Back from my travels, it's time for a few updates. I've mostly blogged about these elsewhere, so I'll just give some pointers here.

The launch of magnetic-stripe cards at Where 2.0 went well.

We had some initial teething issues with Linux talking to the card printers, which was resolved by backing down to Linux kernel 2.6.22 from 2.6.24. I'm not entirely sure what's up with 2.6.24, but it exhibited strange behavior talking to the card printers over ethernet — as if there were MTU misconfigurations. It's a big nuisance, as 2.6.24 is the default kernel shipped with Ubuntu Hardy, an otherwise excellent release.

I've been paying some attention to OpenID 2.0 recently, as it's time for me to upgrade my OpenID accepting websites to use the new release of the specification — if for no other reason than Yahoo! OpenIDs are 2.0-only.

This investigation led me to notice XRIs again, which are the confusing underbelly of the OpenID specs. The W3C Technical Architecture Group recently advised against using XRIs. I wrote about this over on my XML.com blog.

I've not used for that blog for a long time, but will try to do so more. I've realized that I've still got a lot to say about the web, XML and open standards, and the XML.com blog seems like a good place to say it.

Finally, to brag for a short moment. Another XTech has been and gone, and this year's was a great experience for everybody involved. This quote from attendee Paul Smith summed things up nicely, as it tells me I succeeded in my main goal for the conference:

What I really liked about this conference was the mix of attendees and presenters, both from academia, and the commercial world both and small. It made it feel much more valid, and it really felt like everyone was there for the right reasons - not trying to sell anything, but out of a genuinely altruistic wish to make the web better.

My sincere thanks to everybody involved in XTech this year.