2007
Leaving Enterprise Search Summit conference. I give it a C.
Happy Mothers Day to all the mom’s out there!
OpenID Makes Identity Easy
I’ve been using OpenID for a couple of weeks now, and I’m really impressed. I created an OpenID identity on MyOpenID a few months ago, but there was nothing to use it with so it just sat. In these few months though, there has been a lot of progress! Recently David Hansson was blogging about OpenID which peaked my interest again (I asked him about it in the interview with him at Minnebar –fast forward to 44:13 minutes). There are now a decent number of web properties that are using OpenID to manage authentication. What is OpenID?
I’m not going to write this when others have done it so well. Excerpt from ReadWriteWeb:
OpenID is an open, decentralized, free framework for user-centric digital identity. It is aimed at solving the problem of Web single sign-on. How does the problem of web single sign-on affect you? Well, if you struggle with keeping track of different usernames and passwords at different websites where you have an account, OpenID can help you. With OpenID you will be assigned a standard username (typically a URL or an i-name, similar to an email address) that you can use on all sites that support OpenID.
There is a wealth of information at the OpenID “How it works” page as well. If you insist on not wanting to read anything (and you likely wouldn’t have made it this far in this post if that were the case), Simon Willison did a nice screencast on using OpenID that is worth watching.
Where is the momentum?
OpenID is getting a surprising amount of support. There are now over one hundred sites, including some fairly large ones, that allow OpenID authentication. The list is growing daily with sites like Digg announcing they will be using OpenID. Microsoft is working to make OpenID and CardSpace work together. AOL has adopted OpenID and every AOL account now has OpenID capability (all 63 million of them!). Sun has announced support of OpenID. Mozilla has also announced that Firefox 3.0 will support OpenID. I’m a bit mystified at Google’s complete silence on this topic.
That is a lot of activity, and much more momentum than was ever enjoyed by passed failed attempts at single-sign-on on the web like Microsoft Passport (now Windows LiveID). The fact that OpenID is decentralized, free and open-source gives it a very good chance at making it.
Cool OpenID Stuff
Once you have an OpenID account using OpenID-enabled sites is a breeze. Here is my OpenID. I can go to any OpenID-enabled site and type in http://thingles.myopenid.com/ and I’m in. I could even make that my own website URL, but I haven’t found a need. Passwords become a thing of the past.
Having a centralized identity also opens up new capabilities. Jyte is a website that makes little sense without OpenID. Jyte is like Everybody Votes for Wii built on OpenID using the Web. See my Jyte page. What makes Jyte compelling is that identity is shared across OpenID sites. So, if I gave permission, another website could query Jyte, using my OpenID URI, and retrieve my information from Jyte to personalize my experience at the new site. Very cool! (And a little scary.)
ClaimID is another interesting idea around identity management. It uses the centralized identity of OpenID to allow you to claim ownership of URL’s. See my ClaimID page. It combines OpenID federation, with the MicroID (get the Wordpress plugin!) microformat (a topic worthy of another post) to allow you to verify ownership of URL’s and centralize this in one federated OpenID-enabled identity.
Hopes
I hope that OpenID continues to get adoption. Identity management is a big problem on the web, and everyone has a myriad of passwords. Additionally, it gets really annoying to have to retype your name, email, address, etc. OpenID has a great framework for selectively controlling the distribution of that information. It removes so much of the friction from both signing up for a new service, and returning to use it in the future.
Wishing that Twitterific would dual-post to Twitter and Facebook.
Delicious Library find similar function is totally cool.
At the Metropolitan for morning seminar. Crazy room!
Just realizing that I need to get a mothers day gift for my wife!
Weekend Away to Birdwing Spa
A couple of weekends ago Tammy and I went on a weekend getaway for her birthday. Now that we have Izzy, getting out of town was a little more complicated than before. There was a careful choreography of hand-offs for both Mazie and Izzy between relatives while we were out. Thanks to everyone for being so helpful!
I booked a weekend away at Birdwing Spa to celebrate Tammy’s birthday. A weekend away, at a spa, seemed like the perfect thing for her. We were a bit underwhelmed with the spa, but the weekend was still really great. Just getting away and having time to read a book in silence was really nice. Tammy read a book I got her for the weekend called Wild Trees, and I finally read Into Thin Air. We both finished our books on the trip, and even got a little ways into the next books.
The spa itself was okay. The facility was dated and the all-inclusive meals, while obviously focused on healthy eating, were a bit too skimpy for me personally. The property that it is on is great, and we hiked pretty much every trail on the place, some twice. While tromping around in the trees we ran into six snakes. Did I mention Tammy hates snakes? Yeah, she jumped out of her skin a couple of times.
