The Eclectic

While bored today I remembered another service that I signed for but haven’t check up on in a while, ClaimID. When I got ClaimID I looked around at some other all-in-one online identity attempts, the other “big” one at the time wasOpenID. Turns out, during my latest 4-month schooling exile ClaimID got onboard to fund OpenID and they are now nicely integrated.

ClaimID also gave me a bunch of ways to post my ID on blogs and websites. Here are a few:

• The Badge
  
• The Links List
  Refuses to work in WordPress
  
• The HCard
  
  Mark Dittmer
• The WordPress “Widget”
  Doesn’t work anymore

I can’t wait for this WordPress plugin to be released. As more and more sites catch on, I’m hoping OpenID will turn into the all-in-one authentication that it’s creators dream it to be.

Technorati Tags: ClaimID, OpenID, ID, WordPress, authentication

Those who know me well are aware that I have a keen interest in the study of religion and philosophy. Now, I try not to criticize those who choose a more secular view of the world than I, but there is one perspective that I’ve always disliked, but never thought about it long enough to rationalize. Recently, a new friend–Jessica of WindsorU–articulated why I hate it when people say, “yeah, I stay away from religion because it causes the most wars.”

Jessica mentioned that people always find ways and reasons to hate each other, and they do so relentlessly.  If we’d never dreamed up religion to explain the unexplained, we’d still kill each other because I have a Y cromosome, and you don’t, or I’m purple, and you’re orange, or I have more pieces of paper with the Queen’s face on it than you. Religion has become the scapegoat for the world’s problems.

Now, don’t get me wrong, something as powerful as faith is easy to manipulate into a destructive force because it brings out our strongest emotions and convictions. But even without religion, we would still be human; still have our emotions and our convictions. Our greed and our envy, our morals and our values, our oil and our profits.

Religion as a source of war is a totally illegitamate reason not to explore religion. It’s a beautiful if you dig deeply enough to learn what it’s really about. Thanks to Jess for showing me the reason behind my resistance on this one.

Let me begin by saying that I, for one, have wasted AT LEAST six hours of my life just getting AJAX to happen in different browsers or more. I’ve even written code to create the missing XMLHttpRequest object for IE that contained work-arounds for Microsoft’s stupid ActiveX objects.

While it means that I’ll probably throw out a lot of code that took a long time to make, I can’t express how overjoyed I am by my discovery of GWT: theGoogle Web Toolkit, the first structured solution (that I’ve seen) to the grossly malsupported concept of AJAX. I would also like to say, IT’S ABOUT F*CKING TIME! It seems to be an uphill battle to convince many facets of the computer development community that simple is good; standards are good; making something more complicated than it needs to be makes things, well, more complicated (not more 1337). So when Google stepped up to horde of browser developers who can’t see eye-to-eye, AND released the fruits of their labour for free use, I practically jumped for joy. One software sector down 2^n to go.

Thank you Google and your developers for this much-needed tool!

Technorati Tags: AJAX, browsers, XMLHttpRequest, Google Web Toolkit, standards, Google, developers

So I started another co-op workterm last week. At my last placement, while the people were nice, the work was pretty boring and monotonous. My new job has the best of both worlds. My week was filled with protocol hacking, learning a new (to me) scripting language, open discussions about projects to improve our products, and interdepartmental airplane/bottle cap wars.

The protocol hacking was fun; I haven’t worked much with hex before and the puzzle-esque problem solving is quite addicting. The scripting language was Perl; grossly efficient and quirky, but a bitch to read (unfortunately, I had to do the latter). And when I said open discussions, I meant OPEN discussions. If I suggested something that challenged the current structure of a product, I was typically met with, “you know, that could work even better. You should test them both and maybe we’ll implement it.” Remember this is my first week on a co-op job–unbelievable.

As for the interdepartmental wars, our cubicle dividers are a good five feet lower than the ceiling; I’ll let you paint that picture yourself. Essentailly, I’m in department full of fun-loving, easy-going goof balls. One day this week, 1/2 hour before the work day was “officially” over, one of the full-timers decided he really wanted to get an old stoplight fixture he’d recently obtained working as a fun and interactive cubicle prop. The only logical thing to do was drop what we were doing and all drive to the electronics store for the relays we’d need to hook it up to a parallel port. Awesome.

I guess what I’m trying to say here is, I love my job. I hope subsequent weeks are as fun and enriching as this one.

Technorati Tags: co-op, workterm, protocol hacking, interdepartmental wars, cubicle, I love my job