alex.polvi.net

Some quick thoughts. These are things I am thinking about when you see me muttering and shouting to myself as I walk across campus.

1) Complete central authentication. It would be neat if there was a central host that acted as a proxy to any authentication systems. System Admins could “sign-up” their entire directory to the service and then allow any parties that use the central service to auth through them. Sure, this opens up a wide array of security and privacy concerns…. but it sure would be neat to have a single sign on globally across the web. Then I would have good reason to change my password every other day and not have to worry about forgetting it.

2) Open services. What if a project like ebay open sourced its code under a license that only allowed people to contribute back to the project? So instead of allowing everyone to deploy their own ebay, people interested in helping would improve the single large project. If someone had a user interface annoyance, for example, they could write up a patch and send it in.

3) Load balancing. While doing my laundry tonight I realized I had three washers, two color and one white, that I seemingly filled randomly. This was load balancing at its finest. The whole situation really brought out how difficult and slow the process can be.

4) Feed Gravity wins the hearts of the young and fearless.

5) Staff lists. Are staff lists really important? In particular, the ACM staff list on campus is pretty active while the member one is completely dead. As Brandon put it, why not make the members part of the organization effort? I think it would just stir up more potential leaders.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 23rd, 2005 at 7:49 pm and is filed under Computing, OSLUG, School.