Alex Little

Mike Ellis posted an interesting article up about OpenID, which is quite critical of OpenID and although I do like OpenID, I agree with much of what he’s saying. Maybe I like OpenID because it’s a way of reducing the number of usernames/passwords I need to remember, rather than being a good way of reducing password overload.

I’ve recently been in conversation with the OU Communications group about how they can OpenID-enable some of their sites and my feeling is that it’s going to be difficult explain what OpenID is how to use it. I feel that to be able to use an OpenID at all you need a basic grasp of how it functions, which may be why it appeals to techies? I’m sure using a url as your identity is going to be an alien concept to people used to using usernames & passwords.

Also there’s plenty of room for confusion when logging into an Open University website using an OpenID… is my OpenID something the Open University gives me?

“Does MSG do multi-user chat?” is something we’ve been asked about countless times, and our response has always been no, and we’re not intending to add this feature, on the basis that many other clients already offer this functionality and we’re not here to reinvent the wheel.

Well, this is only partly true! The MSG web-client interface doesn’t offer the facility to create and join chat rooms, but the server that MSG runs on does (OpenFire Jabber server). This means that if you have an account on our MSG server, you can log into this account with another Jabber compliant client, which does have chat rooms.

Liam and I have been trying this out this morning using the Pidgin client (he’s also just had a meeting with few people using it) and all seems to be running well, these are the steps you need to go through…

1. Create account on MSG (use the register link)
2. Install Pidgin and connect to the msg server (msg.open.ac.uk) using you rnew username and password
3. From the ‘Buddies’ menu in pidgin, select ‘add chat’
4. Create a name for your room (only seems to like alpha-numeric characters, so no spaces)
5. Fill in the options you want, or just leave on the defaults

We found the ‘invite’ function a bit flaky (didn’t track down the exact cause or where it was going wrong), but you can just give people the name of the room you’ve created for them to join.

Any feedback/comments etc welcome

I’ve just updated our OpenID server with a new site design (which is more OU-brand like) and also a much cleaner interface. There are also a few minor changes that I’ve made, e.g. showing people what their OpenID URL is and I’m going to update some of the help documentation too later this pm. This is essentially in preparation for me to hand over the server for someone else to look after

Have just spotted this posting about the Remember The Milk GMail extension for FireFox, so you can manage your RTM tasks directly from GMail. Looks pretty good (saves having 2 browser windows open), but seems its something else I’ll need to wait for, as you need the most recent version of GMail, which hasn’t yet been rolled out to my account (should note that now I do have the offlline version of Google Docs!). Only thing I’m not too sure about is how it will look on the small screen of my Asus Eee – might just be too much to squeeze onto one page – but will give it  go anyway….

I noticed the announcement the other week about Google Docs adding the capability to work in offline mode (using Google Gears) which is great – especially for me when I’m going away and may only have intermittent/unreliable internet access. Unfortunately the capability hasn’t filtered through to my Google Docs account , but hopefully it will soon (I noticed their release mentions it’ll take a few weeks to be available to all)

I usually use a task/todo list to remind of what needs doing when and up until now I’ve just been using the task list in Outlook, which has been kinda fine, the only irritating thing is that in the Outlook Web Access version you can’t view/edit/sort by the categories that you might have put tasks in.

So I’ve been having a quick look at the numerous other options for online to do/task list to find if any of them are suitable for me. The main ones I looked at were Ta da and Remember the Milk (RTM). Ta da is very very simple, but for me, too simple, I need to be able to put due dates, reminders, notes and also have recurring tasks, so that one wasn’t for me. Instead I’ve gone for using RTM, which seems (so far) to do everything that I need. I did find to start with that it was fiddly to move from a highlighted task over to edit the properties (due date, tags, recurrence etc) without inadvertently having the cursor move over another task and highlight the properties for that task instead – however, using the keyboard shortcuts made it far easier to use than with the mouse.

To really make best use of RTM, e.g. getting task reminders by email or IM, changing the default task lists you need to get into your account settings. Another bonus for me was the fact that it makes use of Google Gears, so I’m still able to use RTM even when I’m not online.

I think I’ve got the problems with our OpenID server now resolved (as mentioned in my last post), but if you find any sites that still have problems then please let me know! One site I know can’t just use the direct identity url is LiveJournal, as it can’t discover the server url from xrds+xml. So will need to have a bit more of a play to get this working.

I’ve just updated our OpenID server so that you can use your OUCU (OU Computer Username) to log in to OpenID enabled sites and you don’t need to have registered with the OpenID server first.

How to use it… whenever you see an OpenID enabled site, enter the following as your OpenID identity URL:

openid.open.ac.uk/oucu/abc123 (where abc123 is your OUCU)

You’ll then use your normal OUCU and password to log in if you aren’t already logged in. It should work for both staff and student OUCUs and effectively turns any OUCU into an OpenID identity url.

If you’ve previously (manually) registered on our OpenID server, but happened to use your OUCU as your username, then these are 2 seperate accounts.

This is still an experimental service, so I’d welcome any feedback

(Update 29/1/08) have discovered some problems with this server but not related to the OUCU part, just that some websites fail when verifying the OpenID ID url, I’ve posted to the openid4java dev group about this.

I’ve added a few new bits to our OpenID server…

• Ability to set OpenID Simple Registration fields
• Allowed sites function so when you sign in to a particular site you can opt to always allow that site
• Remember me function when logging in

Probably nothing fantastically exciting there, but should make it a bit easier to use. I’m still concious of the fact I don’t spend too much time developing the OpenID server, since the important thing is that there are services you can use your OpenID with rather than yet-another-OpenID-server, plus the main reason I developed the server was out of personal interest.

I’d also like to get the Cohere tool OpenID enabled and hope to be working on that soon

Yesterday some of us in KMi had a bit of a get together to figure out what we can do, want to do, don’t want to do etc with OpenID. It also gave me chance to give a little overview of how OpenID works to those who didn’t already know. We recorded the discussion using FlashMeeting and you can view the replay. The picture isn’t great, but the sound seems to be ok which is the important bit, so at least you can hear what everyone is saying