Geekularity

OpenID is an up and coming authentication standard that allows you to log into participating web applications using the same credentials for each. No more having to remember different usernames and passwords. You can authenticate with an OpenID compatible web service using a unique URL instead of a username and password. In my case the unique URL is http://seanosteen.com. Since this URL is unique to me, I do not need to worry about someone else registering the same username and blocking me. My authentication URL will always be http://seanosteen.com for as long as I own my own domain name.

Of course, right now, this standard is still in its infancy. Many more sites need to support it, and many *many* more users need to start using it in order for the technology to gain the necessary critical mass. Give it 3-4 more years, and I think most commercial websites will support OpenID authentication.

OpenID will thrive in an arena where other federated or single sign-on services have not, and here’s why:

1. OpenID is just as its name implies, an open standard. Anyone can implement an OpenID provider service, and there is no way for a big corporation to force you to use their service over another provider. They can only attract customers with better service and value-added solutions.
2. It’s easy to get started using it. You can sign up with any number of OpenID providers and receive an OpenID based on one of their accounts. With a little bit more work, you can setup a delegation to make your website or blog your own OpenID. I strongly recommend the delegating to your own custom URL as this decouples your OpenID from your service provider which will allow you to change providers at any time with a minimum of hassle.
3. It’s easy to implement on existing web applications. There are code libraries and samples for implementing OpenID on just about every web publishing platform. Some of the popular content management systems like Drupal, Joomla, and Wordpress already have plugins available to use. Most of the blog publishing services like LiveJournal & Wordpress allow you to easily setup your blog’s URL as your OpenID.
4. It’s easy to switch between providers! The OpenID standard provides for a delegation model. This means that you can make an OpenID out of any URL which you have control over and set it up using the OpenID provider of your choice! This is how I made http://seanosteen.com my OpenID. Just recently in fact, I switched between my old provider MyOpenID and my new one Personal Identifcation Provider (PIP), by Verisign; and I did so in about 30 minutes. All I had to do on my end was to copy and paste two lines of code into the HTML markup on my website. I didn’t even need to visit any of the websites, on which I use OpenID, to make changes. They automatically picked up my new delegation and authenticated me using my new provider. It’s that easy! This is of course using my custom URL as the OpenID. If you use the OpenID provider’s OpenID URL, a little more work will be involved to associate your new OpenID with an existing account.

By the way, Verisign’s Personal Identification Provider (PIP) is still in a beta testing phase. But one of their cool value added services, and the reason for my switch, is the availability of multi-factor credentials, specifically their SecureID key faubs. My only difficulty in implementing the PIP OpenID service was that they have not published how to setup delegation to their service. So, I contacted support on Saturday afternoon, of the long Labor Day Weekend here in the United States. To my surprise, I got a very prompt and helpful reply within an hour from Gary Krall, the Technical Director for the PIP project. Kudos to Gary and crew for the amazing response time on a holiday weekend.

Ignoring that faint voice in the back of my head that tells me that Google may indeed be Skynet, and that our robot overlords are just a few years away from their planned invasion, I decided to hand Google the keys to my kingdom. I have moved several of my internet domains over to Google Apps. What that means is that all of my Email, Calendar, News, and soon phone calls, will be hosted (and probably indexed) by Google. In the coming weeks, I will move all of the domains I manage, both personal and professional over to this amazing service. This excludes my clients whom I manage, but do not actually host.

I’m doing this because hosting my own email is both tiring and expensive. Rather than spend countless hours being my own systems administrator and doing endless battle with the spam trolls, I decided to delegate this little bit of geekery to someone who is more proficient. When complete, this move will hopefully free up some significant mental energy (and funds for that matter as the Google Apps basic package is free) to spend on other pursuits. Besides, Gmail and Google Calendar are easy to use, easy to access, and quite a good value for the price!

Right now, I’ve only moved my professional domains, but my [family] clients and my personal domains will soon follow. When all is complete, I should no longer need to rent a dedicated server, and my monthly recurring expenses should go way down. This comes after reading Scott Hanselman’s post about doing the same thing for himself and his entire family. So, special thanks to Scott for outlining his process and his reasoning. It was a big help.

I didn’t know that RAID was a bad word, much less a bad acronym, unless you are an insect. But after reading the Drobo product literature and watching Robert Scoble’s interview with the Data Robotics, Inc. management team, it became clear that Drobo’s marketing machine wants nothing to do with the term RAID. Apparently RAID has become synonymous with enterprise-level, expensive, hard to setup, and hard to maintain. Wanting to target small businesses, small offices, and home users, Data Robotics, Inc. calls their product a Data Robot (Drobo for short); a protected storage solution which uses industry standard data protection methods. Marketing gloss aside, I think that the Drobo product embraces the best of what RAID was supposed to mean: Redundant Array of Inexpensive (or Interchangeable) disks.

