to the queen of England and talked about real things we all think. Keep in mind this perspective, the Queen of England once hated Rock and Roll, but has since knighted several rock musicians. In the context of rock’s invention, it was not accepted however over time, it became an acceptable art form (WFT that really means). Looking back now, the Pistols got an entire generation to sit up and say "something’s not working here and were pissed". In the right context, I would nominate Johnny and the boys for giving an entire generation the message that they better think for themselves and things can be changed. It changed my life. When I had the chance to work for the United Nations and be disruptive and tell people who were full of crap that they were full of crap. I did it and I am proud of that.

The point is that Context is everything and most approaches to artificial intelligence seem to be rather static than dynamic. Most of the AI research to date in the field of Ontologies and semantics seems to take a hard coded approach. This is not how humans think.

To add to the problem, there is one other important thing that humans do well that computers cannot do as well. This is excellently summed up in David Luckham who I consider a genius in every sense of the word. Definitely on par with Johnny. Simply stated, it is the ability to detect two events, recognize the context in which they occur and understand the causality relationship between them For example, if you came home and saw that your spouses car was gone, that is one event. If you then saw a guy carrying a TV around the corner, that in itself is another event. Now put the two events together and the causality may point to a situation where they are stealing your TV because the house is empty and they helped themselves. Easy for a human, not so easy for a programmer to capture this model in a generalized sense so it can be reused over multiple examples.

To make Computational Intelligence work, one would require a model for Complex Event Programing, an inference engine using something like the Blackboard patterns with a hypothesis limiter on it to negate the exponential hypothesis problem, a context ontology to layer over top of whatever semantic reasoning one might employ, and a large enough source of events that be used to feed it all. The latter is very important since event isolation would lead to an incomplete set of events to mine for the inference component and probably miss key things.

This is where Adobe LiveCycle enters. LiveCycle, as a platform, has several key places where events are captured and stored in a manner that they can be audited later. The next generation of the LiveCycle platform and the blades that plug into it carry a much more complex series of audit trails than the last version.

Here is a hypothetical situation where a phishing attack is starting. A mass email goes out and tells customers of a bank to use their forms to change their password because of a security breach. If you use LiveCycle Forms, served from a LiveCycle Form Manager, you will generate an auditable event each time one of your customers grabs the form. If your customers account is then accesses and a transfer form is filled out, that will also generate a second event. You now have two events that have a relationship to one thing - the unique account. This should be a relatively easy pattern to catch if you are using LiveCycle as a platform over your IT infrastructure. If you were to use multiple disparate technologies, it could also be caught however this may take more hard work to account for different Document models and mine the events at the same level of granularity.

LiveCycle Policy Server will be able to make events accessible in the LC 8 release and via the SDK, some events are available now. This should be useful to companies who are serious about thwarting criminal behaviour linked to people using their IT infrastructure.

Back to Johnny Rotten now. Things have to change in the world. The pistols and PIL changed me and now I am feeding back change into the world. People need to start thinking about this stuff and start finding ways to fix it. Come to think of it, I guess I am not too changed from my previous punk days. The picture on the left was taken in July of 2006 ;-)

Adobe LiveCycle: why is it so boring?

So you might think that is a funny title for a blog entry made by a guy who is supposed to be the evangelist for Adobe LiveCycle. I mulled it over for quite a while before deciding that it really is accurate and portrays what I want to say.

For those of you who do not know what LiveCycle is, it is a core part of Adobe’s engagement platform. Essentially, it is a platform plus a series of servers that provide core functionality to act as a bridge to allow an enterprise to engage the far edges of the internet in a variety of ways. The marketing spiele states:

The Adobe® LiveCycle® family of J2EE-based enterprise software enables organizations to create, deploy, and optimize solutions to more efficiently capture, process, and archive information. It combines robust process management with electronic forms, document security, and document generation in an integrated and cohesive set of products that work inside and outside the firewall, for users in online and offline environments.

LiveCycle solutions leverage the universal client Adobe Reader® software and Intelligent Documents based on PDF and XML to capture information from users and automatically process it to the back-end or transaction systems that need it.”

For more about what it is, just visit http://www.adobe.com/products/livecycle/

The top four reasons why I think some find it boring?

