Origa.me

If you use Mac OSX and want a graphical subversion client, ZigZig software have just release version 1.1 Beta 2 of their Zigversion software. It's currently available in a free non-commercial version and the license fee for the commercial version is also pretty reasonable. OK, it's not 'free' (as in speech) software but I believe good software - even commercial - should be encouraged. This version adds editing of repositories without...

Great news everyone!! OpenID , something I've blogged about previously , gains new support from Microsoft and Verisign. I've been keeping an eye on OpenID for a while now and playing with it outside of work, but I think this is the point at which I'm going to seriously consider promoting it with new and established clients.

Aaah ... breaking the silence. Has it really been 10 weeks since my last post? Here's one for the web designers out there. If you haven't heard of Microformats then check them out. They effectively allow you to embed structured data (such as contact details, events, geo data, etc.) into a standard web page in a way which can be read by humans as normal, but using an agreed format based on common established standards (such as vcard and...

Having looked at ruby-growl earlier today , but needing network-wide notifications rather than to individual machines, I hacked the following code together in Ruby using mDNSBrowse (from the Howl project - sadly a dead project replaced more recently by Avahi) to discover and resolve Growl clients on the network:

For anyone who uses Growl for event notification on Mac OSX and who wants to receive notifications from a Linux machine (eg: a local server), take a look a Ruby-Growl . Pretty simple to set up and works fairly nicely. Example CLI usage: growl -H 192.168.1.x -t "Server ready" -m "The server has finished booting" -P ****** It might be nice to be able to do a general network broadcast but I suspect the security implications mean you...

Ruby 's one of the newer darlings of the fashionable development world. It's not really mainstream and doesn't currently have the kind of ubiquitous availability of languages like Perl and PHP or the commercial favour of Java and C++. That said, there's enough noise being made about it to at least have a look... so I did. There's a getting started in 20 minutes introduction to Ruby linked from the main ruby site ( www.ruby-lang.org )...

A little while ago I speculated that we would see a single sign on (SSO) system from Google at some point. It would seem that, for a change, Yahoo! has beaten them to the punch. Browser Based Authentication (BBAuth) circumvents the whole 'signing up for another account' thing by linking to your Yahoo! account and requesting permission for certain information.

These two articles popped up in my news reader today: 10 Things That Will Make Or Break Your Website 11 Best Practices for URLs Both make good reading and are full of sound advice for developers. Onto the reference shelf they go.

Today is oneWebDay apparently. I'll have to put it in the calendar so I don't nearly miss it next year too. Perhaps I'll tell some friends about it next year as well.

Interesting article on eWeek about password management issues within corporations. I think it would be fair to say that similar issues affect the domestic market, although without the regular enforced password changes. Most browsers implement some form of login management although this doesn't entirely solve the problem of having to remember your details and so discourages good password policy. Browser systems are also occasionally...