May 2007

View from Networkshop 35
Originally uploaded by iay.

I recently attended Networkshop 35 at the University of Exeter and presented a short talk on The UK Federation and Shibboleth: Nuts and Bolts. The idea was to discuss some of the technical challenges involved in the interplay between the UK Access Management Federation for Education and Research and the Shibboleth software, and talk about some future solutions to some of the issues.

As you can see from the integrated slide and video version of the talk available from the conference site, I knew in advance that I’d be short of time so on the day covered only the first two main topics: metadata and discovery.

[2018-03-02: Updated to remove links to the JISC archive of the Networkshop 35 site, which no longer exists and which was not captured by the otherwise reliable Wayback Machine. The video of the talk appears to be lost to the ages.]

I didn’t want to lose my thoughts on “trust” in the federation context, though, so instead of deleting the slides entirely I left them attached to the published version of the presentation. You can download the slides if you’re interested.

The University of Exeter, where Networkshop 35 was held, is fairly photogenic. I’ve uploaded a few snaps to give the idea.

…and we’re back. After more than 22 years in one place, we’ve finally moved a whole third of a mile to a somewhat larger and generally much nicer flat.

In doing so, we’ve swapped a view of the Daintyland wool shop for a view that actually has a few trees and even a distant hill or two for those with good eyesight. Huddling round a candle flame in winter has been replaced by gas central heating. A bedroom full of boxes of books we had no room for has been swapped for a hall full of boxes of books we probably can now find room for.

This has been a pretty stressful process, but not nearly as bad as we originally feared. Lots of people deserve kudos for this, but as well as the buyer of our old property and the sellers of our new property (who have all been very accommodating), our solicitors, the removal company and my new ISP come particularly to mind.

Having said that, I don’t think we’ll be doing this again any time soon. It will probably take us a few years just to get all the boxes of books unpacked…