The Drobo unit accepts up to 4 disks, and will take any 3.5″ form factor Serial ATA disks you already have, or purchase and optimizes them to run as one large virtualized disk. No matter what size the disks are (unlike other RAID solutions, the disks do not need to be the same size in the Drobo appliance), the Drobo operating system will build the largest volume possible while providing at least a minimum level of protection against hardware failure. Whether it’s just two disks, on which it builds a mirror (equivalent to RAID1) or three or more disks where it creates a striped set with parity (equivalent RAID 5), the Drobo OS takes care of all of the configuration for you. It will even build a redundant mirror when a single disk is inserted. However since a single disk mirror will still fail if the single disk stops spinning, I do not recommend relying on this configuration for hardware data protection. The Drobo appliance will even rebuild and resize the partitions when additional hard drives are inserted in real-time without the need to bring the volume offline.

I’ve been evaluating my Drobo unit for two weeks now, and I set it up to run attached to a Mac Mini, which acts as my office server and media center. I can then share my files with my other computers using several protocols including Samba, Apple FileShare, or SSHFS. The unit was easy to set up, and runs very smoothly. With the exception of some noise when the cooling fan ramps up to full speed, the unit is normally very quiet. I purchased the $500 Drobo appliance, but I already owned the four disks that I put into the unit, all 200GB drives. This configuration gives me a total of 550 GB of space to hold my data. The remainder of the space is reserved for data protection and for system overhead. As drives fail, or as I need to expand my storage, I can simply upgrade the disks one by one and without taking the appliance offline. I will simply slip out the oldest or smallest drive and insert the new one. After a few minutes, the Drobo appliance will have formatted the drive and resized the volume to utilize the new disks.

Although I am very happy with the data protection that the Drobo appliance provides, I do not consider it an excuse to not backup. A protected storage appliance like this will not protect me from fire, flood, or other disaster, so I still backup all of my critical files nightly to a removable drive which I swap out each week and take with me off site. In the future, I plan to setup an rsync relationship with a computer at my house and move all of the changed files across the wire each night through a cron job. But that’s a project for another day. All and all, I’m very happy with my Drobo appliance and would recommend it for individual users and small offices with large storage needs, but who do not have large throughput needs. The Drobo appliance attaches to the host system using USB 2.0 and the specifications claim that it has a sustained transfer rate of 22 MB/s. This is enough for an individual to run a video editing project on it, but it may bottleneck when I/O intensive databases try to move large chunks back and forth. At that level, you would need to build a more enterprisey RAID solution anyway.

As part of the “One Last Thing” portion of his keynote this morning, Steve Jobs announced that developers wishing to create applications for the iPhone are relegated to creating Web 2.0 style web applications for use inside of the iPhone’s implementation of Safari. While Safari is supposed to be fully functional on the iPhone, including Javascript, which will allow for AJAX driven user interaction, the only access to the internal workings of the iPhone will marshalled through URLs and possibly Microformats.This begs two questions:

1. Will developers be able to take advantage of any offline persistence frameworks inside of the iPhone like Google Gears?
2. Can AT&T’s EDGE network handle the extra bandwidth burden that AJAX user interaction often adds?

Kathy Sierra, a prominent blogger and author, who’s blog I read constantly, has quietly endured cyber-bullying in the comment sections of her blog and through other online forums. This unacceptable behavior has recently risen to threats of sexual torture and death. As a result, Sierra has canceled her speaking engagements and has become reluctant to venture out her front door. In what may become her last blog post, she explains what has been going on and then she apologizes to her readers and fans for withdrawing from the community for a while.

It’s an absolute shame, if not ironic, that such a brilliant person, who so thoroughly understands and is able to explain the intricacies of computer user behavior, has fallen victim to the antics of such a disturbed computer user. Kathy Sierra has taught me how to become a better software developer, and I have always looked forward to reading her insights. How anyone could find reason to hate her for what she does is beyond me or any other sane member of the human race. Unfortunately, that’s not who she is dealing with. Should Kathy choose to permanently withdraw from the blogosphere as a result of these events, I think we would all understand. However, she will be sorely, sorely missed.

I suspect that much anger and outrage will be expressed in the blogoshere over this topic. And as strong as my emotions are over this, I will not offer a call to action or an opinion of what should happen. Rather, I will suggest that Kathy has many friends in this community and that our demonstration of support for her is much more helpful than any witch hunt or mob action. Let law enforcement do there job, while you, as a friend of Kathy Sierra, send her your love and support.

Monday night, Sean Kane, the Director of User Interface Engineering at Netflix, gave his presentation entitled “Developing a Great User Interface” to members of the East Bay IT Group . I found it particularly fascinating to see how Netflix integrates their feature development and testing into a very rapid, biweekly release cycle. Most of the features, once they graduate to production grade code, will exist on the production web site and will only be available to one or more select groups of users; usually groups of about 10,000 users each. Depending on the feature and what usability metric they are testing for, these test groups will last for several weeks or several months. Other test groups might run concurrently and will often overlap. This testing system sounds fascinating, especially when I realized that I may have been a member of one of the test groups in the past!

