Trypticon: Tag meta

Whoops

Trejkaz — Thu, 07 Jun 2007 21:54:00 +1000

I just switched ISPs (Internode now suck, $200/month is just unacceptable for only 90GB/month downloads.)

That would have gone smoothly, but FreeDNS have added this annoying feature where they require confirmation by email in order to detect inactive accounts. And where do they send this email? Guess where… the domain managed by their DNS server. So that mail is currently going into the void until they let me login.

The really funny thing is that by the time anyone reads this, the problem must have already been fixed. :-)

Furniture Purge

Trejkaz — Mon, 21 May 2007 17:12:00 +1000

Turns out we don’t have to move house which is good, but I’m still going to go ahead with getting rid of excess furniture and whitegoods, just to make the place seem a little more tidy again.

The thought of putting it all on eBay seems like too much trouble so I figured I might as well put something up here in case anyone wants to steal some of it before it goes to a second hand store and/or the dump.

Obviously it will have to be pickup so anyone not living in the Sydney area can disregard this message. :-)

Outdoor sofa. Not designed for outdoor use as I’m sure you can tell, and in slightly shit condition but it was shit when we acquired it. It was at least under shelter for its entire life so it’s mostly free of water damage on the top, at least. (trashed)
Average-sized fridge. Left by ex-housemate years back, still works fine, have been using occasionally for drinks storage.
Top-loading washing machine. Left by ex-housemate a few months back, never been turned on, never came to pick it up.
Three swiveling office chairs:
- blue one with a tall back;
- ~~black/grey one with a medium back;~~ (claimed)
- ~~black one with a tall back which reclines perhaps a little far back.~~ (trashed)
Two bookcases: (actually three but one has already been claimed)
- ~~Black one just over 1m high, two shelves, entire thing is in good condition, it’s just going to become redundant in a week or two;~~ (claimed, I think)
- ~~Grey one about the same size, only one shelf present but fine otherwise.~~ (trashed)

I imagine the more expensive, useful things like the fridge and washing machine are going to get the most attention. Either way the way I will play this game is that whoever comments first, gets the item(s) they choose in the comment.

Mii

Trejkaz — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 16:45:00 +1100

I guess I haven’t posted since the Wii post back in December. That’s because the Wii is so good that I’ve been too busy playing games on it to make any weblog posts.

…

That was a lie.

What really happened was a certain kind of earth-shattering event after which I wasn’t in the mood to post anything on any sites for a month or so. I swore to myself I wouldn’t post anything about it (as I really dislike drama) and it felt wrong to post anything else in that time.

Anyway after one month straight, non-posting became a kind of anti-habit.

In a way it’s a shame to break that streak with such a content-less post as this, but I really have nothing else to say except that I might be posting again when I can think of something coherent.

Trackback Spam Sucks

Trejkaz — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 16:49:00 +1100

I’m in the middle of deleting about 80-90 pages of trackback spam.

It’s funny, though. The whole point of trackbacks is to provide a simple way to automate sites linking back to sites which link to them. But as soon as you make this automatic it makes spamming the site really easy.

I wonder if people will eventually come up with a way around that.

Back Home

Trejkaz — Thu, 12 Oct 2006 16:31:00 +1000

I know I haven’t posted all the holiday entries yet but I thought I’d mention (for those of you who might be wondering) that I’m back in Sydney as of Tuesday morning. I was supposed to be back Saturday morning but there were a few fun issues getting home which I’ve already written up in entries which need further checking and editing.

The remaining holiday entries will probably be finished at a rate of one per day until I reach the group of more recent ones which have already been written or until the weekend is reached, whichever comes first. And once I finally have those out of the way, I can start looking at the photos.

Some Blog Catch-up

Trejkaz — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:09:00 +1000

This new hotel (Shibuya Excel Hotel Tokyu) has high speed Internet (around 9 megabits when I tested it just now) so I can finally put some time into updating. I won’t put everything up at once though, just a bit to get things going.

I have started to wonder how much this net access is costing me. If it turns out that it’s part of the price of the hotel, then maybe I will get to watch some anime on this trip anyway (because I’ll be damned if I’ve ever seen any on TV so far.)

Gorn

Trejkaz — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 06:36:00 +1000

Out of the country for a couple of weeks. I don’t know if I’ll get time to post here during that time but we’ll see.

See you all in a couple of weeks.

