OpenID is an open standard for a distributed system that allows users to authenticate with a single identifier on sites across the internet. For a while now, OpenID has promised to become the tool that lets internet users login to all sites using a single account, and recently, with many of the big web comapnies (Google, AOL, Yahoo, MyOpenID) becoming OpenID providers, and many smaller sites starting to support OpenID authentication, OpenID is coming into its own. Yes, its still fragmented, yes there’s many sites that still don’t use it, but things are getting better, and for me, there’s enough value in it now, that I want to use my blog as my OpenID for my internet persona.
I have a couple unique requirements for what I’m trying to do, so let me set that up first. I have a public online persona that I use for this blog and other sites online related to running and technology. I have no illusions of privacy. I am sure anyone who is determined enough can find out plenty of personal information from my activity, but in general, most people that come to this site are looking for content about the information I post. I would rather not broadcast my personal information to all those people so I try and keep my public online accounts separate from my personal ones.
That being said, its a pain to manage multiple logins and passwords, log in and out of sites, and so on. OpenID can be really useful with this task, and that’s what I’m trying to do: use my WordPress blog at http://www.hackrunner.com as my digital identity for public web activity and convert as many accounts over to it as possible. BUT, I don’t always want to remember a second password for my public persona, so I’d still like to be able to login with my private personal OpenID, without broadcasting it to the world.
So here are my requirements:
Set up my blog as an OpenID provider.
When authenticating at my blog, be able to login using OpenID authentication from another provider (i.e the OpenID I use for my personal activity).
I don’t necessarily want to do OpenID delegation here, since it will publicly broadcast my other OpenID.
Be able to manage my user account settings on my blog, so I can switch between other OpenID providers I use to authenticate.
This gives me portability in the future if I decide to switch OpenID providers.
As usual, WordPress already has all the tools I need available in its extensive plugin library. Here are the steps I followed to get this up and running. (more…)
You may have seen a few commercials for it recently, but next week, from Feb. 14- Feb. 16, Jeopardy! will be airing a face-off pitting all-time greats Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter against a research computer built by IBM called Watson. I make no claim to be an expert, but from some brief exposure in college, I have a general feel for how hard it is for computers to perform natural language processing just to understand the human language. IBM is taking this one step farther by pairing advanced language processing with search algorithms to try and create the ultimate Jeopardy! champion. From some of the videos I’ve seen online, it’s pretty impressive, and the showdown next week should be fairly entertaining.
The Wall Street Journal has a good article giving a very simple explanation of how Watson actually works, and the forthcoming book will likely provide even more details on the story of Watson. I’ll be tuning into Jeopardy! next week to see how things go. My personal prediction is that Brad Rutter will take the win, but both Ken and Watson will put in good showings. Watson’s Achilles heel will likely be a few botched categories and questions that put him in hole, but its exciting to see how much progress IBM has made with technologies like these by taking up the IBM Jeopardy! challenge.
A practice round of Watson playing is available on YouTube and embedded below.
At lunch the other day, the conversation turned to Apple, and one of my co-workers posed the question, “Why hasn’t Apple released a video game system yet?” At the time, I was playing Angry Birds on another co-workers iPhone, and I waved the iPhone at him and responded “They have.” He of course responded that it isn’t really what he meant, but I thought a bit more about what Apple has done with its gaming strategy up till now, and they are actually positioned surprisingly well to pull in a huge chunk of the video game market over the next few years.
Before I dive into the details, most of my argument is based on Clayton Christensen’s ideas around disruptive innovation and low-end disruption. In a nutshell, Christensen theorizes that most disruptive innovation occurs when established firms neglect certain market segments because they offer too low of a margin to entice the incumbents. Innovators enter the low-end segments and the incumbents do not react, but overtime, the entrants overshoot the needs of the low-end markets and begin to pick up additional market segments. Left unchecked, the entrants eventually overtake the market, driving the incumbents out completely. Its a pattern that has repeated itself throughout history, and Apple may be repeating it again with the growing library of games it distributes on the App Store. (more…)
It’s been a while since I’ve had to set up a new SVN repository on my home network, so now that its time, I figured I write a quick post documenting the steps along the way.