1. Most successful technologies are very simple and do something so well that they are often forgotten. Think about HTTP – you don’t see analysts and press talking about how radical and exciting it is. HTTP simply is a workhorse that does something extremely useful to the benefit of everyone. Once it is up and running, you tend to forget about it unless you have a problem. Adobe LiveCycle is a workhorse – most people are more interested in what it has done rather than how it has done it. Once it is deployed it sits there quietly in the background just performing its tasks. Not really that exciting…

2. Another trait that well designed and well thought out technologies have is that they solve a problem and do it well. Once the problem is solved, the IT group moves on to the next problem and unless something breaks, tend to somewhat forget about the problem they just solved over time. Once you deploy LiveCycle to do something, you should hopefully be able to move on to other problems and more or less forget about it.

3. LiveCycle does the middle tier connecting. Simply, with all the buzz about Application Servers and Rich Internet Applications (RIA’s), the workhorse (the middle tier) is often neglected. Although absolutely essential, most people will never see it directly, only interact with it other that the results. Look at components like LiveCycle Assembler. It gathers data from various other sources and serves it up as a PDF document then hands it off. The end user only sees the PDF document and should not really care how it got created. In fact, if you started telling them about Assembler, most would probably go to sleep since they do not need to care how.
   

4. LiveCycle is complex. In fact, there are so many libraries providing the functionality behind the scenes, that most people would (and should) get bored if they tried to read through and understand all of it. If someone is really excited about LiveCycle and talks about it with a passion, they need another hobby.

Of course, if you are excited about LiveCycle, that doesn't imply a social adjustment is in order. The people who make, design and promote LiveCycle have to be somewhat fanatical about the platform itself and we are.

In following weeks, I will post some more advanced subjects converning LiveCycle. Stay tuned.

Microsoft and ODF: Yeah, what he said.

I cannot over emphasize the importance of accurate journalism in my blog. Rather than repeat this, please just read the ZDnet blog on the subject:

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=3300&tag=nl.e622

Adobe LiveCycle Assembler - what is it?

Adobe LiveCycle Assembler is a cool new technology for those of you working with aggregating data from multiple sources to bind into a PDF document as output. It embraces a simple pattern of Whole-part using a template model to declare the construction of a final PDF document. This is done using an XML template called a "Document Description XML (DDX)" that defines the single output file and the content and data used to create it.

LiveCycle Assembler is a server based solutions that uses the DDX templates and the specified source documents, manipulates the data in the source documents according to the specifications of the DDX, and places the resulting documents in the specified output location.

Why I like this?

Simple - it is starting the road to declarative PDF expressed in XML and DDX document sare relatively easy to author. The namespace of the DDX language is http://ns.adobe.com/DDX/DocText/1.0/, and the root element is
DocText. A simple example of how the root might look?

















The DDX format allows for rich declarative expressions for all elements of a PDF document, ranging from Metadata to control over text of artwork. The data model for the XML is well thought out. Describing simple items like bookmarks is easy and you can also express actions:

Most documents formats appear to be moving towards a full XML expression with some form of packaging. Open Document Format (ODF), the OASIS open standard for XML declared documents, spreadsheets and presentations, uses XML as the standard for syntax. Norm Walsh was a pioneer in using DocBook which used stylesheets to display XML and even the next version of Microsoft Office is purported to be in XML format. In general, it seems to be a relatively popular activity nowadays.

Flash Player on Linux by year end

Having run a Linux Laptop and desktop for a while, I sympathize with those of you waiting to get Flash 9 for Linux. I have made good on my promise from JavaOne to follow up internally. The latest public news I have found is that we will have updated the Flash player for Linux by the end of this year. Read near the bottom. If you have comments on this subject, please feel free to leave them here. Although I do not speak for Adobe on this blog, I do perceive that there is a sense of urgency on this issue that seems to increase in the last two months.

Flex, that "Web 2.0 thingy" and today as a significant event in history

So today, Flex 2.0 was officially released. Hurray! What? Exactly! So why is the arrival of Flex so important and if it truly is, why is this event not larger?

First - for those of you who do not know what Flex is, Flex is an offering from Adobe that allows you to create Rich Internet Applications (RIA's) that display using Flash by using a declarative markup langauge (MXML). Furthermore, unlike Flash Director, Flex Builder caters specifically to developer who like to think in terms of Objects, Event Models, Event Handlers, MVC and other commonly accepted programming methodoligies and techniques, rather than the timeline based world of Flash Director. Flex has two important components - the Flex Builder, an Exclipse based development tool that comes with a wide range of prebuilt widgets and components, and Flex Data Services, a server that can allow the heavy lifting to be done away from the client.

