In the past five days or so I've seen three different posts on the web where somebody has either confused OpenID and OAuth or expressed confusion as to how they differ. I'm not going to name names or point to URLs. I'd prefer to try to fix the problem.

Therefore, here's a simple, and hopefully clear and accurate, guide to the purposes of and differences between the two systems. If I had a video camera, I'd act out the sock puppet version for you. But I don't, so you have to read this instead.

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Topics: technology/oauth, technology/openid

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I've been overwhelmed a bit by a head cold that sprung into life on Monday and am thinking at the speed of molasses. Turning lemons in lemonade, I spent today catching up on some reading and video watching (interspersed wtih napping). This meant I got around to watching some of the videos from a functional programming seminar given to Ericsson employee's last month, the full list of which are available on Ulf Wiger's blog.

The video I'd like to draw attention to is Simon Peyton Jones' initial talk (he gave two): Taming Effects - The Next Big Challenge. If you've ever wondered why functional programming might be relevant or why there it seems to be gaining more visibility on websites, this talk should provide some food for thought.

Simon is a fantastic speaker, providing you can keep up with somebody who speaks fairly fast. He always conveys a real enthusiasm for what he's talking about, looks very well prepared and manages to present complex things in a very simple fashion. He's one of the people I'm slowly trying to emulate in my own presentations, although I'm miles away at the moment. Simon's best known as one of the authors of Haskell and maintainer of the main Haskell compiler, GHC. However, you don't have to know Haskell to follow this talk; he introduces the necessary terminology as he goes along (that being said, some familiarity with programming is assumed).

One of the things I like in the introduction to this talk is pointing out that functional programming — results driven by data dependencies, rather than execution order — are actually really familiar to us all. It's how a spreadsheet works! This was also brought up in a presentation I referenced last year and I like the analogy a lot. Even when we're using procedural/imperative programming techniques we can benefit from understanding a functional approach to algorithms. This talk expands one aspect of that point: as we work with larger and larger data sets, we need to be more concerned about unintended and even intended side-effects.

Finally, if you're interested in a fairly fast-paced, but excellent introduction to Haskell, I would also recommend Simon's tutorial from last year's OSCON. Part 1 and Part II. It will take a bit of attention, reading of the slides and possibly some rewinding in places, but it's a very nice introduction to the language for programmers who may be familiar with other languages. Plus, who else uses the basics of an X windows manager as their example application?

Topics: technology/algorithms, conferences, software/haskell

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It's always annoying to have to examine the teeth of a gift horse, but if somebody is basically dominant in their area, or one of a very few dominant players and you are essentially forced to interact with them, then it's game on. Lately Google's non-search products have been driving me more and more to despair. Perpetual beta is not an excuse for producing poorly behaving services and not having a proper bug reporting system in place.

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Topics: software/design, technology/Google

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Today's mostly trivial and "well-known except if you haven't seen it before" system administration tip is prompted by one of the recent comments over at James' blog.

Be careful when using shell wildcard patterns as arguments to scripts. There are two ways to mess up and you'll usually forget to test both of them.

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Topics: software/linux, technology/sysadmin

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Melbourne airport's Qantas Club has free wifi, which is nice. However, all is not entirely sane in the network land:

...
Feb  1 18:24:36 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 59 seconds.
...
Feb  1 18:25:35 lancre dhclient: bound to W.X.Y.Z -- renewal in 55 seconds.
...

and so on (public IP address changed to protect the innocent). Rinse, wash, repeat. I'm all for not tying up the network with unexpired leases that aren't being used, but 60 seconds seems a little eager. I'm just saying.

Topics: software/linux, conferences/linux.conf.au, technology/sysadmin

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Last month, I wrote a quick summary of some of my experiences trying out OpenID support in various places. At the time, I noted that Google didn't have any OpenID support in blogger.

At the end of November, they announced support for it, although I only noticed this last week. As you can see from the varied comments on that article (warning: more noise than signal at times), this hasn't been met with universal approval, mostly because of the trade-offs requires for usability.

Today, I wanted to leave a comment on a blogger-hosted blog and I tried out this new feature. Google do not get a passing grade.

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Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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When Simon Willison started to do a lot of publicity work for OpenID last year, I figured it was probably the right time to at least learn as much about it as possible and start trying things out. Just over a year later and, whilst as a technical specification and a service it shows a lot of promise, as something for users, it doesn't seem to be there quite yet.

Lately I've been looking a lot at the user experience. Whenever possible, I've been using OpenID logins on sites that allow it for comments. I've also been noticing sites that aren't OpenID-enabled when they really should be. My feelings have been mostly ones of disappointment. The user experience doesn't end up being very inviting as a rule and I'm gradually arriving at the point where I'm nervous about using OpenID because it's misused so often. Time to draw a few conclusions.

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Topics: technology/openid, thinking

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Maureen Johnson, who writes on of the "just for fun" blogs I read and is definitely not a tech blogger, recently went on a tour of Google's New York offices. And thus we find out:

...the creepy part is that they have all these long memos on debugging and testing code in the stalls of the women’s room. They make you work hard there to get all the free food and the scooters. They even make you work while you pee.

Topics: technology/Google

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Blog friend Dave has posted today about AideRSS. Apparently it's the new sliced bread for overwhelmed feed readers.

I am not an AideRSS user. However, having read Dave's description and spent 15 minutes browsing their site, I don't get it. This seems like an unlikely mish-mash of subscription services and "long tail" services. One of the perceived advantages of sites like del.icio.us or, say, programming.reddit.com — to pick a sub-category of reddit I use a bit — is that they make note of needles in the haystacks of endless blogs and websites. In contrast, an RSS feed from a site is generally only worth subscribing to if you like that site in a general manner.

Selective items from particular RSS feeds you have chosen feels like limiting the haystack size in the hope of finding more needles. Statistical sampling doesn't work like that. It also presumes that the scoring methods used by AideRSS align well with the user's preferences. I'll give the last point, though, since their selection of seed sites for scoring look representative for the RSS-consuming information junkie.

I guess it depends on the type of feeds you pass a service like this. Something super-general, like everything published by a newspaper site might provide sufficiently broad coverage, I guess.

One cannot argue with success and if people find this type of service useful, all the best to them. But I still don't get it. It feels like a more generic syndication feed of "best of" items might be better.

Topics: technology

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Everybody should bear in mind that I am not a link blog. Every rule has exceptions, though..

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project makes it to the front page of the BBC news website today, as a link to this article. Even includes a video snippet of the always enthusiastic Mr. Blizzard.

Topics: technology/OLPC, software/open source

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