Programming

Collected online resources

11 February 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 4 Comments

Here are some nice links for you all…

FUNDAMENTALS ——————————————————

Hardware

SOFTWARE PROGRAMMING ——————————————————

General

Modern methodologies

Haskell

Lisp

Java 2 Standard Edition

Java 2 Enterprise Edition

PHP

Python

Ruby

Scheme

Smalltalk

PARALLEL COMPUTING ———————————————

What exactly is Yahoo! Pipes?

9 February 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 4 Comments

People all around the world are at this moment raving about a new technology by Yahoo! called Pipes.

Simon Willison says:

“[It is a n]ew Yahoo! service for combining and remixing Atom/RSS feeds using a really sophisticated drag-and-drop UI.”

I guess it is kind of a portal builder which gets its data from Atom and RSS feeds.

I’ll try it when it bloody works because currently “Our Pipes are clogged! We’ve called the plumbers!”…

;-)

I want my own OpenID…

24 January 2007 By Avinash Meetoo 2 Comments

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

According to I want my OpenID!,

“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 :-)