by lorenzo tilve

Fresh restart

After a lot of months of plenty of work, some vacations and important changes in my personal life, I’m trying to get this blog updated.

To start with the most significant change, I became a father the past year 🙂 It’s just an amazing experience every day.

Resuming what I did at work during this time, basically:

  • Coordination and development of Typo3 applications …
  • Some consultancy project and collaboration in certification process …
  • Teaching in Igalia 2009 edition of free software master …
  • … and mainly  being part in the development team of a RIA oriented scheduling application, more news about to come. Stay tunned.
by lorenzo tilve

Testing Moonlight

We have been considering several architectural alternatives for a future project we are going to start. The idea is to develop a production management system, which has a scheduling part, to which is going to have a web interface. The debate is: plugin-oriented (free alternatives, of course) vs javascript.

We are not sure about the richness we will need to handle, and how easy would be to integrate it with

I have installed packages to run my own mono server, and develop some quick tests for moonlight http://www.go-mono.com/moonlight/

The tests were done with 1.0 and 2.0 versions for 32 bits. First worked fine, but some environments already demanded the latest version that shoud be downloaded from the repository

svn co svn://anonsvn.mono-project.com/source/trunk/moon

Although some simple C# components worked fine, and it would be interesting in the future as an alternative to Flash, its level of maturity, and the doubts on how we could connect the graphical components with a non-mono application, led us to discard Moonlight for the current project.

Besides, the possible use of direct Canvas elements in HTML 5, made us go to Javascript alternatives that seem to have other clear advantages.

So we are testing now Yahoo Library YUI (BSD Licensed) that is looking really good for our purpose of drawing and moving boxes over our ZK Direct RIA architecture.

by lorenzo tilve

Open ID’ing

I have being testing the creation and configuration of an specific account for OpenID in one of the profiles supported by sourceforge.net authentication list:

  • AOL http://openid.aol.com/screenname
  • Livejournal http://username.livejournal.com/
  • Blogger http://blogname.blogspot.com/
  • Yahoo https://me.yahoo.com/username

Having already some of this profiles ready to use, i decided to set up my identity via Google, as far as I am already using some of thir products quite often.

So at this point you can either log in Sourceforge with your personal account or register a new user based on a OpenID provider.

Suposing the second one, the registration sends a message to Blogger to ask for confirmation of the confidence on authentication with Sourceforge. Regarding registration forms, they may share information based on specific formats, I will try to take a look into this one day.

So once accepted, you can link your sourceforge.org id with the OpenID url provided, in order to use that url (in this case ltilve.blogspot.com) to log in, never mind the user_id you could register.

I guess that this algorithm is based on something similar to SSO behavior, prepared to filter ‘man-in-the-middle‘ vulnerabilities, but I will review this to have more information 🙂

  • http://openid.net/what/
  • http://alexandria.wiki.sourceforge.net/OpenID
by lorenzo tilve

Online Desktop. State of the art

Some times it is necessary to take a breath.

The concept 2.0 is expanding too fast and some times it is mandatory to stop from your tasks to have an overall perception of how technologies are evolving. Perhaps the forest sometimes doesn’t allow you to see the trees. Let’s have a look on how to face an approach to the integration of these applications on the desktop.
Borrowing some ideas from Chema proposal:

  • Get a definition: What is online desktop for us?
  • Which is the relationship with Online Desktop?
  • Crazy ideas: What do you think that could your desktop do to improve your Internet experience?
  • Study the state of art of the project. What is mugshot?

Starting from the last point, we have started testing Mugshot Stacker in an Ubuntu 7.04.

# alien mugshot-1.1.45-1.fc8.i386.rpm

Warning: Skipping conversion of scripts in package mugshot: postinst postrm preinst prerm
Warning: Use the –scripts parameter to include the scripts.
mugshot_1.1.45-2_i386.deb generated

# dpkg -i mugshot_1.1.45-2_i386.deb

# mugshot
mugshot: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So it is necessary to install libcurl4, and i will have to upgrade my distribution. Keep going…

[…]

Finally, it wasn’t neccesary. Reviewing the ubuntu backports and debian repositories mentioned in the mugshot wiki , I reached this repository where I could download and install the Debian package to start playing whith the Mugshot stacker widget.

Mugshot