Present Perfect

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when it's the weekend and when I want to relax, and schedules diseases breaking out accordingly. I'd feel guilty about getting ill on working days, I'm sure.

We had a BBQ planned on Sunday with our old sport club - our yearly meeting. A simple flu wouldn't stop me from having it, even though we took over organizing it from the original instigator (and used Doodle to do so - do yourself a favor and use it every time you're planning something with friends to avoid fifteen thousand mails going "I can't on that date, how about that date" - I wish I had thought of that site)

BBQ was excellent, save for the fact that the ten-year-old-but-still-in-a-box-deluxe-barbecook was missing a whole bag of nuts and bolts. Peter to the rescue by going to the hardware store and getting some basics to at least allow us to have the BBQ itself working. And affected as I was by the flu apparently I didn't bring home charcoal but vineyard branches - not a good fit for the barbecook.

But all was well after a short wait and the meat was excellent, as was the company. And we even got some sports done.

Today being San Joan in Barcelona - my least favourite holiday, 6 year old kids running around at night shooting off fireworks without regards for their own or my life - I decided to stay home this week. I'm happy I decided to stay here because it's no fun travelling while ill. This also allows me to focus on setting up our new virtualized development platform at work, because we're working on a near-seamless migration from our old platform code to the new version. Flipping the big red switch just isn't a responsible way of migrating customers anymore.

Kristien took advantage of me staying to work from home this week and went out yesterday to get a new kitten. His name's Tonie (staying with the cat meme we started with Lunya), he's mostly black but with white paws, a white jaw, and a bit of white across his face. As far as kittens go, this is one of the more active I've seen - up and about and trying to break free from his temporary "get-used-to-a-new-place" area in two hours. Usually a kitten takes about a day hiding behind some couch in a corner to adjust. Also, this kitten hardly made a peep while Kristien drove him home - an hour car ride and only six meows. Lunya would wail like a baby the whole drive.

Anyway, I'm sure you all know kittens are cute and heartbreaking. This one's up and about and alternating between discovering this new place and resting on my lap.

In the end I've decided not to go to GUADEC this year, and go to Europython instead. It's not really a very calculated or well-thought out decision - I was hung up on deciding ever since I realized they were on at the same time. I probably would have booked for both months ago if they had been separate.

It's not that I don't want to go to Istanbul - I do, but holy shit, is it expensive - and it's not that I don't want to see all my GNOME friends again. I'm interested in the debate our dear rabble rouser has started, though I doubt people will get anywhere on that.

Maybe it's simply fatigue - I have to agree with some people that there isn't that much variety compared to other years looking at the schedule. Possibly it's also the fact that I haven't contributed much of anything at all to GNOME over the last year. I'm sure that's largely due to my focus having changed a lot. My involvement in GStreamer as well has waned over the last year, for various reasons I'll save for a possible other post.

Europython was fun last year, it's nice to see a different community interact once in a while. Breaks the entrenchment one gets into. It's also more work-related - we're looking for people with Python skills, so it makes more sense to go to Europython.

In the end, it wasn't a single thing that made me decide, it's really just a flip of a coin decision, and I'm sure I'll regret it somewhere down the line. Chosing is losing.

So, with my birthday coming up (and now having decided to have it in Vilnius) I've cleaned up my Amazon wish lists and ordered myself some goodies off of it already. Which leads me to wonder two things related to Amazon.

First of all, why does Amazon even *have* different frontend sites for different regions ? And why do these sites not interact in any way at all ? Every link on the web to an amazon item are always to the US version, so I always end up having a US wish list, though it is weird to order stuff from the US if it's also available on any of their regional sites.

Which leads me to point two - how is it still possible that ordering the same stuff from the US just comes out huge chunks cheaper than ordering it from the .uk or .fr sites ? And that's even when I choose priority air shipping. Shouldn't it be a hell of a lot cheaper to ship from their European warehouses ? Is this just the weak dollar ? Should I delete my UK wish list entirely anyway (which I only started for DVD's because of region coding and PAL vs NTSC) ?

Anyway, enough influenced posting for today. Time to do some non-work work.

