Nearly a month since my last post, but I couldn’t think of a better topic than this one. OpenID has slowly been gaining ground, rightfully so given that every site from Facebook/MySpace/Twitter/Google/etc have been pushing their unified log in systems. It’s troubling at best, given the security history of some of these sites, and the sneakiness of web code these days. Why? Well, for starters my old school ways kick in and I flat out prefer to know what site has me logged in, and as ‘who’! Some people prefer to hide online, and I certainly lurk appropriately due to my own introverted ways, but there are times where being “me” is important (namely in a professional career standpoint).
Gina Trapani from Lifehacker/Smarterware has posted a wonderful little 2-line HTML tip (via Stack Overflow) to get OpenID working on your very own domain. It’s slick, easy and leverages Google Profiles (as well as other ID proxy type sites).
I also agree with her statement about tending to her online identity. I have found myself fending off various domain & identity predators. My biggest issue was a chap, who having my same name, actually tried to apply for something using a paper I wrote (and had published briefly online some years back). Imagine my surprise when I get a follow up interview call for a job I never applied for. Hilarity ensued. Cute. Ben C’s stealin’ my identity? It’s more likely than you think!
Given that there’s lots of people out there who share the same name, this little tip can help keep your personal identity in check. It’s like I wrote the evil-Ben: it isn’t that I frown upon the sharing of a similar name, because that would be silly in a world of 6.6 billion people, it’s the fact he was impersonating my credentials for a job that concerned me much.
Even without your own domain, being aware of OpenID and how these “top level sites” leverage their own code for logging in to sites, you’ll appreciate just how crazy the web is getting.
After a busy last month or so, I’ve been stuck on how best to address Pushing Ice. It’s a fantastic story, and probably one of the most important novels for Reynolds — at least in my opinion, since he seems to have improved upon some areas that were quite glaring from his Revelation Space series. Don’t get me wrong, I think he’s brilliant at hard science fiction space opera, if not one of the best. Yet as any writer will say, the more you write, the better you get. Pushing Ice definitely reinforced that statement.
Reynolds, once again, stuffs his writing with brutally efficient and wonderfully complex descriptions. For some it’s probably seen as abrasive writing, but then what good novel doesn’t require you to take that little extra time. I read Pushing Ice in about four-and-a-half hours, with nearly all of it on a plane. Perhaps it was the gentle lull of the engines, and the noise cancellation routines chugging away in my headphones, but I found myself transfixed on the story. The pace he set maintained itself thoughtfully, unlike previous novels that were oddly paced, with areas receiving necessary focus as needed.
The characters were great, and with dashes of humour and some wonderful scenes of intense ‘hardcore space opera.’ The human quotient is never far, especially given the sheer vastness of the story. His mind-bending revelations hit the reader with a serious blow, especially when it comes to the scale of what he is presenting (though I will leave it up to you to determine whether that scale is in in terms of physical space or, perhaps, time). I did catch myself thinking upon Clarke’s 2001 series, with hints of Rama tossed in along side H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine, but that’s neither here nor there. Comparisons exist for every novel, and for Pushing Ice to be rubbing shoulders with some Sci-Fi classics, I think that speaks highly of how far Reynolds has come.
Overall it was an enjoyable read, smooth comes to mind, much like the flight when I read this book.
Images… in MY QR Code? It’s more likely than you think.
April 22, 2010This is a brilliant example of how versatile this medium is. The image above will take you back to this site. How is this capable? Well, from some incredibly awesome programming. Dr. Manabu Hagiwara, a mathematician at the Japanese Research Center for Information Security (RCIS) has released a free downloadable QR Code generator called QR-JAM [...]