Archive for the 'web' Category

Being Your Own OpenID Provider

Published by ugo on May 6, 2008 in web. 0 Comments

I tried twice today to set up a this domain as my OpenID, delegating first to Yahoo! then to my GMail account (using http://openid-provider.appspot.com/ which is almost there but not quite yet). Ended up setting up my own OpenID provider using phpMyID, which might be a bit rough at the edges but works as advertised.

I was only briefly stumped because for some reason, hashing my password using openssl did not give the same result as hashing it via PHP. Turns out I had forgotten to use ‘-n’ with ‘echo’ D’oh!

Somehow I was hoping this OpenID stuff would have been a bit easier…

Photophlow

Published by ugo on January 3, 2008 in photography and web. 4 Comments

I must thank Ted Leung for inviting me to photophlow as this has allowed me to get in touch with a bunch of Flickrites and have some good conversation. I mostly agree with Ted’s analysis of the site, especially when he says that photophlow is a bit like IRC with pictures (and this means it has the potential to be a great time sink, if you get too much into it) and at the same time it’s really pushing the envelope in terms of building interactive applications on top of “mashable” services like Flickr. In fact, it’s so much more than a simple mashup: it’s a real application using the Web as its platform and Flickr as its API. Totally cool, I think.

I have one more invite left if you want to try it. Just leave me a comment here with your email address and I’ll send the invite to the first to do so. Leave a comment also if you are not the first. If I manage to get more invites, I’ll send them out on a first come-first served basis.

photophlow badge

Update: I have two more invites and, since this post is currently #2 on Google for “photophlow” in some regions, I guess they won’t last long.

You call this REST?

Published by ugo on December 16, 2007 in devel and web. 2 Comments

From the Amazon SimpleDB documentation:

Amazon SimpleDB REST calls are made using HTTP GET requests. The Action query parameter provides the method called and the URI specifies the target of the call. Additional call parameters are specified as HTTP query parameters. The response is an XML document that conforms to a schema.

Note

If the length of the query string that you are constructing exceeds the maximum length of the HTTP GET URL, use HTTP POST and submit the query string parameters in the body of the message.

Excuse me??? This must be the single most egregious abuse of the “REST” term I ever saw. Listen, Amazon, just because you use HTTP and XML and do not use SOAP, you cannot just call it REST because you think it’s sexy and pretend that you’re not looking stupid.

debugger;

Published by ugo on November 10, 2007 in web. 0 Comments

I guess some developer at alitalia.com forgot to remove a statement from one of the website’s scripts:

alitalia-debugger.png

I noticed because I have Firebug installed and it popped up the Javascript debugger window while loading the home page.

Bidplaza: Is it for real?

Published by ugo on November 7, 2007 in skeptic and web. 11 Comments

Via an article on corriere.it, I just learned of the existence of Bidplaza. If you do not read Italian, don’t worry, it’s exactly the same mechanism as limbo unique, except for the cost. Basically, the player who makes the lowest unique offer for an item wins.

While I wasn’t able to determine how much placing a bid on a limbo unique item costs, it’s very clear from Bidplaza’s website that each bid will set you back 2€ (that’s almost USD 3 nowadays).

Since online forums in Italy are ablaze with questions about Bidplaza, with people wondering whether it’s a scam or a legitimate business, I figured I could do some research about it. Here are my conclusions. Take them with a grain of salt and remember that I am not a lawyer, I an not in any way involved in Bidplaza, nor I have any other knowledge beside what can be gleaned from the Web.

What is the business model?

The business model is very clear, so people should stop wondering how they can give away cameras, computers and cars for such low prices. If they put up an iPod Touch 16GB (list price 399€) for bidding and 200 people bid on it, the site will have made a 1€ profit. If 400 people bid, they will have made a 100% profit on the sale. Of course, this implies that they will get a high enough number of bidders, but if they have some capital they can afford losing some money at the start while the media-driven buzz heats up and the site becomes sufficiently popular.

Is this an auction site?

This is not an auction in any way. It’s more akin to a lottery, as guessing the lowest possible amount that no one else will bid on is more a matter of luck than anything else. I’m not sure there can’t be a playing strategy that gives a better change of winning, but if there is it isn’t obvious and the odds must be only marginally better than a strategy based on picking values at random. If it’s a lottery indeed, is it legal according to Italian law? I have no idea, I’m not a lawyer.

