Gremlin’s Fireside Chat

According to this article on the BBC 25% of all Europeans have never used a PC. Even my mother (non tech as you get) has used a PC at least once. I am gobsmacked!!!

Today is Bill day – the day I go through all the bills that need to be paid and pay them.

One of this months was a domain renewal “bill” from Domain Renewal Group for “riomhaire.org” for 28-85 Euro. It took a few seconds for me to realize that I DON’T HAVE ANY DOMAINS REGISTERED WITH this group. Interested I went to their website typed in the requested domain “riomhaire.org” and “its up for renewal” – in December 2009 a bit earlier than I would expect from a domain manager.

To cut a story short – it’s a scam, not illegal in that they will prob transfer your domain from whom its currently with to them when the domain expired, but unethical (from my perspective) business behavior never-the-less; I won’t mention that their rates are high and anyone sending a solicitation for business that looks like a bonifides bill deserves filing in the round bin (or rectangular shredder in this case).

Its easy to be confused, but if you have many domains and/or the one who manages your domains is not the one who receives the bill. But if you get a regular snail-mail from Domain Renewal Group just walk away. Also KNOW and record which company manages the DNS entries for your company.

[09:00] My friend Will says he gets spam on the feeds …. is this true? I hope not.

[10:00] Something is very very odd. When I look at the feed using the google and yahoo readers then the spam is there. When I use firefox, agregator, WGET etc and I don’t see the spam. Very Very odd. Not much I can do until I get home though.

[22:42] Yes my site has been hacked… but fixed and hardened now (I hope) in accordance with these guidelines. A  good site that helped me with this issue are JungleG and the usual Wordpress support – thanks guys.

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.

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.