Syndicated over on LiveJournal

Trejkaz — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 16:11:00 +1000

I used my recently-created OpenID to log into LiveJournal and create an “external user” account over there. LiveJournal even let external users add friends, which is pretty nifty although not quite ideal (mainly because the friends list is stored on their end and not my end. XFN would probably be more interesting if everyone used it.)

One of the limitations of external users is that even if they have a blog, that blog isn’t made visible to people who add them as friends.

And so…

glittalogik has done the deed, and created a syndicated feed of this blog over on LiveJournal. Now LiveJournal users can just add this feed and see all the posts I make here.

Here is the feed’s profile page so any of you on LiveJournal can add me.

Thanks!

Of course, the remaining problem is that comments on these entries will end up going to LiveJournal instead of here, but I’ll just have to live with that I suppose.

The "Consistent Identity Project"

Trejkaz — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 09:51:00 +1000

Those of you who know me from Jabber-related projects will probably have noticed that I dumped everyone from my main roster and moved you all to my newer, “official business” Jabber ID. I’ve also been routinely moving all semi-work-related mail to the respective email address.

I guess now people will be able to cope with my mail address and Jabber ID as the new ones are much easier to remember. :-)

Next I want to move my Jabber-related software projects over to my other domain, but that’s going to take a little time because I’ll have to tinker with the source files and copyright notices too. No fun… I wonder if there is some way that I can omit copyright notices and have Subversion add them automatically when the files are checked out. That would be grand.

OpenID is Just Too Easy

Trejkaz — Sun, 13 Aug 2006 00:47:00 +1000

First, I should add a little background for people not already in the know.

OpenID is a decentralised identity system, the general idea being that different sites can authenticate with each other, so that as a user, you need only ever login to a single web site. It has been designed to keep things simple, at least from the user’s point of view. Although a lot of clever cryptography happens under the hood, the user is never exposed to it (although concerned users can certainly go and read the specs if they are worried about how it’s implemented.

The protocol was created by Brad Fitzpatrick of LiveJournal fame, and indeed, LiveJournal was the first major service to support the protocol.

Whereas protocols such as Passel may be more flexible by supporting proof of identity using multiple means – whether it be email, instant messaging, or whatever – OpenID has the immediate benefit of being implementable today, without modifying the web browser itself.

A while back, there was mention on the Typo mailing list that someone was adding support for users to authenticate using OpenID when leaving comments on the weblog. There was also some talk about how awesome it would be if Typo could also act as an OpenID server in its own right. It would mean that every separate deployment of Typo would have its own OpenID service built-in – this is the sort of true decentralisation which OpenID was designed to permit.

But instead of waiting until the code ended up in Typo, I was actually considering setting up my own OpenID service. If I put it on some sensibly-chosen URL, it may even turn out to be the same as the URL Typo came up with. One such URL might be http://trypticon.org/users/trejkaz, which might also serve as a page showing the user’s profile and contact information – it may even list articles written by that user. If I were to set up a server, then as Typo weblogs started rolling out support for OpenID commenting, I would be able to use the feature on other people’s blogs without having to wait for the server to be implemented in Typo itself (a much more complex task, or so I’m led to believe.)

Unfortunately, it turned out to be a bit difficult to set one up because when I went looking, there was no simple, ready-to-use OpenID server that I could find bundled up in a friendly fashion. But the good news is, I discovered that you can achieve the same sort of effect with much less work, and all you have to do is sacrifice some of the decentralised nature of the service.

I’ll present my guide to getting this working as a tutorial in three steps. It’s much easier than you might imagine.

Step 1: Sign up for an OpenID service

The first thing you need is an OpenID service – any OpenID service. Aside from LiveJournal, there are a multitude of other services to pick from (isn’t choice great?) Here are but a few of your options if you don’t want to use LiveJournal:

MyOpenID – a simple, no frills OpenID service;
GetOpenID – another simple OpenID service;
TypeKey – originally just a centralised identity system, but added OpenID support later on so now it’s a legitimate OpenID service;
Videntity – a somewhat interesting service which also supports generating a VCard from your profile.

There are many other options, a larger list of which can be found on the OpenID wiki.

I ended up choosing MyOpenID, because I didn’t particularly need any extra features as long as the service was secured by TLS (which most will be – beware of ones which are not). When choosing between MyOpenID and GetOpenID, I chose purely on the basis that the “My” felt more “personal” at the time.

Hint: If you want to get through these instructions with the minimal amount of work, choose MyOpenID for yourself as well. If you do this, you won’t need to think so often while performing the next step in the instructions.

