OAuth Spec 1.0 = More Personal Mashups?

Your valet key for the web: Like the feature on many cars today where you give the parking attendant a special key to your car that gives him some, but not all, access to your vehicle. On the Web you now have your own keys to dozens of sites but how to best handle the mashup-style case of site A wants you to grant them access to get some data from site B? Ideally you don’t want to give site A your password to site B. OAuth aims to simplify this problem: “It allows you the User to grant access to your private resources on one site (which is called the Service Provider), to another site (called Consumer, not to be confused with you, the User).”

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OAuth Spec 1.0 = More Personal Mashups?

Not the same as OpenID, this standard is about promoting access to data between sites but with control over what is accessed. Could be very powerful if it is done right.

Weak Ties and Diversity in Social Networks

Strength in diversity...

Weak Ties and Diversity in Social Networks - Bokardo

How a social network benefits from the weak ties, those outside one's normal social network, to bring in new or additional information or knowledge.

Tagging and foldering

Another tilt at the ontology vs folksonomy approach...

Tagging and foldering « Jon Udell

Short but well worded, as ever with Jon's work, this gives a description of some pluses and minuses of using free tagging for metadata.

Test post to Blogger NOSMeLD

This is just a test post from Live Writer. Ignore this.

We've moved

We're waiting no longer. We have moved our activity over to our own blog engine.

https://normedlive.lakeheadu.ca/cs/blogs/nosmeld/

This also allows us to put some control on the spam comments.

We hope you'll continue to follow us there.

Not Happy with New Blogger

Hmm, I'm not a happy blogger at the moment. Google has unhelpfully updated its blogger engine. So far I cannot see any benefit from this. Seems slower than before and I have not found any improved features.

But what I am really unhappy about is that it has broken all the links to the blog writing tools that I use. I contribute to multiple blogs and having a single tool that works seamlessly across all of those is important to me. I suspect that this is becoming true of many other serious blog writers.

So...notice is given, Google. Play nice with others. You are not the only game in town. I will not be posting further on this blog until you do so. I do not intend to use your intrusive and proprietary Google Toolbar to contribute to Blogger blogs. If this is not fixed soon, this blog will be moved to a blog engine that is compliant.

Computer scientist reveals the math and science behind blockbuster movies

Computer scientist reveals the math and science behind blockbuster movies

Won't be too long before we don't need actors. This piece threatens to get a wee bit obscure but is relevant to those of us working on simulators in medical education.

OpenID: an actually distributed identity system

OpenID: an actually distributed identity system

Wouldn't it be nice not to have to mess with hundreds of passwords? Some sort of centralised authentication system would make things so much easier...and yes, easier for hackers...but only to a small extent.

We are very predictable animals, and the more passwords we are expected to learn/memorise, the more lazy we become. We all trend to very guessable passwords - ooh, they'll never think of my birthdate backwards! Sigh. I have written about this before. The whole concept of strong passwords is fundamentally flawed. They only slow down a good hacker and deter the lazy. Think for a moment about how the banks do a pretty good job of protecting your money at an ATM with a simple 4 digit-only password (and yes, the commonest is 1234). Having a token (in this case your card) is the other essential piece. This is what is meant by 2 factor authentication. (BTW, don't let some EMR vendors try and tell you that 2 sets of passwords is 2 factor authentication...but I digress).

For a truly brilliant presentation on identity, check out this presentation by Dick Hardt. A great lesson in effective presenting, as well as a good overview on identity stuff.

The Most Annoying Things About Windows Vista

The Most Annoying Things About Windows Vista

Thinking about upgrading. You might want to wait until Service Pack 1 at least (the first major bug fix). Check out this article - not exactly fulsome in praise.

No wonder Vista sales are way below that predicted.

Surgeons who play video games more skilled - CNN.com

Surgeons who play video games more skilled - CNN.com

A bit more rationalising? I can just hear it..."Just 5 more minutes, Dad...don't you want me to grow up to be a neurosurgeon?"

But no - this study appears well done and has some relevant results. Of course, I wonder if people who already have good hand eye coord are in turn drawn to video games i.e. is this cause and effect?

Interacting in 3D

 Another approach to improve our interaction with computers.

Link to The Engineer Online - [News: engineering news, engineering info, latest technology, manufacturing news, manufacturing info, automotive news, aerospace news, materials news, research & development]

Sounds fascinating, although not to be categorised under Coming Soon, I don't think.

Hindsight is 20/20

 This short discussion is awfully reminiscent of such famous quotes as...

Link to Hindsight is 20/20 | jon lee dot see eh

"The world only has a need for about 6 computers" [Thomas Watson, IBM] and "640k should be enough for anybody' [Bill Gates].

Ah, those that fail to appreciate the effects of exponential trends. Sigh. Ray Kurzweil writes extensively about this in his books - our tendency to use linear extrapolation based on current activity and data.