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Sat Jul 28 10:56:26 2007 GMT: Weather
Thu Jul 12 20:14:09 2007 GMT: We've Dropped Our Prices
Wed Jul 04 18:58:25 2007 GMT: OpenID
I have had a closer look at OpenID now. While it certainly comes with a coolness factor, I think, from a technical perspective, the specification is a mess.
Although both the "Consumer" and the end user will talk to the "Identity Provider", only one URL is used for this communication. As a consequence, the "Identity Provider" is needlessly complicated to implement as the response will be either a "Key-Value Format" (when the requests comes from the "Consumer") or HTML (when the request comes from the end user). Furthermore, it essentially prevents the use of any Web-server built-in authentication (as only requests from the end-user need to be authenticated).
Another point to note is that the specification requires the "Consumer" to extract some information from a HTML document (by "parsing" the HTML). This, of course, complicates the implementation of the "Consumer" and would have been easy to avoid.
And then instead of using something like SOAP (or XMLRPC) for the communication between "Consumer" and "Identity Provider" they have chosen to use something different.
But as long as something is cool enough, it doesn't seem to matter if it's cleanly designed.
Sun Jul 01 09:17:28 2007 GMT: Lake District Holiday
I just returned from a one week holiday in Grasmere (Lake District). Although the weather wasn't ideal, it wasn't too bad either. Anyway, go to my digital photo album for some pictures (and part 2).
Tue Jun 12 18:56:54 2007 GMT: Google's Response to The Article 29 Working Party Letter
The document itself is, of course, not worth reading. But having a look at the document's meta-data reveals some interesting information: Creator: Acrobat PDFMaker 7.0.5 for Word, Producer: Acrobat Distiller 7.0.5 (Windows)
Huh? That looks a bit strange when you keep hearing for months that Google challenges Microsoft with new business package.
Sun Jun 10 11:24:12 2007 GMT: New Intel and Sun C++ Compiler Versions
Both Intel and Sun have released new versions of their C++ compilers this week: Intel C++ 10 and Sun Studio 12. The Sun compiler is available as a free download and now fully supports Linux.
Apparently, both compilers emphasise their superior optimisation and parallelisation capabilities and there appears to be a trend towards OpenMP support.
Mon May 28 21:43:07 2007 GMT: Google's misleading response to privacy concerns
Google's privacy counsel has responded to concerns over Google's ambitions to maximise the personal information it holds. Unfortunately, this response is quite misleading as it suggests that Google only collects personal information as part of its personalised search service. But this is definitely not the case as Google has recently clarified that they collect information about the search, such as the query itself, IP addresses and cookie details. And there is no (easy) way to opt out of this data collection. But it gets even worse when you add Google's AdWords and Google Analytics to the equation as there are now lots of sites using at least one of these services. So you don't even have to use Google's search engine to have data about the sites visited sent to Google. And by the way, combining those logs doesn't look like rocket science to me...
Mon May 28 21:06:00 2007 GMT: greylstd 0.2
Wed May 23 17:41:07 2007 GMT: Google's goal to organise your daily life
Fri May 11 22:34:22 2007 GMT: Broken DNS Setup
Wed May 09 17:41:19 2007 GMT: JabRSS User Accounts Cleanup
Sat May 05 14:58:58 2007 GMT: Swindon Local Elections