A major point of clarity - to use Flex, you do not need to buy anything. There is a free Compiler available and you can write your own server and bind to it however you want. Adobe sells it tools based solely on the value they present. Most people will want to do a few common tasks and these are packages in our tools to make it much easier and quicker for you to get your next generation RIA up and running. This model was triumphed by Macromedia - think of why people bought Dreamweaver instead of hand coding HTML and JavaScript. Still - please feel free to use the free stuff.

Flex arroving in its' current iteration is a major milestone on the road to the next generation of the internet or what some are calling "Web 2.0". Flash has been for a long time the preferred technology for most rich internet applications and Flex bridges the gaps between web developers and application developers. It briges the gaps between enterprise architecture and the edge. There is even a bridge between AJAX and Flex.

In short, this toolset, the common programming model and forced MVC architectural constraints are moving the internet along to whatever it will be. Want to make a rich HTML text editor for your site? It used to take several days or weeks to do. Today, using Flex Builder 2, you can make the front end in minutes (I actually timed myself and my fastest time was 42 seconds).

As with everything I post on this blog thought, don't just take my word for it or believe me. Try it out for yourself.

Interview on Web 2.0

I am really grateful to the Syscon folks for creating this interview:
http://tv.sys-con.com/read/235922.htm

The gist is about the Web 2.0 but with some actual depth added to the concept. The ideas started during a blog exchange with Tim Oreilly. Despite the fact that the name "Web 2.0" is perhaps suboptimal, the "thing" that people have come to link to the term does exist. Problem is (of course) that the "thing" is undefined. Accordingly, everybody thinks it is something a little bit different.

The interview discusses some possibilities for creating a set of reusable architectural patterns using the Mackenzie-Nickull Architectural Patterns Metamodel to distill out the differences in Tim Oreilly's examples of Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. This would by far be the most concrete definition.

Dion Hinchliffe recently published an example of some of the Web 2.0 Patterns I have been working on. Matt Mackenzie, who is always thinking beyond the edge, also has some interesting thoughts on the subject of Web 2.0.

Sign the "SOA 2.0 - Stop the Madness" petition!

If you care about technology, please sign this:

http://www.mwdadvisors.com/resources/stop-the-madness.php?do=show

SOA 2.0 makes people finally speak out!

I have observed a really cool phenomena in the last week. Normally, when someone comes out with a new buzzword that doesn't really have any substance, most people merely complain quietly and go about their business. With Gartner and Oracle now having gone public with their term "SOA 2.0", the collective disgust seems to have finally reached the tipping point where people can no longer keep quiet. I am a bit surprised for two reasons. One is that I have talked to Yefim Natis and actually found him highly intelligent. It doesn't seem characteristic of him to back a buzzword like SOA 2.0.

The second surprise is the wave of attacks coming at the use of the term. This is good to see that folks are finally starting to yell "where's the beef" and "the emperor has no clothes". Some recurring thoughts on SOA 2.0 are spot on. This is a compilation of my favorites so far.

http://markclittle.blogspot.com/2006/05/soa-20-ignorance.html

http://www.mac-kenzie.net/blog/2006/05/24/soa-20-what-are-they-smoking/

http://www.mwdadvisors.com/blog/2006/05/soa-20-stop-madness.html

http://jroller.com/page/dancres?entry=oh_no_soa_2_0

http://sw.deri.org/~juan/weblog/?p=242

http://mult.ifario.us/articles/2006/05/24/soa-2-0-mud-in-the-mud-puddle

http://www.thedatafarm.com/blog/PermaLink.aspx?guid=cfb38e60-5c9c-4670-8c36-ae36f114e075

http://voelterblog.blogspot.com/2006/05/it-folks-out-of-control.html

http://data-entry-business.blograzor.com/52352/

You'll notice a pattern here. There are about 3 or 4 people who like the term and several of the entries in Google's blog search simply syndicate the same content. The above links are unique comments written by people who I consider pragmatic and smart, not based on this but on previous blog entries they have written.

The Fan just got smothered!!!!

The fan just got hit big time!

I cannot believe this is happening. I met up with Mark Little at Java One and he told me some people are actually starting to talk about “SOA 2.0”. The German language has the only words for this – “einfach unglaublich”. Roughly translated it means “utterly unbelievable”.