Who is behind Bidplaza?

The bidplaza.it domain is registered by a company named Es Media Srl, based in Segrate (MI). They do not seem to have a website, but if the company is real, anyone could go to the Chamber of Commerce in Milan and ask for information about it. However, their CEO Semih Sadi has a profile on LinkedIn and he’s listed as the admin contact for the domain.

The only entry mentioning Bidplaza on LinkedIn is for Sadok Kohen. Sadok has a blog and if he keeps an eye on his incoming links and notices this one, he is welcome to visit and leave a comment.

By the way, where do these guys come from, since their names are obviously not of Italian origin?

Turns out they’re apparently Turkish. Just to be clear, this is a fact I have no problems with.

Who are all those smiling Scandinavians driving Porsches and Ferraris show on the website?

I have no idea. Various articles on the Italian Web hint at Bidplaza being an emanation of some nordic entity, but I could find no trace of this. One article references bidplaza.co.uk but that website is just a page with an address and some phone numbers. The bidplaza.com domain is registered to the same people who registered bidplaza.it and indeed www.bidplaza.com redirects to the Italian version.

My educated guess is that their business just started, but they wanted to show some history to make it look more legitimate. Unfortunately, you just can’t hide anything in the era of Google and it’s not true that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. If you’re a dog, somebody will find out sooner or later and this kind of strategy risks backfiring. Of course it’s entirely possible that those Swedes are real and I welcome Sadok or Sami or any other representative from the company to come here and tell us more about them.

Would you play on Bidplaza?

Matter of fact, I already did. I registered on the site and gave my mobile phone number, so I could get the 2€ bonus, which I used to place one bet. Unfortunately I bet on an amount which was not unique, so I lost. I guess that if it cost much less than 2€ per bet, I’d be tempted to try playing some more. I would feel relatively safe in doing so, since I could simply budget 10€ via PayPal and not risk anything more, but I’m not a gambler.

Update: I found where the happy Scandinavians come from: bidster.com. The graphics of bidster.com and bidplaza.it are obviously the same, so I wonder what exactly the relationship between bidster.com and bidplaza.it is. A bit more transparency would be appreciated.


do.you.love.me?

Published by ugo on October 12, 2007 in web. 1 Comment

Extensions - .me : Montenegro ready to go live - DomainesInfo: “The local registry has just put up its new website and hopes to start registering .ME domains in the first quarter of next year.

Domaines.Info spoke to the .ME registry’s technical manager, who explained Montenegro’s plans for going live on the Internet, following the ICANN’s board decision earlier this month to delegate .ME to the country’s government.

On top of the main .ME domain, the Montenegrin namespace will have 8 secondary level domains: NET.ME, ORG.ME, CO.ME, GOV.ME, AC.ME, EDU.ME, ITS.ME and PRIV.ME.

The registry is currently setting up the technical infrastructure for .ME and hopes to launch early next year. The extension will be unrestricted and auctions may be held for the more valuable names. “

I’d love (pun intended) to buy the love.me domain when it becomes available, but if the history of Tuvalu’s TLD is any indication, it will cost millions.

(Via Lars.)

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5023

Published by ugo on October 9, 2007 in atom and web. 0 Comments

AtomPub is now officially RFC5023:

The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources. The protocol is based on HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations. The Atom format is documented in the Atom Syndication Format.

LazyWeb: Using client certs with NetNewsWire

Published by ugo on June 26, 2007 in apple and web. 2 Comments

netNewsWireIcon.jpgI’m a fully satisfied user of NetNewsWire (the full, not-lite version), but there is one thing that this fine piece of software cannot do, apparently. I want to subscribe to some feeds that are served by an HTTP server which requires authentication and only accepts client certificates as a means of authentication. So I can subscribe to the feeds using Firefox LiveBookmarks, since I have imported my client identity certificate in Firefox, but I’d really prefer to be able to read those feeds in NNW. Alas, NetNewsWire doesn’t seem to offer any option to import a client certificate, like Firefox does.

A search on Google and on Newsgator’s website did not turn up anything useful, so I’m resorting to the lazy web, in the hope that some kind soul had the same problem and solved it.

