January 2007
Jan. 27, 2007
MacFUSE Tech Demos from Amit Singh’s Macworld 2007 Talk (via) DocsFS, PicasawebFS, ProfFS, RSSFS and SpotlightFS. Eye-opening—especially the ease with which they can be mounted.
How-to: Read and Write NTFS Windows Partition on Mac OS X. NTFS driver for MacFUSE, with full read and write support. Great for BootCamp.
OpenID Enabled: OpenID Tests. Useful for checking if your OpenID consumer or server are working OK.
Web Services based on SOAP and WSDL are "Web" in name only. In fact, they are a hostile overlay of the Web based on traditional enterprise middleware architectural styles that has fallen far short of expectations over the past decade.
idproxy.net: Use your Yahoo! account as an OpenID
In an ideal world, some or all of the sites with large user databases (Yahoo!, AOL, Google, Amazon and so on) would act as OpenID providers, allowing their users to sign in to OpenID supporting sites around the Web. Until that happens, people who want to use OpenID need to sign up for Yet Another Account to do so.
[... 414 words]Jan. 29, 2007
undisposable.org. A free Web Service for checking if an address is likely to come from a disposable e-mail service. It’s the anti-Mailinator!
It's still a privacy concern. If, for example, I work at and post from Microsoft all day and my identicon is that of the MS Proxy Server then I would be able to identify other mefi users who are my co-workers because our identicons would match.
Apple UK Get a Mac ads. Totally awesome, they’re using Mitchell and Webb. Not sure how much Mac users will want to be associated with Jeremy from Peep Show though...
Jan. 30, 2007
OpenID as easy as 1,2,3. An idproxy.net walkthrough, with screenshots.
James Randi owes me a million dollars (via) Interesting case study in cryptographic bit commitment protocols, which allow something to be published that can later prove the authenticity of a revealed secret.
Jan. 31, 2007
Wow! Fantastic photo.
Announcing Jyte. “Jyte is a simple service that allows you to associate claims, credibility and contacts to build a reputation with your OpenID”. The OpenID landscape is wide open for innovation like this.
Mr. Gosling—why did you make URL equals suck?!? Wow, the behaviour of java.net.URL.equals is completely idiotic.
Two hosts are considered equivalent if both host names can be resolved into the same IP addresses [...] Note: The defined behavior for equals is known to be inconsistent with virtual hosting in HTTP.
Spelling correction using the Python Natural Language Toolkit. Uses porter stemming to implement a search engine ’did you mean’ feature based on the Brown Corpus.
Flickr users are marked as such in the Yahoo user database. What this means is that the account is permanently protected from deletion, even if you cancel your SBC-Yahoo DSL and even if you never check your Yahoo Mail (if you elect to have one). Both free and pro accounts are protected. And your Yahoo signon name will not be displayed anywhere on Flickr -- your existing Flickr username will stay the same.