blogs

Slowly, more and more sites have supported login using OpenID.

The selling point of OpenID is that you can use one login to access varies sites. This is very convenient. But I am worried about losing the same passwords for all the OpenID supported sites I access. There are so many phishing activities going on to steal passwords. I need something that's not password-based.

I came across Certifi.ca which is a password-less OpenID provider using SSL certificate for public key-based authentication. The basic idea is that you store your public SSL certificate(public key) and the private key in your browser. Certifi.ca identifies you by your public key, and uses your public key to encrypt communication between your browser and itself. Your browser with the private key is the only one that can decrypt the communication. There's no password needed!

Tags: ssl certificate public key openid provider certifi.ca cacert.org

I started to host tahoewiki.org on Wik.is with a pro account a couple weeks ago. It's powered by Deki Wiki which I first learned through ReadWriteWeb. Time for me to give a review.

Reasons for choosing Deki Wiki:

• It's open source
• It has a suite of widgets and web Services mashing up contents. The mashup features are important because I want to bring in contents from other sites into the wiki

Tags: wiki mashup wik.is deki mindtouch review

I have updated Tahoe Wiki to include the following tips:

• Winter driving in tahoe
• Deals and money saving tips for skiers & snowboarders including beginers
• Lodging

Those are things I've learned over the years of going to Tahoe. Enjoy.

Tags: snowboard tahoe wiki ski winter vacation driving saving tips

Just when the first major snow storm hit Lake Tahoe today, I set up tahoewiki.org which is powered by wik.is. I will share the tips I've learned over the year about beautiful Lake Tahoe

Free free to join and contribute.

Tags: tahoe wiki lake

Sebastian Larsson's stunning goal at the 93rd minute help Birmingham City to defeat Tottenham on December 2nd, 2007. This gotta be the finalist for the goal of the year.



David Bentley's great free kick against Newcastle on December 1, 2007

Tags: soccer goal video sebastian_larsson david_bentley

On Scribd, I found the following presentation on using Amazon S3 as a storage medium for MySQL 5.1. Exciting stuff as S3 can act as a infinite disk. If it works out, it's going to be very valuable for MySQL running on EC2 as file system storage on a EC2 instance is gone once the instance goes down.

Tags: amazon mysql aws s3

It is early Nov. You are so ready to get head-start of your 2007-2008 skiing/snowboarding season by booking a trip to Tahoe for Thanksgiving or Christmas now. But you still see sunny weather in Tahoe area.

So should you bet or not?

Probably not because it's really a hit or miss whether mother nature will dump enough snow by Thanksgiving and Christmas.

In my past experience, most of time, there's not enough snow in Thanksgiving. Sometimes, there's not enough snow in Christmas. For example, last year was a really bad drought year in Tahoe, and the season didn't really get started until Jan.

Tags: tahoe snowboarding weather thanksgiving christmas vacation skiiing

If you can't fight the biggest player. Unite others to fight him.

OpenSocial API, proposed by Google, and supported by popular social networks including hi5, iLike, Slide, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Ning, Bebo, MySpace and SixApart, but excluding FaceBook, are going live in any minute(supposedly to be open tonight).

The open API will have three parts(from Oreilly Radar

• People
• Storage
• Activity stream

All of these calls will have a GData counterpart and they will use HTML and JavaScript only. Google is considering adding OAuth (Radar post) to the API.

Tags: google facebook microsoft opensocial platform myspace

Amazon S3 has been out for a while. And the competition is heating up in the storage as a service market.

S3 in general:

• 99.9% service level guarrantee (only have had SLA recently since Oct. 8th, 2007)
• no worry of hardware failure, data redundancy
• one and only one master secret key. I would like to be able to create separate secret key for different applications so if one application got compromised, other applications won't be compromised
• can't control bandwidth overage. Can be a real problem if your competitors are leeching your S3 bandwidth that you pay for every bit

Tags: amazon aws s3 joyeur bingodisk layeredtech box.net nirvanix mediamax