Now Mark is a very smart guy – I work with him on many Web Services standards bodies where he provides great value. I have never seen him get really upset about anything before I saw this blog entry. This should be a testament to how absurd the concept of SOA 2.0 is.

As Mark correctly points out, you cannot take some half baked marketing term and milk it for another few miles by sticking a version number at the end of it. This appears to be nothing more than a scam to keep people coming back for more information. People – they are making it up!!! You are being lead down the wrong path. I can see it in my head:

Analyst: “SOA is the answer to anything. Even if you don’t know the question. Too bad I can’t tell you what it is exactly but if you listen to me, maybe you can do it someday.”

Customer: “Actually, I think I figured it out. It is a model for software architecture.”

Analyst: (Thinks silently – “Oh no – they’re on to me. What should I do??”)

Analyst: ” Very well, I think now you are ready for SOA 2.0”.

Please note I am not just picking on analysts - they are just the easiest target in this case ;-)

On Mark’s blog, he notes that Steve says Web 2.0 it is a mix of EDA and SOA. Bullocks! All SOA is event driven. How can you have a service that does something if there is no notion of an event (trigger) in the architecture? I suppose if you just built it and it sat there doing absolutely nothing but even then it would be event driven since doing nothing is what it should do in the absence of any events. Can anyone provide an example of SOA that is NOT event driven?

A group of people (over 200 members and observers to be precise) got together out of disgust for lack of clarity around SOA and put together a Reference Model to clarify what is meant by the term. Being largely end users, they asked all the right questions. If SOA is architecture, as the name implies, how do we express it as architecture or some architectural artifact? How is it different from other interface based designs? Does it have a right to exist as a term (*read – does it have any substance or is it pure marketing hype)?

These people wrote a Reference Model which defines an architectural paradigm for organizing and using resources under different domains. The Reference Model is not architecture per se, it merely notes the main concepts, at a completely abstract level, for the entities which consistently appear within service oriented domains.

SOA Definitions – There’s enough for one per person.

Given the current Wikipedia definition and the OASIS Reference Model for SOA, it appears that SOA is something we all have probably been doing for a long time. Even Starbucks implements the OASIS Model. Service provides for their Services (they provide caffienated beverages to customers) use visibility (signs, advertising) to let others know the services are available. There is an interaction model (money for coffee) that uses a behavior model (pay first, coffee later) to provide the service. There is a service description (like WSDL for customers) and a fabric they attach to to allow service consumers to interact with the service. WS-* is the same. This really makes me wonder when I see quotes stating things like “over 60% of all companies hope to be doing SOA by 2007”. Even some smart IBM'ers have been skeptical of peoples claims to be “doing SOA”. Given they also have at least established a metric for SOA, they are IMO entitled to talk about it. For someone who starts this sort of a conversation without using a *useful and measure-able” definition of SOA is, cannot be held in high esteem.

The OASIS Reference Model for SOA does not purport to be the one and only true definition of SOA. It is simply a model that is a stick in the mud (or FUD in this case). Even if you do not agree with it, it represents a non-proprietary definition which you can use as a point of reference to state where your definition differs. Someone can easily state “When I say SOA, I differ from the OASIS Reference Model in the following ways….. [insert your POV here]”.

Summary

Mark is a smart guy, beware of people selling anything undefined with a 2.0 extension and if your “doing SOA”, be careful and don't forget to use Starbucks products .

Adobe Developer Week Registration Live

Registration for Adobe Developer week is now live. The week long event is completely virtual. It is sort of an "anti-conference" of sorts.

URL: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=452429&loc=en_us


Developer Week is a week of free, online technical seminars on Adobe technologies, scheduled for June 12-16. I will be presenting on Friday.

The coolest thing at Java One 2006

Okay - so Java One is in its' final day. Yes - tons of really cool technology here but three things really caught my eye and stood out from the others. I guess the gist is that software itself is no longer enough to be really cool because all three picks are both hardware and software based.

Number three was the computer controlled train set using Java to control all aspects of two HO scale engines interactions with the track. Yes- its' been done before but I have to tip my hat to those who can take the imagination to do this and somehow find the time too. I gave him a Flex 2 beta 3 CD and explained how it would be possible to make a flash webpage to allow people to log in remotely and control the train set. You could play with it from your desktop. Flex and trains - stoke!!