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Flickr = Censorship

Published by ugo on May 16, 2007 in photography and web. 3 Comments

Flickr = Censorship

Just when the outrage over the theft of Rebekka Guðleifsdóttir’s photos by Only-Dreeming was beginning to calm down, Yahoo/Flickr finally reacted.You’d expect that they stand by their paying customer, who got her pictures stolen precisely because she decided to use Flickr to showcase her work, enriching the Flickr website in the process and ultimately benefiting Yahoo as a corporation. But no, instead they behaved just like you’d expect a soulless, gutless, dumb corporation to behave: they stood by another corporation, who probably had its lawyers send Flickr a nasty letter, and screwed the individual customer!

They might have later apologized for this, but what’s a private apology worth, especially considering that Rebekka’s original post, with 450+ comments attached to it has been deleted, apparently forever?

I think Flickr should realize that only by protecting, as much as possible, their users’ expectations of copyright enforcement, they can have their community grow beyond amateurs like me, whose pictures nobody would ever think of stealing and reprinting, into the realms of professionals and semi-professionals, like Rebekka. Maybe they aren’t interested in this kind of audience, but while it’s true that 99% of pictures on Flickr are of the users’ cats, it’s probably people like Rebekka, with millions of views on her photostream, that draw interest, attention and traffic.

Digital photography is a revolution, and Flickr is at the forefront of this revolution. They should do whatever is in their means to make it even bigger. This does not mean that they should start scouring the interwebs for evidence of theft, but when such evidence is presented to them (and admitted by the thieves themselves), they shouldn’t just hide it.

As a paying member of Flickr myself, I am going to write them a polite letter, asking them to restore the original picture page with all its comments, and to do a public apology. If you use and love Flickr like I do, you should do the same.

Update: a public apology by Stewart Butterfield has been posted here. I would have preferred a more prominent place and it still looks like in won’t be possible to restore the original picture, but I commend Flickr for admitting they did the wrong thing this time.

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New York to Paris according to Google Maps

Published by ugo on March 30, 2007 in fun and google. 6 Comments

SwimAcrossTheAtlanticOcean.pngI bashed Google Maps before for suggesting ludicrous trips across the Bay of Sidney in order to cross a street, but this is way more funny than annoying.


More geotagging

Published by ugo on March 25, 2007 in google and photography. 7 Comments

Following the lead of Jeremy and Leo, here are my latest geo-tagged photos on Google maps. Not a lot of exotic destinations of late, as you can see.

Now it would be nice if there were a parameter that allowed you to show more than the latest 20 or so pictures. Or show a map for a specific set. There doesn’t seem to be a way to tell Flickr to generate a feed for a set, though it is possible to generate a feed for a tag. So here’s the map of all my photos tagged “umbria”, which is only a subset of all the pictures taken on a recent trip to Umbria.

In the end, using the Yahoo-supplied map on Flickr itself gives more complete results, though probably less amenable to cool mash-ups.

Google + Atom

Published by ugo on March 22, 2007 in atom and google. 0 Comments

atom-logo75px.gifGoogle Data APIs (Beta) Developer’s Guide: “The Google data APIs (’GData’ for short) provide a simple standard protocol for reading and writing data on the web.

GData uses either of two standard XML-based syndication formats: Atom or RSS. It also has a feed-publishing system that consists of the Atom publishing protocol plus some extensions (using Atom’s standard extension model) for handling queries.

Each of the following Google services provides a Google data API:

  • Google Apps Provisioning
  • Google Base
  • Blogger
  • Google Calendar
  • Google Code Search
  • Google Notebook
  • Google Spreadsheets
  • Picasa Web Albums”

As DeWitt Clinton wrote on the atom-protocol mailing list:

What never ceases to amaze me is that APP was applicable in so many cases. A true testament to the power of the protocol.

It’s indeed noteworthy the amount of buy-in and mindshare the Atom Publishing Protocol has gained in such a short time. And it hasn’t even reached RFC status yet.

Travel directions according to Google

Published by ugo on February 15, 2007 in fun and google. 2 Comments

GoogleMapsSydney.pngA couple years ago I made fun of Microsoft for suggesting a trip across most of Northern Europe for going from Haugesund, Norway to Trondheim, Norway. It’s only fair then that I poke fun at Google now for suggesting that you cross Sydney Harbor (going via a toll bridge) if you merely want to go from 200 Sussex Street to 201 Sussex Street, which amounts to basically crossing the street.

