Jazz all the way

Usually, when I work I need absolute silence. Especially when I write code. Any sound disturbs me. Those which have to do with human voices (phone calls, talks, music) are the most harmful. I never turn the music on or anything else when I program. I also prefer to leave all my development tasks for my night shifts.

But toda I found out that I can actually listen to music while writing code. I was looking for some new radio stations at Shoutcast to add to my music player and stumbled across some Jazz stations. I decided to try one before adding it to the list. I wasn’t yet programming, so it was OK to liste to it for some time.

It was only in the morning, 8 hours later that I noticed that I’ve programmed and did everything I had to do and never switched off the Jazz music. It didn’t disturb me even one bit. In fact I have a suspecion that it actually helped me. I will be repeating the experiment, but until than I’m surprised anyway…

The Grand Downtime

As you all had probably noticed the server was down for a looong time – about 18 hours. It all started as minor hardware upgrade, that didn’t went right, that was turned into major software upgrade. The server is currently running Fedora Linux Core 4. Not everything is fixed and reconfigured, so, please stay with me for the time being. I am trying to fix everything as fast as I can. Yes, that includes your hosted websites.

I will let you know when I’m done so that you could check if everything is back to normal. I will also provide some more details about what went wrong and how I worked around it.

So long for now…

What should I do?

Many people were asking me about Delicious recently. Some of these people are computer newbies, but others are highly trained IT professionals. I decided to write a small post about Delicious, that would explain briefly what it is and why would one want to use it. It seems that I’ve got my inspiration all right and after two hours that I haven’t noticed, I was looking at a rather large piece (about 10 KBytes, 1600+ lines) of text. And it still wasn’t finished.

While writing it, I also wanted to add few lines about flickr and Technorati. I haven’t done so yet, because I understand that it will blow the original article even more.

Now I am thinking about what should I do with all of that. I don’t want to pos the monster 10K thing as most people will get bored even scrolling through it. But I haven’t found a way to split it effectively yet. Probably I should add everything I want, reorganize and than split it into a series of articles. Maybe it will come out easier.

What should I do?

OpenID – free, open, and decentralized identity system

It has been some time since I was thinking that logging into all those blogs to leave a comment is lame. I guess this idea visits heads of many people out there. During the last couple of days I added few more blogs on my blogroll and started to think more about this problem.

My thinking was in the direction of some WordPress service. At least in the beginning. Something along the lines of Blogs Of The Day. Some services, say Blog Passport or something like that, that could be used by all those WordPress intallations to authenticate visitors. Basically, the even the same database table from WordPress could be used as a base. A person would login to at Blog Passport and than visit any WordPress installation and at any site that would support the scheme he would appear as logged in user.

But all I did was thinking. I didn’t even investigate if there are any existing solutions. The good thing is that I didn’t write any code. Because today I stumbled upon something that would be acceptable – OpenID. I first saw it at LiveJournal.com. It already supports it.

The idea of an OpenID is simple. It is even simplier that what I was thinking. It is a distributed system that authenticates against a URL. You can be logged in at any website that supports OpenID and than any other site that supports OpenID would work for you . The description of the process, the protocol, and the development status are all at the project’s website.

The good things about OpenID so far are:

  • free and open and intends to stay this way.
  • decentralized
  • supported by some big sites (LiveJournal.com)

WordPress plugin is in the works. I hope that this project will get some attention and that we will finally have one annoying problem solved. Cheers!