Origa.me

Following several months working with Drupal including some contract programming work and several existing client migrations, I've decided to migrate my own blog from Wordpress.

I've been having a bit of a tinker with Comet , a complementary technology to Ajax. The concept isn't new: it's essentially socket programming but instead of sockets it's done over HTTP with a web browser and a standard web server. The idea has been around for a number of years in various guises but has gathered steam recently in "Web-2.0" (don't shoot me! At least we all know what I'm talking about!) circles so I thought I'd...

This came in kind of useful on a client's site recently - allows you to display data in a standard HTML table and then use jQuery to read the data in the table and display a graph using Open Flash Charts in its place. It's all a bit rough but meets my requirements so I probably won't give it any more attention. I'm making it available here in case anyone else finds it useful - feel free to take it and extend it. Here's the jQuery plugin...

This is a pretty cool idea and works well (I might add). Well, it works well except with my GTalk address but that's not their fault. XMPP auth for OpenID

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.

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...

As a reminder for myself, and in case anyone happens to find it useful: if you run into problems making IIS send mail with CDOSYS from within a .asp file (VBScript) like I did today - this may help: First, put this at the very top of your script (before the language declaration, etc)

Wow, I cannot believe I've been doing version management manually as long as I have. This whole subversion thing has really opened my eyes in the past 48 hours. I've actually migrated all of my active code to it already - it's so easy!

First ever Subversion checkin (directory structure) seemed to go smoothly enough. Thank goodness for the Subvervion book (and Plucker so I could read it on my PDA rather than lugging the laptop to bed every night). I did forget to add a comment, which is a bit of a faux pas - must remember never to forget again! Next step is to actually upload some code. I'm also seriously considering using Subversion for some of my work projects -...

Just heard about this today: http://www.ibegin.com/ibox/ibox-test.html Had a play with it and it looks the business. Certainly when combined with AJAX it makes handling dialogues in administration interfaces that bit simpler and more user friendly. Into the toolbox it goes!