myvocs

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It is my pleasure to announce the first release of myVocs box, an integrated collaboration platform. myVocs box is a virtual machine that delivers the technologies that drive myVocs.org wrapped up in a
self-contained system that's ready for you to enjoy.

Please visit http://myvocs-box.myvocs.org for details on the three simple steps to download, run, and enjoy a collaboration platform of your own.

The technologies in this release of myVocs box include:

* A complete Shibboleth 1.3 identity system (IdP and SP)
* Simple collaboration group setup and management via Sympa
* Flexible resource integration powered by YubNub

[phpwiki]
The Internet2 2006 Fall Member Meeting was held in Chicago, Illinois from Monday December 4th through Thursday December 7th. I attended the meeting to participate in a SURAgrid presentation and demonstration of applications running on SURAgrid, including the UABgrid BLAST application which leverages DynamicBLAST to distribute gene sequence queries across grid resources. I also participated in a meeting to discuss next steps for the continuing myVocs and GridShib integration efforts and project updates.

SURAgrid is a collaborative effort to build a production grid computing environment leveraging existing infrastructure and applications.

Need a server cert that has no password. Commands are:

(1) change directory into the grid-security directory: cd /etc/grid-security

(2) Generate the server key (with password): openssl genrsa -des3 -out server.key 1024

(3) Generate certificate *without a password*: openssl rsa -in server.key -out server.pem

(4) Create CSR (Certificate Signing Request) to affirm that the server key is valid. The server.pem is used in place of server.key as we don’t require a password:
openssl req -new -key server.pem -out server.csr

The information you are about to be asked to enter information will be incorporated into your certificate request as the Distinguished Name or a DN of the signed cert. [ If you enter ‘.’, the field will be left blank ]

[phpwiki]
Came across [a nice analysis of connetea bookmarking software|http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/lund/04lund.html] off a link at
del.icio.us. [Connetea|http://www.connotea.org/] seems like the right
bookmarking tool to play with
in myVocs. The [code is open|http://www.connotea.org/code] and they are
following del.icio.us ideas but
extending them in useful ways. This wouldn't elliminate del.icio.us use
but would give us a way of seemless identity integration with a
bookmarking tool.

I also took a look at the [facebook.com|http://facebook.com] site
referenced in [jim's blog|http://arch.doit.wisc.edu/jim/index.php/2005/10/04/internet2-collaboration-tools-phone-call-4-october-2005/].
This
is one of the best examples of how a [vo-core like myVocs|http://myvocs.org] should look
and work. It's got excellent methods of connecting groups to groups. It
builds excitement for the user.
Granted, this could also act as an identity provider, but could
just as easily leverage an existing idp infrastructure or be the "local
account" idp for the vo system environement.

I have listed down some "things to be done" and my experience with myVOCS usage,

1) for a new user the first question will be " What are VO's ? how will it be useful ? " ...something which has to be made clear so that it will be used.
The link "What is this tool" is a link to yubnub, rather this can be customized explaining the concept of myVOCS (yubnub relationship) and giving some more examples.

2) Once a user gets into any VO (say cms), there should be some link to get back to myVOCS page or see the list of subscribed VO's to jump into.

3) There should be a create command on myVOCS page and a small list of created commands and a brief description of the same.

This demos starts at the myVocs homepage: http://myvocs.org.

The point of starting here is to approach use of the tools from the perspective of a current and active VO participant. While you may not be that kind of user today, you can quickly become that user.

In essence, this is the type of user most of us are today, when it comes to the Internet. If we are interested in finding something, we rarely expect to be able to browse to the data from a directory of Internet catagories, like we did in the early days of the Internet with Yahoo!. For a new Internet user that doesn't know what's out there, Yahoo!'s catagories are useful. For an experienced user, you just want the search bar. Google figured that out and simplied their UI accordingly. You go to Google's search site expecting to type in your search and access the content of interest by browsing off the results our your search command.

the myVocs demo went well and along with Jim's work, seems to make a very nice system environment. struck again how clearly bogger.com, technocati's and del.icio.us have the potential to become the major new applications of you desktop with these technologies. amazing to see the type of system experience that can be defined with so many interfaces available. interesting trend graphs to namespace creation and management.

am working on getting the demo in an on-line followable version and will add a link when I ha

have made slow plodding progress on the myvocs demo. managed to avoid
getting sidetracked with a sympa5.1 installed after checking for the rss
feature in sympa5.0 and seeing that it works. had to get a better
understanding of rss and how live bookmarks are created in firefox.
thought sympa had a problem with rss content type at first but it was just
a problem with the rss.ttl, it didn't have a closing brace on one of the
elements. Also updated template to just show listname and not have a
newline in front of the title since firefox seems to interpret all
whitespace literly in the title element. it seems firefox only "sees" the

[phpwiki]
!UPDATE: May 17, 2006
Two recent presentations have been given that provide an overview of myVocs and the scope of the technology and project. The first as at the [Spring 2006 Interent2 Member Meeting|http://grid.ncsa.uiuc.edu/presentations/i2mm-myvocs-gridshib-april06.ppt] in April and discussed our collaboration with the GridShib project and the second was given at the [TERENA 2006 conference in May|http://www.terena.nl/events/tnc2006/programme/presentations/show.php?pres_id=206]. This latter presentation is a good overview of the goals and architecture of myVocs. More updates to come.