For those that may be unfamiliar with it, SVN is a commonly used version control system. It allows users to manage the changes to source code over time so that a user can quickly restore old versions, analyze change sets, and control how change sets are applied to a set of source code. SVN is likely the de facto open source centralized version control system. It grew up from the older CVS project, but it should be noted that it is a centralized version control system. There a number of distributed version control systems out there such as git, Mercurial, and Bazaar, which are gaining adoption very quickly and provide a number of benefits for projects with many users. For my home use, I’m the only user, and I’m familiar with the ins an outs of SVN, so I’ve stuck with it.
SVN is also one of the most well documented open source projects out there, primarily because of the excellent work that goes into the SVN Book. The online content is freely available, and its essentially the same content that is published in the O’Reilly reference. It is update often and is very comprehensive. If you have any questions about SVN, I’d start there.
Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, on to the content. I want to set up an SVN Repository for a new project I’m working on. There are a number of ways in which you can choose to organize SVN, but I generally follow the 1 project per repo model. I use Apache and WebDav to connect to my SVN repos so that I can access them directly over http. Assuming you already have SVN and Apache installed, there are really three quick parts to the setup. Create the SVN Repo, Configure the WebDav connection, and Setup the SVN Repo.
Create the SVN Repo
To create the svn repo, you’ll make use of the svnadmin command line tool. It provides a number of SVN mainteance functions including the create repository functionality. I usually create the repository as root, and then after it is created update the permissions so that the web user is the owner and the group is the SVN group. This allows both Apache and SVN processes access to the files. The commands needed to set this up are below.
#create the new SVN repo
sudo svnadmin create /storage/svn/myNewRepo/
#change permissions on the new repo so that Apache and SVN can access it
sudo chown -R www-data.svn /storage/svn/myNewRepo/
Configure the WebDav Connection
Creating the WebDav interface is also just as easy. You’ll create a simple Location entry in your Apache configuration which defines the parameters needed for users and the SVN connection. For me, I put the configuration in the default website on my SVN server (on Ubuntu its /etc/apache2/sites-available/default), and I use the Apache AuthUserFile to control users of the repo. I have set up user accounts for other repos, so I’m just going to hook into the existing file.
The location information in my Apache file is shown below. I add it directly the default VirtualHost listing for the server.
From there, its just a quick Apache restart with sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and then you should be able to access the repository over HTTP in your browser by going /svn/myNewRepo on your server (i.e. http://server.my.home/svn/myNewRepo). You should see a simple page listing the repository information, version 0 as the version number, and an empty directory since we haven’t added any content yet.
Setup the SVN Repo
Your svn repository is now ready to use. Most repositories follow the general pattern of a trunk/branches/tags structure, so to make sure things are working, I’m going to create those directories using the svn command line client. Thereare a number of ways to do this, but I’m just going to create one directory at a time directly on the server. The commands look like this.
svn mkdir http://server.my.home/svn/myNewRepo/trunk --message "Creating the basic SVN structure for the project"
svn mkdir http://server.my.home/svn/myNewRepo/branches --message "Creating the basic SVN structure for the project"
svn mkdir http://server.my.home/svn/myNewRepo/tags --message "Creating the basic SVN structure for the project"
And that is all that’s needed. You can verify that it worked by going to the svn repo’s web address again and verifying that the list of folders has updated. Typically you would then check out the SVN trunk and then start checking in your code.
I’ve been toying around with some small ideas for websites, and I’ve been looking for some straightforward frameworks that would allow me to quickly prototype a site that could still be used, at least for moderate levels of traffic, in a production environment. I decided to check out Django, a Python based web framework that supports a lot of out-of-the-box functionality and is easily extensible.
This post outlines the steps I took to install Django on test web server, which is currently running Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat).
Overview
As is often the case, I like to configure my test system so that it is as close as possible to the production environment I eventually deploy to. In many cases, that means deviating from Ubuntu’s distribution repositories and installing some packages from source. In the case of Django, there is an appliance version of Ubuntu that supports Django, but nothing official in the repositories. So as usual, I’m back to installing my own version. Before I started, I laid out a few of the requirements I would like to achieve.
Use the latest stable version of Django (1.2.3)
Install Django in a shared location, but Django sites should be independent.
Each Django site should be in its own Apache VirtualHost, so as not to disturb the other sites I have running on my test server.
Each Django site should be easily maintained in source control and should not include any major artifacts from the Django library. This will make the application portable, and will be helpful when I move it to other servers, such as production.