Google Embarrassed in Australia | TechCrunch: “Reporters at a Sydney, Australia newspaper discovered an embarrassing flaw in Google’s Map product - Google recommends a 10.4 kilometer trip, across the harbor and back, to go the thirty steps from Google’s Sydney headquarters to a hotel located across the street. The suggested route would also include a AU$3 bridge toll. Any query for driving directions from areas east, south or west of Google’s headquarters will suggest the same detour across the harbor, using a toll tunnel or bridge.

Google is blaming MapData Sciences, the Sydney-based company that supplies the mapping data to Google, for the problem. I imagine MapData is working on a fix rather urgently.”

At least they don’t make you cross half a dozen national boundaries and a couple seas to get there.

Misunderstanding REST

Published by ugo on February 14, 2007 in atom and web. 3 Comments

Dave Winer discusses Yahoo! Pipes and in the process says something so wrong that I don’t even know where to start picking it apart.

In this case, the target is the huge, rich base of RSS feeds, which is designed to work with one kind of aggregator, a River of News, and if you structured Pipes around that — a filtration process for a river, it might bear some immediate fruit, but its built on a different model.

This might be true if you limit yourself to RSS, which is not very useful beyond aggregators. Maybe if you started using Atom instead, you might discover it is suited to a much larger category of applications.

It assumes that each feed can be dealt with as a procedure call, which according to the REST philosophers, it can, but in practice, feeds don’t take parameters, so they’re the least interesting kinds of procedures, like clock.now in UserTalk. Sure there are some verbs that build on that verb, date.month, date.year and date.dayOfWeek, but nowhere near as much as verbs that have rich parameter lists, which are like the gateways that Tim O’Reilly and Jon Udell are so excited about.

Equating feeds to procedures? Is this supposed to be consistent with REST, in Dave’s mind? Reality check: There are only four verbs in REST: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

See XML-RPC for Newbies for background; a Pipes that could do XML-RPC could be interesting, esp because the Metaweblog API is an XML-RPC application, and is widely supported by blogging tools and CMSes.

XML-RPC? Talk about flogging a dead horse.

In the RSS world, and therefore in Pipes, there’s no way to tell if items in two feeds are talking about the same thing. The best you can hope for is keyword serendipity, which all the demos so far do, and those make for unsatisfying demos, because you know you couldn’t deploy a useful app out of the concepts they illustrate. Very much like the early demos for HyperCard, Marimba, and my own Frontier.

Now it’s possible that a company like Yahoo, with its diverse flows of information, and nearly universal support of RSS, could add enough metadata to their feeds to be sure two items in different feeds were talking about the same thing, and then we’d be somewhere interesting.

Once again, if you used Atom, you could rely on every item having a unique identifier, and a universally unique one, being a URI. You could also reasonably expect that two copies of the same item, no matter which feed they were found in, had the same id. Unfortunately, RSS offers no such guarantees.

Looks like Dave is just whining here because Yahoo! Pipes is not like XML-RPC and RSS is too weak for doing anything besides aggregating news. If he had the courage to look beyond what he invented many years ago, he might find something actually useful was invented in the meantime.

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Flash and Firefox to unite

Published by ugo on November 7, 2006 in opensource and web. 0 Comments

Web 2.0 Conference: Flash and Firefox to unite - ProCreative - Macworld UK: “Adobe will contribute source code to the Mozilla Foundation as the two organisations aim to establish a standard scripting language that developers can use to create interactive applications for Flash Player and Firefox.”

I think this has the potential to be seriously cool, and on several aspects:

It’s cool for Mozilla and the Open Source community in general, to have such a powerful and ubiquitous web client platform as Open Source software.

It’s cool for web developers and users alike, in that it paints a future of convergence between Ajax, the HTML DOM and the ActionScript object model.

Of course, Adobe thinks it’s going to be cool for their baseline, as this will allow them to sell more server-side solutions and authoring tools.

This is not cool at all for Microsoft and IE, though.

The standard scripting language that Tamarin will implement in Firefox is ECMAScript 4, now being developed by standards body Ecma International. Sun Microsystems’ JavaScript and Microsoft’s JScript are both based on ECMAScript, which is currently in its third version.

Actually, JavaScript has nothing to do with Sun Microsystems, who own the Java trademark, but was invented at Netscape.

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Yahoo! Bookmarks: where’s the API?