Number two was the java powered robot car. Sun's pavilion featured a home built, mad scientist designed computer controlled car that really blew me away. Just imagining the interfaces to connect all the controls of a car to a program, being able to read live input data and account for all variances to be able to drive a car is staggering to think about.


By far my favorite is the java controlled lego robots. Bruce Boyes of Systronix one upped everyone else by developing java controllers for robots. The system works well with Lego (tm), one of my all time favorite toys.
There is just something cool about putting java into toys.

so why is this my tops pick? The Java/lego robots were built using JVEX. JVEX-robotics is a project to interface the VEX Robotics System controller to Java single board computers. The goal is to free the Java host from low level device management responsibilities by delegating these tasks to the VEX hardware. The result is that Java can easily be used with the VEX kit, which is a great prototyping environment. You can come up with an idea during morning coffee and make a prototype using Lego and talk to it via JVEX all before lunch.

I'm going to order some of this - just think of the cool uses.

1. I could install these controllers inside the street lights in Vancouver and build a remote control and transmitter in my car so the lights are always turning green for me when I drive. Very cool. Still - others may get pissed if they found out.

2. I could sneak into the railways yard and implant the system into life sized trains then sit in Dick Hardt's balcony overlooking the waterfront and plays trains - with real trains! Rad!

3. I could build tiny legs for my cell phone and install the system with controls for the legs. The next time I lose my cell phone, I'll just jump on a terminal, log in and tell it to walk home by itself (serves it right for losing itself in the first place).

4. I'm going to place tiny switches in the elevators at all the tall buildings then randomly pick floors for people to go to. This would be too funny. I will then build a web enabled application to allow others to remotely control the elevators speed, destination and behavior with cameras to observe the resulting mayhem on CCTV over the internet. Better yet, you could bid on eBay to control your co-workers experiences in elevators. Too much fun!!!

I don't think I can play with just plain old lego anymore. What blows me away is that this stuff was so cutting edge 15 years ago that it would have been locked into a military basement somewhere. Now - you can buy kits from Lego and Systronix. You can use Flex to code front ends in Flash to allow distributed control over these robots and the whole thing is here today.

If you see a Sony Ericson cell phone with tiny robotic legs stumbling around looking lost, you know who's it is. Please kindly remind it that it shouldn't have got lost in the first place and point it towards Vancouver.

Time to go speak at Java One.

Ciao!

D

Java One

Java One is really busy this year. Really cool too. Yeah - there is the usual plock about "enterprise java services" and "robust scalable architectures" as the new "paradigm". Buzzword bingo anyone?

Anyways, if you read this and are at Java One, drop by the booth and say hi. I'll be there all day every day.

More on AES encryption

Okay - some people have been making some rather brazen claims about the ability to crack a PDF document which uses the AES 128 bit key to encrypt the content. I am not sure if they are truly psychic (one plausible way to crack AES), but doing such using a brute force attack is probably not going to work without a bit of luck. To understand how complex AES is, let's explore how the key is derived and what it means to "break" or "crack" encryption.

The AES standard has a fixed block size of 128 bits and a key size of either 128, 192 or 256 bits. The key is expanded using Rijndael's key schedule in which most of AES calculations are done in a special finite field. Operates on a 4 x —4 array of bytes (the State) and uses four distinct steps to encrypt.

1. AddRoundKey - each byte of the state is combined with the round key; each round key is derived from the cipher key using a key schedule (simple).

2. SubBytes - SubBytes is a non-linear substitution step where each byte is replaced with another according to a lookup table. In order to add non-linearity to the key, the Galois Field (GF) is used to derive the inverse function of 2 to the power of 8. This has been credited with keeping things unlinear.

3. ShiftRows - a transposition step where each row of the state is shifted cyclically a certain number of steps.

4. MixColumns - a mixing operation which operates on the columns of the state, combining the four bytes in each column using a linear transformation. This provides diffusion in the final cipher in conjunction with ShiftRows. Each column is treated as a polynomial over GF(28) and is then multiplied modulo x4 + 1 with a fixed polynomial c(x) = 3x3 + x2 + x + 2.

The final round replaces the MixColumns stage with another instance of AddRoundKey.

