Building simplicidade.org: notes, projects, and occasional rants

Notes

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Follow-up to Authenticate Anywhere

Yesterday, Joel commented on my authenticate anywhere post, talking about the security and privacy problems with the Google authentication in Zooomr. He is right, of course. Zooomr asks you for your login and password. Of you GMail account. And that's not good. This is of course, because GMail was never designed to be an authentication mechanism, and people are abusing it. You could do the same with almost any ISP that offers POP3, for example, using that service to check credentials.

Tip: show process sorted by RSS

Several times I needed a way to quickly see which process are using the most memory on a Linux system. After reading a bit of the man page and with a tip from the Apache performance article I was reading, I settled for this: ps ax -yl --sort:rss (BSD syntax) ps -eyl --sort:rss (standard syntax) There you go. Update: corrected the command, thanks to Daniel Fonseca. I messed up BSD syntax (which I prefer) with standard syntax.

Authenticate anyware

There is new Flickr-type site making the beta rounds, called Zooomr. I found it via Dystopics review. I normally could care less about a new photo-site, but there is one feature that I'm just crazy about: distributed authentication. See the screenshot from their login page (taken from the above review): You can use Level9, OpenID, LiveJournal, Google and Meetro. OpenID is the cool one, for me, because it also enables you to use your Typekey identity for logging in.

Campfire

Campfire is coming along and the first screen-shoot and screen-cast seem great. They have been conducting load testing on their service this last few weeks, and it seems that yesterday they did the last one before launch. It seems another winner after Basecamp and Backpackit, very nice, and well deserved. Technorati Tags: 37signals, campfire

We own you

Jeremy was giving us a heads up about 2006 being the year of the privacy problems for search engines. And a couple of posts down, we see that the latest Google Desktop makes it very easy to send your documents (Word, PDF, you know, your personal documents) to the Google server for indexing... It's a beautiful technical achievement and perfectly possible with their technology, but the privacy implications are huge, as you can imagine.

Kudos to the Safari team

It's nice to see the efforts of the team of non-Apple WebKit developers rewarded. As a thank you, we are giving MacBook Pro computers to twelve of our top contributors. We’ve also invited five of them to attend Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference 2006 “on Apple’s dime”. Kudos to the all team! Technorati Tags: apple, webkit, safari

Newton

The TV here in Portugal is now showing a classic, Steven Seagal Under Siege 2: Dark Territory. A good movie.... Not. Well, at least Seagal has a Newton :). Technorati Tags: apple, newton

iTunes Estimator

I like Dashboard widgets. I like the looks, I like some of them for their functionality, but mostly I like them because the poetic way they burn my CPU. Anyway, If I had access to the US iTunes Music Store, I would be running this one, iTunes Estimator. Heck, I'll fess up: I'm running it anyway to see how accurate will he be. Thanks go to the TUAW guys for this waste of my CPU.

Google Cookie authentication

I found this article interesting, at least for the technical details: The Mysteries of X-GOOGLE-TOKEN and why it matters. On a related note, if you needed a simple single sign on system to deploy in a controlled environment, that could be used with PHP and Perl sites, and with Apache+mod_(perl|php) or lighttpd+fastcgi.... Probably no such beast. I'll see if OpenID covers what I need. Yes, it's not a SSO system, but maybe it's a good base to build on.

Is it just me or rsync is crazy?

Is it just me or rsync include/exclude patters are crazy?? I want a simple thing: specify in the server rsyncd.conf file that we only want to export 3 directories from a specific path. After battling for 1 hour with this, I settled on this configuration file. use chroot = yes read only = yes uid = nobody gid = nobody [files] path = /my/files/ comment = my important files filter = + /dir1 + dir1/** + /dir2 + dir2/** + /dir3 + dir3/** - * Notice the pattern?