I based most of my work on an article on jeffbaier.com, but made some adjustments along the way to suit my needs, so I’m posting my steps for anyone else that might be following the same path. (more…)
In a previous post, I covered creating a simple WordPress theme, which forms the basis for the theme I use on this site. That theme creation guide covered only the very basics of setting up a WordPress theme. I’ve since upgraded to WordPress 3.0 which introduces a number of new features including Dynamic Menus. In this post, I’ll cover taking advantage of the dynamic menus api, as well as “widgetizing” my theme, which allows me to configure which widgets will show up on sidebars in my site.
My updated theme is available below for reference.
My backup system(s) for my WordPress blog have been running for well over a week now, and the upgrade notice in WordPress finally got the better of me. I went ahead and took the plunge, running the automated upgrade to WordPress 3.0.
The upgrade was easier than can be expected. One click to start the upgrade, and a few more to confirm that I REALLY wanted to upgrade, and then the process was underway. Grand total, I think it took me maybe a minute and a half.
Everything seems stable (I did try it out first on my home test machine) so far. I’m not taking advantage of any of the new features yet, other than the improved interface. Pretty soon, I’ll update my WordPress theme to take advantage of the new dynamic menu API as well as catching up with older feature sets by widgetizing my theme. Further down the road, I may look into some custom post types, especially for putting together race reports and recaps. Expects some new posts sometime soon detailing how I rolled those feature sets into my theme.
The other big feature in WordPress 3.0 is the MU multi-user setup, where multiple blogs can be run from one installation. I don’t have a huge need for that these days, but it’s a great accomplishment that WordPress now has that in the core.
Other than that, its just business as usual here. Anyone reading the blog really shouldn’t see any changes, but WordPress 3.0 does look like a solid, polished release, and it looks like it’ll be a solid platform for the WordPress team to continue improving their app. I’ll leave you with WordPress.org’s video detailing the new features in WordPress 3.0.
WordPress 3.0 is out and seems to be picking up quite a few downloads. I’m about ready to take the plunge, but up till now, I’ve neglected the backup side of my site, so now seems like as good a time as any to get an automated backup tool running. It’ll give me a little piece of mind when I perform the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 and will give me a frequent snapshot of the site should I ever need to restore it for other reasons (moving hosting providers, recovering from a site attack, etc.)
I’ve seen quite a few ways that one can backup their WordPress site, and specifically, I’ve decided to implement two methods. The first will be a purely command-line method using Linux/Unix shell scripts that will copy backups of the site down to my home machine from my hosting provider. For my second approach, I’ll use one of the WordPress Backup Plugins to store my backups on an internet based storage provider. (more…)
In my previous post, I got the latest version of WordPress up and running on one of my home test servers. So what was the point of that whole ordeal? To set up a sandbox where I could try out WordPress customizations and features without impacting my live site. Once I had my test WordPress up and running, the first thing I tried out was creating my own custom theme.
In this post, I’ll run through the high level steps I went through to get the basics of this site up and running, including detailed code snippets along the way. I’m assuming the reader has some familiarity with XHTML and CSS, so I won’t dive too deep into the details; there are plenty of tutorials and documentation out on the web for that.
If you’d like to look at my final theme as reference while reading through this post, you can download a snapshot below.
I will be posting a series of articles on my experience with getting up and running with WordPress. In this post, I’ll outline the steps I went through to get WordPress up and running on my Ubuntu Web Server, but first a bit of background about why I’d even want to do this.
Background
I’m setting up a blog to document some of my interests and various activities I’m involved in (you may have already guessed that since you’re already reading my blog). I have a hosting provider that allows me to setup and use WordPress fairly easily via a simple cPanel installation. Setup was pretty much a breeze and I was up and running with WordPress 2.9.2 in less than a minute or so.
One of the things I’ve always liked to have though is a sandbox environment. I’ve got a home network that consists of various salvaged and cobbled together machines, most of which run Ubuntu’s server distribution, and one of them is a “web server” set aside just for this type of thing.
OpenID is an open standard for a distributed system that allows users to authenticate with a single identifier on sites across the internet. For a while now, OpenID has promised to become the tool that lets internet users login to all sites using a single account, and recently, with many of the big web comapnies (Google, AOL, Yahoo, MyOpenID) becoming OpenID providers, and many smaller sites starting to support OpenID authentication, OpenID is coming into its own. Yes, its still fragmented, yes there’s many sites that still don’t use it, but things are getting better, and for me, there’s enough value in it now, that I want to use my blog as my OpenID for my internet persona.
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