Things to like about openSUSE 10.3

It works well out of the box. Things it doesn’t do wrong I didn’t need to get round the GRUB bug since SUSE treats PATA and SATA disks as pseudo SCSI disks and nothing gets confused when rebooting. It didn’t kill my graphics card with a buggy NV driver. My Soundblaster Live card works correctly with digital output and everything. My old, serial connected, Wacom graphics tablet just works. Once installed, Compiz Fusion just works.

Distributions December 2007

Linux is a very fast moving landscape so I tend to do a major update of my systems once or twice a year. Although I moved over to Linux at the start of 2007, I decided to do another move in December as my main installation was getting rather tatty from too much experimenting! So I went back through the distributions that I had looked at before, namely: Ubuntu (along with the variants Kubuntu and Mint) now at 7.

Welcome

Having finally made the switch on my personal machines from Windows to Linux early last year, I decided I’d like to share my experiences of “living with Linux”. As an IT professional, I’ll probably never be completely free of Windows, I use it all the time at work so I’ll also be looking for tools that work across both platforms. Regards, Julian.

Handle web parameters gracefully in PHP

Handle web parms (Call as: myParms('report');) # Ensures that the given parm is always set function myParms($var) { global $$var; if(isset($_REQUEST[$var])){ $$var=$_REQUEST[$var]; } else { $$var=''; } }

Mining the Paper Mountain

One of the biggest problems with trying to de-clutter my life is the “paper mountain”. This is all the stuff that comes through the front door on a depressingly regular basis. At least the majority of it is now from organisations that we actually do have legitimate dealings with as a family (bank, etc.) but it still piles up on the table by the front door and then adds to even bigger piles in the office.

JanRain

[JanRain][1]: “Internet-scale identity services with OpenID” Products [MyOpenID][2] Identity Provider [Jyte.com][3] Claims, cred & contacts [BotBouncer.com][4] A free CAPTCHA service for OpenIDs [OpenIDEnabled.com][5] By developers, for developers [Schtuff.com][6] A free Wiki service [1]: http://janrain.com/ [2]: https://myopenid.com/ [3]: http://jyte.com/ [4]: http://botbouncer.com/ [5]: http://www.openidenabled.com/ [6]: http://schtuff.com/

New Ping Identity Apache CardSpace Module Brings Information Cards to the LAMP Stack – Ping Identity Corporation

[New Ping Identity Apache CardSpace Module Brings Information Cards to the LAMP Stack – Ping Identity Corporation][1]: “New Ping Identity Apache CardSpace Module Brings Information Cards to the LAMP Stack Apache Applications Now Have a New Tool to Protect Against Phishing Attacks RSA Conference, San Francisco, CA – February 7, 2007 – Ping Identity Corporation today announced the immediate availability of an open source module that allows Apache-hosted applications to use Windows CardSpace Information Cards for authentication.

Identity brings Microsoft and Internet 2.0 together | The Register

[Identity brings Microsoft and Internet 2.0 together | The Register][1]: “Is Open ID the glue we need? By Mary Branscombe (Published Thursday 1st March 2007 09:47 GMT) Microsoft isn’t the only one taking an interest in Open ID. AOL, Yahoo! and Digg have all announced they’ll accept Open ID credentials as a way of identifying users online. But for Microsoft this is more than just a technology partnership. It could be the first real step towards creating the multi-platform, multi-system identity metasystem.

Digital Credentials Offer Enhanced Privacy

John Q Random writes _“[Stefan Brands][1]‘s company credentica.com announced their [U-Prove library and SDK implementing ID tokens][2] â€��? also known as [digital credentials][3] or private credentials. (Private Credentials are a cool PKI replacement and anonymous e-cash tech that allows you to prove certified attributes like age, credit rating, group membership, etc. without revealing who you are; to allow you to have a digital life without the digital dossier effect inherent in a central databases.

OpenID Discussion

There is an discussion of OpenID in [this Digg entry][1]. Interesting for peoples views on the merits and weaknesses. The actual entry is about Digg announcing support for OpenID. [1]: http://digg.com/tech_news/Kevin_Rose_at_FOWA_DIGG_Adopts_OpenID