Once you have chosen the service you wish to use, signup should be pretty straight-forward – it will most likely work just like every other web-based registration form you’ve already used.

Step 2: Modify your web site

The second thing you need to do is modify your web site.

You will need to pick a URL for the service to work on. This URL will be your OpenID “Identity URL” (get familiar with this term – you’ll be seeing it a lot.) In my case, I made the changes to my theme layout, which is then applied to every page on my entire weblog. If you do something similar to this, all URLs on your site will be valid identity URLs, but they will all delegate to the same user account on your OpenID service. It may not be a very elegant solution, but it does work.

Once you have located the page which needs to be modified, you will want to insert some extra <link/> tags into its header. Let’s take a look at how that looks, using a simplified version of my own site’s markup as an example:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
  <head>
    <title>Trypticon</title>
    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
    <link href="/stylesheets/theme/default.css" media="screen" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />
    <link href="/stylesheets/theme/local.css" media="screen" rel="Stylesheet" type="text/css" />

    <!-- Begin added headers -->
    <link rel="openid.server" href="https://www.myopenid.com/server" />
    <link rel="openid.delegate" href="https://trejkaz.myopenid.com/" />
    <!-- End added headers -->

  </head>
  <body>
    <!-- The rest of your content will be in here.  I cut it out for brevity. -->
  </body>
</html>

Surrounded by comments for the purpose of labelling, I have added two <link/> elements above, which together perform the delegation to my preferred OpenID service. I will briefly explain these link tags now, as you will need to make some changes for your own site.

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”https://www.myopenid.com/server” />

If you are using MyOpenID, you don’t need to modify this and can ignore the next two paragraphs.

The “openid.server” link points at the URL on the OpenID service which all requests will go through. In fact, this element always needs to be present, even when not using delegation – it’s how the sites you’re commenting on know which URL to use to ask for authentication.

The URL will of course be different depending on the OpenID service you have chosen (this is why I wrote earlier that if you want to keep things simplest for yourself, you should choose the same service I chose.) If you have chosen a different service you will need to find out what its server URL is. A common way to go about this is to go to your true identity URL (see the explanation of “openid.delegate” below) in a web browser, and view the source of that page. You will find the “openid.server” link tag there, which can be copied into your HTML in its entirety. Alternatively, the service you have chosen may have documentation detailing which URL should go here.

<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”https://trejkaz.myopenid.com/” />

This is where the real magic happens. The “openid.delegate” link points to your true OpenID identity (remember, an OpenID identity is, usually, just a URL.) When a site encounters this, it will authenticate you as this URL instead of the URL you entered.

If you are using MyOpenID, then all you need to do is replace the username (here it’s “trejkaz”) with whatever your username is on MyOpenID. If you have chosen a different OpenID service, you will need to insert your identity URL here.

Step 3: Test it

That’s right, there are really only two steps to actually set up this delegation, but it’s always good to confirm that everything works as expected.

The easiest way to do this is probably to go straight to a site like LiveJournal and try to leave a comment.

Note: While we’re at this stage, it’s probably a good idea to make a quick note regarding privacy. If just any site in the world could determine who is sitting at the computer, what you would end up using would be the world’s best, decentralised tracking cookie! As you don’t want to be tracked everywhere you go, you have to first tell your OpenID service that you wish to allow the site to confirm your identity. This only needs to be done once per site (any more would be cumbersome), however many OpenID services also allow you to let a site check your identity once and once only. It may seem a little inconvenient at first to have to tell each site about the other, but trust me, it’s a good thing.

Once you have given the site permission to check your identity, everything should work.

If it doesn’t work, try commenting again but this time, use your true identity URL. If this works, then you may have mistyped the “openid.delegate” URL. Another possibility is that the service you tried to comment on doesn’t yet support delegation – this is the case with many OpenID demo applications, so using simple demos is a bad idea if you want to perform this test. If your true identity URL doesn’t work, then there is a problem with your OpenID service itself, and you will need to contact your respective service to see what’s going on (or, I suppose, find another service.)

Done!

And there you have it, a nice URL which you control, which you can use to login on almost any OpenID-capable web site in the world. The number of sites is slowly growing as more and more software adds support for the protocol.

You can move from service to service, and as long as you update the “openid.delegate” link to point to your new identity URL, everything will work as expected. It’s almost as good as running your own OpenID service, but much simpler to set up, even if it somewhat defeats the purpose of having a decentralised system. :-)