To give you an idea of the complexity of the resulting decryption process, to crack a 128 bit key would take approximately 3.4 x 10^38 guesses assuming the correct key was the last one you tried. To place this in perspective, is estimated that if a DES key generator were able to discover 1 DES key per second, it would take 149 thousand-billion (149 trillion) years to crack a single 128 bit AES key. As a side note, most physicists accept that the universe is approximately 20 billion years old.

As Homer Simpson would say - "D'oh!!!".

What people who are claiming to "break" AES have to use as a metric is a methodology which is anything faster than an exhaustive search for all the keys, also referred to as a "brute force" attack. There is another type of attack methodology called a "side channel attack which does not operate on the actual cipher but on mechanisms around it. There have been two claims of success in breaking AES using side channel attacks. You should note that both of these required access to an application running on the same machine.

Anyone still feel they can get the $500 I offered for cracking the document?

Working with XML data in Flex and Flash

I have been playing around with a new feature of Flex 2.0 (actually it is a new part of ActionScript 3.0). It is called E4X or ECMAScript for XML. It allows Flex developers to very simply and quickly write down and dirty bindings from XML data to Flex objects.

I will be teaching a 4 hour tutorial at the upcoming Geoweb in Vancouver July 24-28 2006. My good friends at Galdos host this conference and do a great job every year. This year the course will be a hands on developer course with Flex 2.0 and a ton of ActionScripting and even a finale of using the Flex API to Yahoo maps.

Okay – so I am not going to repeat the entire tutorial module here (it is not even complete), but I will share the *.mxml file with you. It is commented to be relatively clear what is going on. For clarity, I put the GML XML sample inline. To work with XML in ActionScript, you simply declare the XML data as an object, then you can use the various XPath like filters and queries against it. While it is not as robust as the full blown JAXB, it is very effective. Here is the sample file – just cut and paste it into your Flex 2.0 project and start playing around by un-commenting the various lines that demonstrate the functionality. The actual file can be downloaded from http://www.nickull.net/blogimages/GML.mxml to avoid retyping.

Enjoy!

AJAX hammers servers?

I read a question posed by James Governor's blog and Tim Bray's always insightful response to it yet was left feeling unfulfilled. It lead me to this blog which provided some further information. Perhaps it is the jetlag or I just haven't abused enough caffeine today but I feel compelled to write more.

The author does not define several things which make his statements relatively un-confirmable. First of all, there is no such thing as a spec for the Web 2.0 so his claim that RIA's are a crucial aspect is a flawed assumption from a pragmatic standpoint, although somewhat orthogonal to the question asked.

So let's look at what AJAX does and why it is favored. In the past, if you wanted to make a webpage that displayed up to date information, you may have to force the page to refresh itself every few minutes or prompt the user to do this. Since HTTP is stateless, that means firing off an HTTP get() request every few minutes to retrieve the entire page. The easiest way to do this was to use the meta-refresh element of HTML 4.0 transitional. Since HTTP server are idempotent, they respond each time they get the request. Tim and I had a conversation about this back in 1999-2000 when he called it TAXI (the father of AJAX). The question posed was "wouldn't it be much more efficient to only refresh parts of a page rather than the whole page). Out of that necessity, AJAX was born. It was actually Microsoft that cemented it by putting the XMLHTTPRequest() object into IE.

Now let's separate business needs from technology. If you have a business requirement to provide current, up to date information to your end users via the internet, you are going to do it, regardless of the underlying technology and the costs on servers. From a pure pragmatic standpoint, one should want to do this in the most efficient manner possible. There are several models available to use.

One is that the server "pushes" information to clients when some event happens (perhaps a stock price changes). The problem with this is that it often means the server has to dispatch a large number of concurrent messages when that event occurs, even if the clients themselves are not requesting it. Suboptimal - this can cause server overload, scare small children and bruise fruit.

Second model is the client side pull. This usually makes more sense given the client controls the nature of the request frequency, although the services architects determine the content size and policies for requests. This makes it much easier on the server to balance its outward messages given not all clients are likely to request at the exact same time.

Reloading only part of a page or even just the data for that part of the page is much more efficient that having to load an entire page or the data and presentation aspects of a component of the page, therefore, I would state that AJAX (or other AJAXian type methodologies) are probably the most efficient way to handle the business requirements that are placed on the web today.

If you were to ban AJAX from the web, we would have to revert to full page reloads which would certainly be more bandwidth and processor intensive than AJAX enables.

