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I want my own OpenID…

24 January 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

[ Have a look at this screencast to view OpenID in action ]

“OpenID is a light-weight, decentralized authentication mechanism that allows you to have one login that you can use anywhere on the Internet.”

This is great as I have 159 (Yes! One bloody hundred and fifty-nine!) passwords in my password database right now and the number does not seem to decrease.

This is what I did to get my own OpenID:

Step 1 – Get one from an identity provider

I chose MyOpenID (you can choose any of those providers), filled in a simple form, waited for a confirmation email and voilÃƒÂ I am the proud owner of avinashmeetoo.myopenid.com (notice that an OpenID is just a URI)… until I realise that it is not exclusive enough :-)

Step 2 – Get my own OpenID

I am fortunate to own my own domain (noulakaz.net) and also my own subdomain (avinash.noulakaz.net).

avinash.noulakaz.net is a much nicer OpenID than the one from MyOpenID, n’est ce pas?

Fortunately, I found a short HOWTO on using your own URI as an OpenID from OpenID enabled.

I simply created an HTML page (index.html if you want to know) at http://avinash.noulakaz.net/ with the following content:

<hmtl>
<head>
  <link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.myopenid.com/server/” />
  <link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://avinashmeetoo.myopenid.com/” />
  <meta http-equiv=”X-XRDS-Location” content=”http://avinashmeetoo.myopenid.com/xrds” />
</head>
<body>
  <h1>Avinash Meetoo</h1>
  <p>Go to my <a href=”http://avinashmeetoo.myopenid.com/”>OpenID identity page</a></p>
</body>
</html>

Notice the link rel and the meta tags: they are used to delegate authentification to the MyOpenID server.

Step 3 – Discover some new OpenID-enabled websites

Thanks to this directory of OpenID-enabled websites, I’ve subscribed to Ma.gnolia and started using it.

Of course, OpenID is also used when contributing comments on weblogs. LiveJournal and Movable Type support OpenID out of the box. WordPress (which I use for this weblog) requires a plugin that I’ve not yet installed :-)

Why do I blog?

24 January 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 10 Comments

I blog for exactly the same reasons Sam Ruby identified five years ago!

“So why do I blog? Because it works. It finds worthwhile things for me to read. It helps me refine and focus my thoughts and be more productive too. And most of all, [it] creates the opportunity to interact with more interesting people. That’s what’s in it for me.”

Beautiful!

On living software…

18 January 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 3 Comments

I’ve just come across Steve Yegge’s latest rant on the fact that most software is crap!

He then names some software which are not crap and tries to identify which caracteristics they share and…… BANG! They are all living!!!

According to Steve,

“Living software has a command shell, since you need a way to talk to it like a grown-up. It has an extension language, since you need a way to help it grow. It has an advice system, since you need a way to train and tailor it. It has a niche, since it needs users in order to thrive. It has a plug-in architecture, so you can dress it up for your party. And it is self-aware to the maximum extent possible given the external performance constraints. These features must be seamlessly and elegantly integrated, each subsystem implemented with the same care and attention to detail as the system as a whole.”

The software becomes a living entity because it does not need to be rebooted. The software can be customised, enhanced, corrected, changed (whatever…) at runtime.

Philosophically, I’m 100% with him… but, technically speaking, building a living software is a big challenge.

And how am I going to teach this to my poor students?

An update: Keith Braithwaite has his own opinion on this and, for him, the essential property is that “[i]t’s about being [able] to interact with computational objects (“object” in the broadest possible sense) in the same way you interact with physical objects.” Essentially, all the “objects” in the software become as accessible and tweakable as any Smalltalk or Squeak object.

Now I know how I’m going to teach my students how to build living software: I’ll let them play with Squeak!