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Oxford Geek Night 2
If you missed the last Oxford Geek Night, you really owe it to yourself to make it to the next one. If you were there then you shouldn’t need any convincing.
[... 180 words]My Future of Web Apps talk as a slidecast
The team at Carson Systems have a pretty quick turnaround on their podcasts; they’ve had full recordings of every speaker up for a few days now. I spent a bunch of time over the weekend splicing the recording of my talk together with my slides, and the result is now available at The Future of OpenID (a slidecast).
[... 177 words]Six cool things you can build with OpenID
I’ve posted the slides from my Future of Web Apps talk on OpenID, minus the demo videos. I’m planning to put together a video that combines the slides, demos and audio once the official podcasts have been published.
[... 816 words]Warning, this is a bad site!
Unfortunately it’s not a glitch in the matrix—this happened to a friend of mine. If a site gets this warning and isn’t listed on StopBadWare.org it just means that Google have blacklisted it themselves—they don’t share their reasons with StopBadWare, and provide no mechanism to find out why they’ve blacklisted you. The link to StopBadWare is something of a red herring.
[... 135 words]OpenID at the Future of Web Apps
People seemed to really like my talk—they even laughed in the right places! I’ll be posting full notes, slides and writing an article for Vitamin over the next few days. For the moment I’m just enjoying coming down from the adrenaline high.
Speaking at the Future of Web Apps
Just a quick update to say that I’ll be speaking at the Future of Web Apps conference in London on February the 21st, talking about OpenID. I really enjoyed last year’s event and feel honored to be included in such an exciting schedule.
[... 86 words]Why you should be using disambiguated URLs
Good URLs are important. The best URLs are readable, reliable and hackable.
[... 553 words]idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.
[... 414 words]Social whitelisting with OpenID
A key feature of OpenID is that it provides a globally unique identifier for every user, no matter what site or service they are using on the Web.
[... 502 words]Solving the OpenID phishing problem
Most of the arguments I hear against OpenID are based on mis-understandings of the specification, but there is one that can’t be ignored: OpenID is extremely vulnerable to phishing.
[... 531 words]How can my non-tech-savvy Mum maintain her own website?
Here’s a trick I’ve used in the past. Find a simple wiki package (I used Tavi). Install it, twice. Point both installations at the same backend database. Now password protect one of them with .htaccess—that’s the one that gets used to edit her site. Make some simple template modifications to the other one to make it not look like a wiki—remove the edit links (and delete the edit saving code for good measure), configure it to display WikiLinks with spaces in the middle, then add the site’s navigation around the top. This wiki will be the public site.
[... 216 words]Leaving Yahoo!, going freelance
Last Friday was my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had a fantastic time there, and will really miss working with Tom, Paul and the many other superb Yahoos I’ve had the privilege to meet.
[... 209 words]An OpenID is not an account!
I’m excited to see that OpenID has finally started to gain serious traction outside of the Identity community. Understandably, misconceptions about OpenID continue to crop-up. The one I want to address in this entry is the idea that an OpenID can be used as a replacement for a regular user account.
[... 601 words]More home improvements
I’ve had an offline Christmas, not entirely through choice (broadband at my Dad’s new place in rural France isn’t working yet) but welcome. I did have my laptop with me, and I’m using Bazaar for version control so being offline isn’t a barrier to checking in code. I’ve just rolled out a bunch of new features that I put together over the past few days.
[... 514 words]How is Google giving me access to this page?
Google have an open URL redirector, so you can craft a link that uses that:
[... 35 words]Sending a postal letter via the internets?
Thanks mycapaciousbottega. It looks like there’s still a business opportunity here because emailbypost.com doesn’t work! I got through the create-your-letter step, but when I hit the “pay” button I got an error from the payment service stating that their user account didn’t exist.
[... 67 words]What is the physically smallest and cheapest laptop capable of running OS X?
Apple rumors are worth approximately nothing, but there’s one going around that a ultra-slim 12“ MacBook Pro is going to be announced at MacWorld Expo some time in the second week of January; might be worth holding on until then to see if there’s any truth to it. There’s certainly a 12” sized hole in the line-up at the moment.
[... 81 words]OpenID screencast
OpenID’s biggest problem is its learning curve. Using it as actually really simple, but if you’re not technical the amount of stuff you have to know before you can understand it is enormous. If you are technical, it just doesn’t seem like it should work—there are a bunch of questions that come up every time OpenID is discussed anywhere (“but surely there’s nothing to stop someone else from spoofing your ID”) which OpenID has answers for, but which are easily misunderstood.
[... 383 words]Why JSON isn’t just for JavaScript
Dave Winer’s discovery of JSON (and shock that “it’s not even XML”) has triggered an interesting discussion thread, on his blog and elsewhere. Plenty of people have re-assured him (and themselves) that it’s only used for JavaScript—it’s convenient in the browser but irrelevant elsewhere.
[... 787 words]How to turn your blog in to an OpenID
Wouldn’t it be great if you could use the same account to log in to multiple sites and applications, without having to trust them all with your password? Wouldn’t it be even better if you could do this without having to hand ownership of your online identity over to some monolithic third party? (I’m looking at you, .NET Passport Microsoft Passport Windows Live ID.)
Finally powered by Django
It’s been way too long, but I’ve finally replaced the ball of PHP duct tape that has run this site for the past four years with a shiny new blog engine powered by Django.
[... 393 words]Freeing the postcode
UK postcodes have some interesting characteristics: a full six character post code identifies an average of around 14 house holds, and postcodes are mainly hierarchical—W1W will always be contained within W1 for example. They’re useful for a huge range of interesting things.
[... 295 words]WriteRoom
I had a look at WriteRoom a few months ago and wasn’t impressed, but Leonard just convinced me to give it another look and I’m completely sold. It’s a free text editor for OS X with two killer features:
[... 157 words]Tamarin
On Tuesday, the Mozilla Foundation and Adobe announced the Tamarin project, an open-source ECMAScript virtual machine based on the ActionScript engine used by Flash Player 9.
[... 380 words]Graphing requests with Tamper Data
I spent the weekend in Boston, speaking at GBC/ACM’s Deep Ajax seminar with Alex Russell and Adrian Holovaty. I’ll be posting some notes on this later, but I wanted to share a really neat Firefox extension that Alex showed me: Tamper Data.
[... 318 words]Keep your JSON valid
I’m a big fan of JSON, and it’s great to see it turning up as an output option for so many Web APIs. Unfortunately, many of these APIs are getting the details slightly wrong and in doing so are producing invalid JSON.
[... 311 words]What I’m excited about, post-conference edition
Wow, I’ve had a really busy month. I’ve attended (and spoken at) BarCamp London, Media in Transition, d.Construct, RailsConf Europe, Euro Foo and EuroOSCON. All were excellent, and each one nicely complemented the others. I’m exhausted. I think my brain is full.
[... 377 words]The YDN Python Developer Center
I recently had the opportunity to put together the Python Developer Center for the Yahoo! Developer Network. YDN is one of my favourite parts of Yahoo! so I jumped at the chance, and the resulting mini-site is now online (YDN blog post here).
[... 235 words]Sticking with Opera 9
It’s been a month and a half since I started using Opera 9, with a promise to report back later. I’m still using it, although some of the things I liked initially have faded while others have emerged.
[... 545 words]