Russell Coker, SELinux developer, Bonnie++ maintainer and fellow LUV person has now switched from Blogger to his own WordPress installation, which makes leaving comments a hell of a lot easier! 🙂
He’s also now got a blog on “random things that are large or of limited interest“, though why that isn’t just a category on his main site (and using WordPress’s handy “more” marker to stop the whole thing showing up on the front page) I’m not sure.
Anyway, welcome to WordPress Russell!
Here we go..
The mainboard connector provides a standard PS/2 keyboard connector for attaching a PS/2 keyboard. You can plug a PS/2 keyboard directly into this connector. PS/2 Keyboard (6-pin Female)
That’s from the VIA EPIA Mini-ITX (“Dream Catalyst”) mainboard manual that happened to be sitting in front of me. Extra boring points for me I think!
People can work out themselves if they wish to be infected by this meme.. 🙂
Having gotten OpenID delegation going I had to go and play some more.. 🙂
Now I was a bit puzzled about the OpenID XRDS Url mentioned in Eran’s plugin, I don’t see if being created at WordPress.com and the thought of just putting a URL in there and hoping is a bit, well, unsatisfying. Now that isn’t Evan’s fault, it’s just the fact that the WordPress service isn’t that well documented for delegation and I was hoping for something that would go a little bit further.
Before I found Evan’s OpenID Delegation plugin I came across Will Norris’s WP-Yadis plugin (originally wp-xrds) but it didn’t really work under PHP5 and so I had quickly skipped over it. Having found myself not quite happy with the outcome of using Evan’s (again, not his fault) I decided to go back and see if I could fix up the PHP4 code that wasn’t happy with PHP5.
Now it turns out it wasn’t that hard to fix, just 3 instances of foreach() where a variable needed casting to Array. That let me put in the OpenID Server Url and OpenID Delegate Server Url that I had been using previously and magically created a XRDS (aka Yadis) document. Brilliant I thought.
But wp-yadis could do more, it already had a set of definitions for a number of providers so that you could just pick the one you wanted and give it your username and let it automatically generate the URLs, but there wasn’t anything for WordPress. A bit more hacking later (to add a substitution to the server URL that was previously only happening on the delegation URL) and it was working!
I’ve sent Will the patch by email, but as the licensing isn’t clear I can’t really make it available here without Will’s approval.
Now that WordPress.com blogs include an OpenID server for free and most WordPress users have an account there as they need it for Akismet to work, it turns out they can use it as the invisible back end to authenticate via their own WordPress blogs (hosted elsewhere) using the concept of delegation.
I thought it would be interesting to try and get OpenID delegation going on this blog as a proof of concept, and because I’m tired of commenting on Tim Connors blog as anonymous. 🙂
Now whilst OpenID delegation requires nothing more than a couple of lines of HTML, on a site that is dynamically generated like a blog you need a bit of code to add that into the front page, otherwise it’s not going to work. With WordPress that is done via plugins and casting around I found Eran Sandler’s OpenID Delegate plugin which I took for a spin.
It’s easy to install, a single PHP file in your wp-content/plugins directory, and then an OpenID Delegation item appears in your Option menu. Clicking on that and you will see three cryptically named options:
OpenID Server Url – this is the URL that access the OpenID server codeOpenID Delegate Server Url – this is the URL for the OpenID that you possessOpenID XRDS Url – this is a URL for a special file that is supposed to control the delegationInitially I tried setting http://????.wordpress.com/ for each field (where ???? is the name of my blog at WordPress.com) and that almost, but not quite, seemed to work according to the OpenID validator. It took me a while to figure out what was needed, but from this forum thread I found a clue that I’d missed a necessary option on the OpenID Server URL.
So, what got it to work for me (and presumably will for you too) is:
OpenID Server Url: http://yourblog.wordpress.com/?openidserver=1OpenID Delegate Server Url: http://yourblog.wordpress.com/OpenID XRDS Url: http://yourblog.wordpress.com/The proof that it works ?
A successful comment on Tim’s Live Journal using my blog as the OpenID server. That’s enough to make me happy..
If you are a business person who is new to the world of Open Source, or you need to introduce business people to Open Source and what it can do for you then the Specialty Equipment Market Association (SEMA, an automobile speciality parts trade association) has a very good introduction to Open Source called Open Source Explained : What it is — What it isn’t — and How SEMA Members Can Benefit From It.
Using open source is like owning a 1960s musclecar. You can drive it just as it is, or you can tweak and modify it to the limits of your (or a friend’s) time and talents. On the other hand, a closed source program is quite the opposite. The work of the people who create the software is not available for tweaking or performance enhancements by the general public. It’s like getting a car with the hood welded shut by the manufacturer. “Here are the keys. Put gas in it, and call us if it breaks.†Closed source has its place, and it might be the only choice in certain instances.
As well as being a gentle introduction to what Open Source is it covers all the sorts of things that businesses care about, servers, oeprating systems, databases, word processing, desktop publishing, CRM, ERP, etc. Well worth a read even if you are involved in Open Source because you’re almost certain to come across something you’d not heard of before.
The author ? Well he’s not a professional geek, he is:
Walter D. Vaughan, Jr. is a vice president at Steele Rubber Products. He is a current member of SEMA’s Business Technology Committee, an ARMO Select Committee member and a recipient of ARMO’s 1998 Industry Person of the Year Award. He also uses or has tested extensively all the software mentioned in this article.
Chalk up another great Google April Fool.. 🙂
Google TiSP (BETA) is a fully functional, end-to-end system that provides in-home wireless access by connecting your commode-based TiSP wireless router to one of thousands of TiSP Access Nodes via fiber-optic cable strung through your local municipal sewage lines.
Google – turning the fear that the Internet is a sewer into reality. 🙂
Update: Google have another, which is Google Paper. This one found via Wikipedia’s list of April Fools for 2007.
Our good friend Chris Borthwick has had himself a blog since 2004, helpfully entitled “A live toad every morning“, and catching up on which I came across this observation..
One effect of global warming is that the seasons are beginning earlier each year. As one sign of this, I saw a display of hot cross buns for sale in Coles on Wednesday, January 3rd – at least two weeks earlier than last year.
The first edition of William R. Cheswick and Steven M. Bellovin’s excellent “Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker” is now available online! According to Google Scholar this book has been cited 661 times..
The second edition is available from Amazon.
Thanks for the pointer, Rick!
Oh dear, it appears Groklaw has some serious (hardware) problems..
Sorry, there are hardware problems with the database server, the RAID card is fried. Prognosis is that it will take till tomorrow EST to fix the machine. Groklaw will be down until then.
Must remember to update my offline backup of my home machine tonight..
Update: Groklaw is now back online..
Here’s a fun stop motion animation on YouTube with real people done by a couple of guys that took 2 months to film and edit.
Their FAQ says:
3. Nothing is fake and no green screens were used. The only computer animated part was the letters falling on the page.