One point I found especially cool was Sean’s discussion about the red star ratings system. Many Netflix users, including myself, believe that the red stars are the average rating from everyone who rates that movie. It turns out that this is only true when you first subscribe to the Netflix service and your ratings and movie queue are nil. Once you have added movies into your queue or begin to rate other movies, the red star rating becomes personalized to you. Based on you viewing, rating, and queuing history for example:

A “Weekend at Bernie’s” search while not logged in and my cookies cleared

Same search, but this time I’m logged into my account

Apparently Netflix thinks I am not as much of a fan of “Weekend at Bernie’s 2″ as the rest of the Netflix population. To the contrary, I loved it! I’m a sucker for both of those movies. Just after I took those screen shots, I rated them both 5 stars!

But this isn’t about my taste in super awesome movies, this is about user experience. As Kane even admits, Netflix needs to do a better job explaining some of the finer points of their user interface. Perhaps a delayed pop-up bubble when hovering over the ratings object could present the user with a “did you know” type explanation with a link to a details page that explains the ratings features in depth. While this feature is optional and would not divert too many users away from the task of hunting down movies to watch, it would give the geekier of us the chance to understand the system a bit more.

Anytime you upgrade your operating system, there will always be a couple of programs and devices that just won’t work right. In my case, my ten year old webcam is no longer supported by Windows Vista or by the manufacturer. C’est la vie. It’s time to move on to something new.

I chose the Logitech QuickCam® for Notebooks Pro mostly because it was small and easy to take with me on the road. I set it up, and it works fine. It works as I expected, so that’s all I have to say about the webcam itself. The reason why I wrote this post, and the reason why I’m so happy with Logitech, is the packaging that the webcam came in.

I am not a fan of the hard plastic cases that most electronics come packaged in. These “clamshell” packages are difficult to open, and are even dangerous. I have sliced open my hands more than once and have come to use industrial tin snips (huge scissors) in order to get into the worst of the clamshells.

I understand why manufactures encase their products in these virtual bear traps. They stand up to rough shipping and most, if not all, of the packaging can be recycled. The clamshell supposedly cuts down on casual theft, and when a product is returned, it certainly is easy to tell if the packaging has been opened. I suspect that it also the cheapest packaging to produce. Nevertheless, I hate clamshell packaging… hate, hate, hate, hate it! And hate is a word that my mommy told me never to use!

So imagine my surprise when I looked at the bottom of the packaging and saw a set of embossed arrows indicating that I could just pull this clamshell package apart. Another sticker on the top of the package showed yet another way to easily open the shell. So, I reluctantly put my gi-normous scissors down, and gave it a go. Astonishingly, the pieces of packaging came right apart and without any gashes or scrapes! It was actually a pleasant experience opening this package! I nearly wept with excitement when my digits all came back to me in tact!

I want to give Logitech a huge kudos for spending a few extra cents per unit to make their packaging more hand-friendly. I have voted with my wallet, and seconded the motion with this blog post. It is my hope that Logitech continues to offer their products in similarly easy to open packaging. It is also my hope that other electronics manufacturers take a page from Logitech. Make your products easy to open. It may actually be a differentiating feature in my future buying decisions.

Steve Job’s displayed Apple’s new media center(ish) product today called iTV, which seems like a pretty cool product! I can leave the noisy PC, with a 1TB storage array in my office, while this sleek little box sits below my yet to be acquired 50″ flat panel display and streams my content. There’s just one thing missing before I buy, a TV tuner & PVR solution that integrates seamlessly into Apple’s Front Row application. I didn’t hear a mention of such a feature yet, so my wallet remains safely in the pocket (Don’t worry honey, I promise to check with you before I buy).

Here’s what I am using until Apple comes through. I originally setup MythTV on an old Linux box. This worked great until I wanted to try my hand at placeshifting, which is when I bought the SageTV suite and installed it on top of of Windows. It has this cool Java applet that I can use to watch TV from anywhere in the world. I’ve even streamed my favorite show, Good Eats with Alton Brown, over a wireless EVDO connection while staying at a relative’s house in the rugged foothills of Northern California. Since I already had the old PC and a video capture card, this whole setup gave me the same functionality as a TiVO and a Sling Box for a very reasonable $100.00. So, Mr Jobs, this is your competition. Please review SageTV’s feature set and let me know when you have a comparable product.

Apple announced today that it has released a beta version of a bootstrapper for Microsoft Windows XP. Named Boot Camp, this product will finally allow users to install MS Windows XP on the new Apple Intel-based PC hardware. And let’s face it, the Apple hardware is SaaaaaaWeeeeet. So the ability to use both OSX and XP on the same laptop… with full driver support… without having to use an emulator, is long overdue! As an aside, you know the Apple developers have been quietly chuckling to themselves as they watched the hacker community trying to do this for the last few months!

After watching “The Minority Report” and seeing the transparent screen that Tom “I jumped the shark, yet I still get to work with JJ Abrams” Cruise uses to do his research, I thought that the science fact was a long ways away from the science fiction that I saw on the screen. Fortunately some super smart people at my alma mater, Oregon State University, disagree. They’ve developed the world’s first transparent electrical circuit! In a press release from last week, John Wager of the OSU college of electrical engineering says: “This is a quantum leap in moving transparent electronics from the laboratory toward working commercial applications.”

Go Beavs!