Published by ugo on October 25, 2006 in web. 1 Comment

yahoobookmarkslogo.jpgYahoo Bookmarks Enters 21st Century - TechCrunch: “Until today, Yahoo Bookmarks (which is a separate product from del.icio.us and My Web) stored only the URL, title and comment for a particular bookmark. The new product caches all text on the page, stores a thumbnail view, and allows both categorization (folders) and tagging of each bookmark.”

I’m not a fan of bookmarking services. I’ve been using del.icio.us on and off for a while but I’ve mostly abandoned it. What I think sets the new Yahoo! Bookmarks service apart is the caching of pages. I think the potential for reusability for this service would be infinite, if it had an API. I can see lots of mashup opportunities opening up because of that cache, but until we see an API, I’m not going to bother.

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The Open Source Search Engine

Published by ugo on October 24, 2006 in google and opensource. 2 Comments

google_coop_xsm.gifEureka! Your own search engine has landed!: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily build a search engine on your blog or website tailored to the topics and areas you know and love the most? You’re not alone if you’d like that — we’ve heard from partners large and small, and users across the web who want access to the Google search platform, and want to customize and make it their own.”

Now, this is fucking cool (yes, I dropped the F-bomb too, Tim)! I’ve been wanting this for ages, mostly to build a search engine for all matters Open Source to go with The Open Source Zone. Now in just about five minutes I was able to set up a very basic search engine and prime it with just a handful of sites. I will be adding more sites in the future, but right now all visitors can have a look here (what’s up with that hideous URL? Can’t we have a simpler one?) and click on the Volunteer to contribute to this search engine link to add more sites to include in the search (you need a Google account for this though; is this part of Google’s evil plan to collect all of our lives online? ;) )

Next step will be integrating the custom search site into The Open Source Zone (which badly needs reviving, I know), maybe using the Ajax API.

Picture courtesy of Ted Leung.

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Get Democracy

Published by ugo on October 20, 2006 in opensource and web. 0 Comments

Democracy - Internet TV Platform - Free and Open Source: “Stop squinting at tiny web video. Instead, download and watch all the best internet TV shows in one powerful application: any video RSS feed, video podcast, video blog, or BitTorrent file. Fullscreen, high resolution, 100% free and open source. New channels arrive daily in the built-in Channel Guide.”

democracy_logo.gif

Democracy is one cool app. The latest version (0.9.1) is wads better than the previous one, and already much better than iTunes’ video section. The fact that it now supports BitTorrent and Flash Video is a big plus: I can now download and watch the Technology Evangelist videos in all their full-screen, 480p glory from the same application!.

Add to this that it is available for OS X, Windows and Linux, it is free and Open Source. What more can you ask for?

Well, actually it could benefit from some UI improvements. For instance, a history function would be welcome, and it should remember the video you were playing and the position you were at, when you move around, so that you can go back and resume playing. As it is now, when you click on a channel, playing stops and you have no way to go back there.

We can be confident that these UI issues will be fixed before the 1.0 release, though. You can hear Nicholas Reville say that most of the work towards their first release is going into UI polish in this interview.

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Security at the Google Blog

Published by ugo on October 9, 2006 in google. 0 Comments

Heather Adkins, Security Team, Google: “Maintaining the trust of our users and ensuring a positive experience using our products and services is paramount to our ability to accomplish our mission. As a result, Google takes security very seriously and designs all of its services and applications to protect your privacy and data security.”

Compare the above with:

Mike Arrington, TechCrunch: “So the real story here is that the Google blog has been hacked. This is a bit of an embarrassment, although it is not nearly as bad as when Google deleted the blog accidentally in March of this year.”

Alright, it might happen to anyone. It happened to me and will probably happen again, but still…

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How much does code suck?

Published by ugo on October 5, 2006 in google and opensource. 2 Comments

codesearch_logo_sm.gifAbout 70,600 times, according to Google Code Search, the latest product of the fertile Google Labs.

But it only sucks 6,511 times, according to Krugle, and a meager 1,910 times according to Koders.

I think Krugle and Koders are going to face some tough competition. Is this a signal to all the companies that are offering vertical search products: “Be warned, your business might be eaten by Google.”?

And now, for another silly statistic, if you were looking for a confirmation that Open Source developers are really sloppy, you can find about 327,000 instances of the string “FIXME” in comments, even limiting ourselves to languages that have a comment syntax like the one of C, C++, Java, etc.

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