Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

Today in 1991, according to Wikipedia, Tim Berners-Lee released the first web-browser and editor this creating the world-wide-web. From nothing to a tool many people depend on for a living, a sales channel and for booking holidays and keeping contact with family and friends – what a change for humanity. I can remember working in Apple in Cork Ireland in 1994/5 when a friend of mine Jimmy showed my an early pre-1.0 version of Netscapes browser surfing the web. I have been hooked every since, and have made a career as a web-developer since 1996. The web has been good to me and my family; Happy Birthday Internet.

I came across this “Freelancer Hourly Rate Calculator” from Paul Boag’s Twitter stream which I found a useful tool.

Maeve did couple of things today I have not seen before:

1) Humming a tune. I don’t know what it was (if anything – she is only just 1) but she definitely was humming.

2) Clicking her tongue – you know when you use your tongue to make the sound of a horses hooves on a road.

I wonder what she will learn tomorrow?

Open-ID is a great concept; not too sure how big its going to get, but I think its going to be massive. What better than one place dedicated to doing authentication  and sign up and then third party products and websites using the authentication and permission systems of the first company/entity to do the actual login. Makes sense to me; save writing up all that pesky login code, and from a user perspective you only have to write down all those user names and passwords for the various websites you use.

So how does this related to the title of this posting? Well I was reading Mike Desjardins article on “A reason to hate enterprise Java” which gave a link to another one by Scribd on the “Java Technology Concept Map”. This latter page allows you to download the article as a PDF – but you have to subscribe to the site to do so. Surprisingly this is the first site I came across that gave you an option to login via open-ID, and this already peaked my interest since I knew basically what open-id is but at the time did not have one. So off I went to the Open-ID site and off the main page there is a link to where to get an Open-ID and to my surprise Flickr, Wordpress and Yahoo are all listed as providers. In the end all I had to do was to in the login page for the “Java Technology Concept Map” put “yahoo.com” and sign in using my Yahoo account and I could download the article.

Hope you find it useful.

For developers who want to use Open-ID with their product you might be interested in Open-ID’s Developer Page.

Its amazing how fast they learn to walk, and I am impressed at Maeves progress. On 26th Dec 2008 Maeve took her first three steps; by Monday February 2nd 2009 she could follow me from living room to kitchen and back. By today February 9th she pretty much walks everywhere (with the odd fall) and she is so proud of herself.

From 1st steps to regular walking = 38 days.

I forgot to mention the fact that Maeve has 8 teeth with 3 coming through – thats 11.