Month: February 2005

Distributed authentication

Today I realized that I am still not registered at Spread Firefox. That is a shock and shame. I immideately went there and got myself an account and a sweet looking button on the bottom of the right panel. I am now an official promoter of Mozilla Firefox. Although I had probably converted a billion times more people by just talking to them than by placing a button on this site, but anyway…

While creating an account, I read about distributed authentication. The “billion sites – billion accounts” problem is old with the web and there were several alternatives to solve it. Microsoft Passport was the most famous, but I think its as dead as Elvis these days. I’ve never heard of Drupel way of solving the problem, so I thought maybe I just post a link so you guys get the idea about it too.

In short: Drupel is an open source CMS, which among other things, supports communications between installed instances for username/password verification. So, basically, one person can get a single account at any Drupel-based website and than use this account to login to any other Druperl-based website. Sweet!

Luckily or unluckily (which is a total other question) not all sites are Drupel-based. That doesn’t mean that everyone else is out of the game. Since the system is open sourced, other sites can be made to suppor the protocol. The protocol is, by the way, XML-RPC, HTTP POST, or SOAP based as mentioned on one of the sites above.

Overall, I find it to be an excellent idea. Hopefully it will gain some weight in the near future, so that I could use a single account on most of the websites out there.

Promoting Mozilla Firefox

This site has a whole lot of original promotional graphics for Mozilla Firefox. You can find anything there – wallpapers, avatars, comics, banners, animated GIFs, buttons, etc. Pay attention to those little digits on the bottom of the listing pages – these are page switchers. Yes, many categories have several pages filled with images. These all are absolutely and totally amazing!

My mobile is disconnected

I was very surprised to find out that outgoing calls from my mobile stopped working from today’s morning. I thought that maybe CYTA has a problem again or something. Usually, when they disconnect the phone for unset bills, they play a message saying so every time the call is attempted. I was just getting a busy signal and call dropped.

I waited half a day, moved around between cells, but still nothing. I than asked a couple of people if they had the same problem. Noone of them did. And indeed my wife’s mobile worked properly. So I moved my SIM card to her phone and tried calling. Nope. Didn’t work. I then called CYTA (fault reports number is 8000-0197, not 197 as they advertise) and they told me that the phone was disconnected because of unset bills.

That got me totally confused since my phone bill is payed via standing order by the bank. Automatically. I checked my account balance and sure enough I had funds available. So I proceeded calling the bank and asking them if the standing order had expired or something like that. In the end, it turned out be my mistake – I had a huge withdrawal which practically nullified my account until the next incoming money transfer two days ago. And, in complience with Muphy’s law, my phone bill came exactly in that time. No money – no bills paid – no phone services.

I’ll have to pass by the CYTA’s office with some cash tomorrow morning and pay it using the old way. I guess there will be a whole bunch of people like myself. Heh.