My opinion - those who are online gamers, porn surfers, MP3 downloaders are all more likely to cause the scalability problems that AJAX developers. Carefully thought out architecture should be used where possible. AJAX solves more problems that it creates.

Duane

Circumventing PDF with gmail? Not!!

I was recently amused by reading a blog of a group who apparently
defeated PDF's DRM system by using GMail's "convert to HTML" option. I nearly fell off my chair when I read the claim " (it) works regardless of the files; usage restrictions..". Yes - under certain circumstances you can gain access to text or other components of a PDF document that has policy protection on it, but *only* if the person applying the policies set the policies to allow this type of access AND does not encrypt the PDF. Keep in mind that PDF is a completely free, open and available standard that anyone can implement. There are several third party SDK's to manipulate PDF documents. Before you read the blog above, it is extremely helpful to understand how the encryption and DRM mechanisms work.

In general, if you do not want someone other than the intended recipient to
view a PDF, you should encrypt it. By default, the encryption level for compatibility with Acrobat 5.0 and later is 128bit RC4. Encrypting the contents of a PDF with a strong key results in a situation where there is no way gmail or any other
application can crack it open by brute force. The PDF is turned into cipher text that is completely incomprehensible to anyone without the key to open it. I am so certain of this that I will provide $500 USD to the first person who can open this document within one year.

A person encrypting a PDF document has several options. First, you can determine the compatibility for earlier versions of Acrobat (5 , 6) or jump straight to Acrobat 7.0 and higher. If you select to encrypt it for Acrobat 7, the default level encryption method is AES, much harder (read = impossible) to crack using brute force.



You can also opt to encrypt all the document contents, or leave the metadata unencrypted. This is useful should you want to be able to have the document searchable in real time based on the metadata. Note the lower section of the screenshot above - by default, the box is checked to allow text access to the document. If you leave this selected, some PDF applications can access the text. If you don't want this, please de-select this option. After setting all of the options and pressing next, you will still be given a generic warning that certain non-Adobe products might not enforce this document's policies. Note that if you do not select "require a password to open the document", the usefulness of encrypting it is moot. Others will still not be able to copy the document by using the text copy tool or Control-C, but other means can be employed.

To summarize so far, Acrobat has DRM capabilities to limit the following interactions with documents

1. ability to disable printing
2. ability to disable cut and paste
3. ability to disable control printscreen
4. ability to disable local file saving
5. ability to disable local file saving
6. ability to disable accessibility
7. ability to make a document no longer exist

A person must comprehend the frame and scope of the intended use of each of
these and their built in restrictions. PDF's are like music - if you can
render it once, it is possible to capture it and render it again. Even if
we figured out a way to prevent all third party screen scraping software
from capturing what you see on a computer screen, someone who both has
access to the document for a single view AND intent to distribute it further can simply take adigital photo of their computer screen to circumvent all of these. There is simply no way to stop someone who is intent on doing this using 1-6 above.

Another methodology is available to place a dynamic watermark on the page, perhaps stating the users name and address in bold gray text across the document. This too can be defeated if one took a screen shot of the document and used a great tool like ... err "Adobe Photoshop" to take care of that nasty watermark. I am guessing the magic wand tool is your best friend here ;-)

So how can you protect a PDF? If you really want to make it secure and also
track the users interaction with it, you would be wise to use Adobe Policy
Server. The policy server uses a model of persistent DRM that follows the
document everywhere it goes. If you feel the document is out of control and
you want to stop it, you can simply "destroy" the document which will cause
it to fail to un-encrypt itself when someone opens it. Is there a way
around that? Sure - sneak into the office of the person who made the
policy, install a tiny pinhole camera near their desk and capture their
authentication.

See what I am getting at, no matter what you do, there is a way around it if
someone is really intent. The easier method is "social engineering" rather than brute force.

So here is a challenge. Take this document here (link to APS protected
document) and try to render it with gmail (or any other method). I will pay
$500 USD to the first person who can show me the un-encrypted content of this document within one year of this.

How I would do it? I would probably try to lure myself into providing a password to a site that offered me some form of membership and hope that I was rather lazy and used the same password for this document. D'oh!! Not gonna work - I typed a random phrase of about 13 characters to encrypt this using AES.

Good luck!