Looks like I caught part of the flu my Barcelonan flat mate was having. It started - as these things usually do - on Friday evening. My psyche knows when...

With the right amount of suspension of disbelief, Metal Gear Solid 4 is - again - totally awesome.

I finished the first section, and the game is telling me "It's past 1:00 AM, isn't it time to take a break ?"

This game, as usual, nails all the details - though the dialogue is still annoyingly out of flow. But it didn't take me long to invest in my favourite shooting weapon - a sniper rifle with a laser scope.

With the right amount of suspension of disbelief, Metal Gear Solid 4 is - again - totally awesome. I finished the first section, and the game is telling me "It's...

I remember being really enthusiastic about OpenID when I first learnt about it. I remember trying it out and, as many, being disappointed at the practical use (nobody was supporting it) but hopeful about the idea. I tried it out a bunch of times later, but today I'm still not really using it. I saw an excellent presentation by Simon Willison at Europython last year, but I'm still not using it.

And the reason, at least for the past year, is that I do not know whether the basic model is secure or not. I've read lots of pro and con posts, and it's gone so technical I don't know who to trust.

If I think about it logically myself, I'd say that I don't see the difference between the OpenID phishing scenario and the Paypal/bank phishing scenario:

• Some site uses OpenID and I want to log in
• said site redirects me instead to a fake site, that looks the same as my real site (either because I use a popular one, or because it actually connects to my real site and presents the same page)
• Any authentication information I enter on this phishing site is thus known to the phisher

I seem to extract from all I've read before that there is a general consensus that this is a real threat, and that OpenID people feel this is not the problem they should be solving - that it is up to OpenID providers to solve this.

But if I were to put online a website that uses OpenID and handwaves phishing problems away to the providers, while simultaneously allowing all OpenID providers, I'd feel bad about teaching my users that it's fine to follow OpenID links and type in passwords.

So, homework for today - can someone tell me in simple terms:

1. if there is something wrong with my simple interpretation of the phishing problem, or if it is in fact real ?
2. What I should be doing if I were to create a website that wants to use OpenID, and I actually care about my users ?

Too much of all of this discussion around OpenID focuses around whether or not it's OpenID's job to solve this problem, whether it is insecure, whether it promotes phishing, and so on. But none of the discussion focuses on what you should actually *do* when you care about making it easy for people to use your site while keeping security good enough.

Someone smart on the topic care to tell me what I should be doing as a website maker, and as a potential OpenID user on other websites ?

I remember being really enthusiastic about OpenID when I first learnt about it. I remember trying it out and, as many, being disappointed at the practical use (nobody was supporting...

I don't ask enough programming questions, so here goes one.

I have a glade file with a vtable with 3 rows, and each row contains another table, with 2 columns and a bunch of rows. It shows key-value pairs. I've put them in a table so that I can hide table #2 or table #3 in certain conditions.

Now, the second column of each of these tables is not aligned with the other second columns of these tables. Instead, I would like to follow the HIG and "Minimize the number of alignment points in your window" the way is done in this example with "General" and "Action" lining up, or the top 4 dropdown/entry boxes and the icon entry box.

Anyone know how to do this while still allowing me to have 3 separate tables to group my key/values ?

Update: somehow I forgot about GtkSizeGroup (shows me right for hacking at 7 in the morning) and people put me in my place. So, it doesn't look like glade-2 supports this. Anyone know why ? Do I need to write code to read my glade file and put each label in the size group ?

I don't ask enough programming questions, so here goes one. I have a glade file with a vtable with 3 rows, and each row contains another table, with 2 columns...

Once in a while I add a new comic of sorts to my BlogLines. It has the huge (dis)advantage of having a big backlog of fun stuff to read through - case in point, a letter to Apple. I'm lucky my lack of drunkenness in general has saved me from being able to relate to this particular post.

Update: or this. Joey Cameau is going to be my new hero.

Update 2: or this one, a more effective anti-RIAA post than anything I've ever seen. 3 in a row - I have to stop reading.

Once in a while I add a new comic of sorts to my BlogLines. It has the huge (dis)advantage of having a big backlog of fun stuff to read through...