It’s funny that now being a parent my expectations of a weekend away are so different. They have simultaneously went up and down. On one hand, simply getting away for the weekend and having some relaxation, regardless of surroundings, is great. On the other hand, it’s really hard to get away so when you do you want it to be exceptional! So, in that regard it was a great, not-so-great weekend. 🙂
New Adobe CS3 Icons
In the most recent iteration of the Adobe product line Adobe decided to make a radical departure with their “iconography”. The new color wheel of icons caused quiet a stir with their customers, and even drawn contests in the community to create alternative icons. The first program I got with this new look was Lightroom. This week I received my CS3 versions of Photoshop and Illustrator as well. Here the new icons are in my dock.
I’m going to go on the record as saying that I really like these. When they are all lined up in your dock like this they are simple to see, easy to understand and the theme is obvious. Kudos Adobe.
Minnebar 2
I’m rather late doing my writeup on Minnebar 2007. I guess the advantage of being so late is that I get to reference all the great write-ups that other people have done about Minnebar 2007. Let me start by highlighting that Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Dan Grigsby did an absolutely amazing, fantastic supercalifragilistic job of putting together Minnebar. It was simply stunning guys – and you’ve set an incredible bar to try to exceed next year.
Here is the only thing that is hard about Minnebar. Both this year and last year it happened to coincide with one of the first, really nice weekends of spring. It’s hard being a Minnesotan and foregoing one of those great days to hang out inside. However, you are handsomely rewarded for the tradeoff. I didn’t see a lot of the people I had invited. You all missed out!
This year was simply great. The attendance was nearly triple last year. There were so many people that I knew in attendance that I ended up not going to that many sessions. In addition to the folks I knew, there were a lot of new faces to meet. I didn’t do any formal presenting this year, but I did get asked to lead the Q&A session with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It was a fun time, David is a really cool guy and I liked much of what he had to say. Tim Elliott got a recording of the session, with David’s permission, and I’m putting a copy of that here for archival purposes, with permission from Tim. (How Creative Commons of us all.)
I also want to give a big thanks to the guys from ip:House who provided the free WiFi service for the event. It was simply stunning in quality and capability, and not a single hitch the whole day. Great job guys!
I’m already looking forward to the next Minnedemo, and the next Minnebar in 2008!
Capacious Memory
I just upgraded my Mac Pro to 7 GB of memory. It’s really great to have the room to stretch your arms out and make yourself at home.
Now Lightroom can eat up memory to its hearts content.
There are a few movies that I’m particularly geeky about. “Apocalypse Now” rates at the top of my favorites, and I’ve seen it an embarrasing number of times. “Glengarry Glen Ross” is there too, and an annual viewing is nearly required. Along with these great movies is “Wall Street”, so I was delighted to see this article in the New York Times discussing the sequel to “Wall Street”, to be titled “Money Never Sleeps” (not to be confused with “Money Never Sleeps – Making of Wall Street”) (read full article).
Another Wall Street? Yes! As my friend said, “GG returns!”. Can’t wait for this to hit the theaters!
Related: TechCrunch Wall Street 2.0.
Just signed up for TimesSelect.
Created a Google Calendar account for my 22 month old daughter for “her stuff”.
That’s normal, right?
Maybe I should drink less coffee.
One of the tweets highlighted in my MarketWatch Farewell Video.
Wishing Twitterific could post in the same way Spotlight allows a search to be done. Avoids a big window having to come up.
New Look for the Site
I’ve grown tired of K2, the Wordpress theme I was using. It’s a nice theme, but I didn’t like how heavy it was and I started growing more frustrated that it wasn’t “stretchy”. I searched for a bit tonight for something better and after trying a number of them out, I found blog.txt. I wasn’t sure about it at first, but I’m really liking it now. It’s super, super-simple and I like the elegance of it. I’m having some trouble getting Ultimate Tag Warrior to play with it, but I think it’s doable.
Let me know what you think, or if you find something broken.
Update
I have tags working now, although it’s not perfect. I’ve sent a note to the theme creator to see what his plans are. I’m thinking he’s going to wait for Wordpress 2.2 and native tags support rather than messing with Ultimate Tag Warrior. I also got Extended Live Archive working in the archives. That makes me happy since I think the AJAX work in ELA is so helpful for that function – not just eye candy.
I’m liking this theme a lot – I like that it leaves the focus on the actual content and spares some of the cruft. I re-enabled some plugins (like Share This) although I’m not sure that I like the cruft it adds. We’ll see.
I’ve also enabled WP-Cache for the first time. It seems transparent and promises speed improvements. I expect the site will be a ton faster for everyone already since the new theme is so much smaller than K2. I also dropped the number of items on the blog main page to 5. I expect that nobody reads down the page.
Ordered another 4GB of memory for my Mac Pro.