The Web 2.0

I now feel compelled to write in this subject after holding my breath and counting to 10 several times. I recently read YABA* about building a "Web 2.0 Meter". A not bad idea *if* you had some sort of defined criteria that those being judged could adhere to. Another site claims it is a Web 2.0 validator
Web 2.0 Validator.

Enough! I can even hear Homer Simpson saying “D’oh!!” when he thinks about this. Time to rant a bit from Logic 101. You cannot measure something by two independent “meters” without some distinct set of metrics around the subject. Sorry folks, it is that simple. I would like to point out that the Web 2.0 validator site had the sense to state the rules they use and that the gist of the article at Oreilly was not about the web 2.0 meter. It was a realization that the concepts we have come to “associate” with the Web 2.0 were really the Web 1.0’s original goals. GAH!!! I just had an unpleasant realization that now I am trying to quantify the Web 2.0. To solve this problem, I think we have to look to the past as well as the future (yeah yeah – so what does that rule out? Thinking about the exact present moment?). The Oreilly folks are pretty smart IMO so please don't take this as some petty stab - more of a friendly prod :-)

If “Web 2.0” is to be used as a catch all term for where we are going, let's put some substance behind it. If not, it will suffer the same symptoms as SOA and Web Services - both very meaningful to most people, just with differing semantics. In fact, the lack of clarity around SOA lead a group of almost 200 people to get together and write a formal Reference Model for SOA under the auspices of OASIS. Similarly, a group got together within W3C and worked on a Reference Architecture for Web Services. I am proud to state that I worked on both projects.

So what can be done to put substance in the Web 2.0?

1. Write an abstract reference model to show the components of the Web 2.0 (abstract); and
2. Create sets of high level abstract patterns, mid level patterns and low level idioms to illustrate what is really meant by the web 2.0; and
3. Create reference architecture (in plural and somewhat generic) for all components of the Web 2.0, describing their externally visible properties and relationships with other components.

An example would be to illustrate the syndication-subscription pattern using some architectural patterns template. The abstract notion is that subscribers notify a syndication component of their wish to receive content. When the syndication component has content it is ready to push out, it configures a list of recipients based on some criteria then proceeds to push the content out. A lower level idiom could show this implemented using Apache components, perhaps even with options for content formatting based on device, reliable messaging protocols, security and end user authentication with a persistent security model for the content itself.

The cool thing about this approach is that it still gives each and every implementer the freedom to make their own black box components whilst preserving a common layer of understanding. It also provides documentation about what is really meant, granted, those who cannot distinguish abstract from concrete may still be confused.

Of course to do this, you would require an architectural patterns meta model and template that allowed you to go from the very abstract to the very concrete, but I think I know where one is that can be donated to some organization.

Why should this be done? Simple – without this, “Web 2.0” is nothing more that a marketing term. Sure – several people will say “no – it means X and exactly X”, but the chances of Boolean Y = eval(personA.X == personB.X) evaluating to “1” in every instance is very low IMHO.

The Web 1.0, aka the “internet”, has achieved a common definition though. Even though it is not concisely written, there is general consensus on what a web server does, what the layered wire protocols do, how security works and how people interact with websites (via browsers). If someone says “this server is internet enabled”, people imply that it means it can take HTTP requests and return text in compliance with the requesters requirements.

Sorry – folks. I just don’t believe that the Web 2.0 will inherit an implied reference model the way the Web 1.0 did. The culprit for this is the Web 1.0 as it exists – it allows anyone, almost anywhere, to write what they think the Web 2.0 is and share it with others. Also, unlike the Web 1.0, the Web 2.0 is not mandatory. The basic components of the Web 1.0 such as HTTP, TCP/IP, SMTP, MIME, HTML etc all were mandatory, therefore it was fairly easy to draw a box and state – this is the Web 1.0. One could even through in some common non-mandatory components and still make a solid statement (example – scripting languages (ASP, VBScript, JavaScript, ActionScript plus CSS, XML et al).

A Reference Model for the Web 2.0 might want to declare some form of compliancy and conformancy statements. Such might be a weighted test of it could be a bar that you must pass. Regardless, before this exists, what is the point of building “validators” and “meters”. Harrumph – end of rant. Take it all with a grain of salt – the Oreilly folks are smart and I’m sure we’ll see something soon ;-)

If not – does anyone feel compelled to take a stab at a formal definition? I will gladly jump in the fray and donate my time to help.

*Yet Another Blog Article – in case you didn’t figure it out ;-)