Blog
September 6, 2006
NIST publishes secure Web Services
NIST has published a paper (Special Publication 800–95)that addresses the problem of deploying Web Services in an SOA while maintaining security. Some of their recommendations:
Using XML encryption to ensure confidentiality.
Using XML signatures to ensure integrity.
Using Security Assertion Markup…
September 5, 2006
E‑Gov at Five Years, Part Five
In the final part of his review of US federal e‑gov activities Daniel Pulliam looks at the lines of business initiatives, which many regard as the next phase of e‑government. The Grants Management Line of Business and Grants.gov are mentioned…
September 1, 2006
E‑Gov at Five Years
GovExec has a series of articles ( 1, 2, 3, 4) reviewing the history of US federal government e‑gov initiatives — their genesis, funding, and results. It’s a good review for anyone playing catch-up, and Grants.gov makes an appearance a couple of times.…
S.2590 — A month of procedural nonsense
It’s been quite a month for S.2590, the bill that proposes to establish an easily searchable database of all federal grants and contracts, and about which I’ve blogged several times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6). The bill had a hold put…
August 31, 2006
Dreaming of an English-Based Object Oriented Language
MIT’s media lab has created “Metaphor”, a facinating tool that parses
standard English into a programmatic pseudo-code. Take a look at: http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2005/032305/Tool_turns_English_to_code_032305.html. Metaphor seems very cool, but to deal with the ambiguities of its English parser, it ends up with non-working pseudo-code. They…
August 29, 2006
Quick File Thunderbird extension
I have a lot of folders in my Thunderbird install, to track projects, people, companies, and so on. When I receive mail, most of it is filtered out into the appropriate folders but that leaves plenty of others that are not caught by…
August 21, 2006
GAO report panel discussion — got questions?
The National Grants Partnership is planning to host a panel discussion about the GAO’s last report about grants streamlining on September 12th. It looks like I will be moderating the panel, so if you’ve got a question that you’d like addressed to some…
US slips in e‑gov rankings
As reported on GovExec’s Fedblog:
U.S. Leapfrogged in E‑Gov Rankings The United States government has slipped a spot in the world-wide rankings for electronic government compiled by Brown University’s Taubman Center for Public Policy. Researchers analyzed nearly 200 countries to come…
GSA to study agencies’ service to citizens
While its focus will be on call centers, e‑mail responses, and web sites, it’s still good to see the GSA studying how well agencies are servicing citizen’s information needs. The first iteration of FirstGov was an amalgamation of sites but…
August 12, 2006
OMB seeks proof of e‑gov cost savings
Following Congress’s action to reduce funding for e‑gov, OMB is now asking for agencies to identify e‑gov costs and savings. This is going to put more pressure on folks in CIO offices to gather yet more data. It’s data that…