Another blog bites the dust

Google Gmail recently got a new feature allowing one to open Word documents using Google Docs and we can safely assume that PDF and Excel (for use with Google Spreadsheets) documents are on their way as well.

Sometimes a Word document can be quite big with lots of added stuff like images, drawings and so on.

If Google can handle the on-the-fly (or at least on-mail-receive) Word documents conversions I do think that they can (and hopefully will) handle Movie files conversions like I suggest in my previous post about integrating YouTube/Google Video with Gmail.

If you haven’t done so already, go check out (and hopefully use, afterwards) idproxy.net.

As written in idproxy.net’s about page:

idproxy.net acts as a bridge between these two worlds. You can sign in to idproxy.net using your Yahoo! account, and then create one or more OpenID accounts for use elsewhere on the Web.

Basically, if you have a Yahoo ID, you can sign-in and create an OpenID for yourself at idproxy.net thus allowing you to use your Yahoo ID and password to connect to any OpenID supported site.

Everyone else has written about it and since I’m a bit behind on my feeds reading list I just got around to check it out.

OpenID Tests is a testing tool allowing you to test your OpenID server and OpenID page. This is such a great tool and could save an OpenID developer tons of work.

All I can say is “Hip hip Hurray” to the fine folks at JanRain on yet another fine OpenID piece of software.

I just read Simon Willison‘s post about idproxy.net.

It’s funny, I just talked about such a service in a previous post and also mentioned I’m working on the same service. I was suppose to release it a week ago but had some other issues to attend to as well as some learning curve with using JanRains’ PHP OpenID library and only manage to get it almost working yesterday. I was planning on release it this week, but since Simon already released idproxy.net I’m rethinking that :-)

I’ve just finished upgrading this blog to WordPress 2.1. This is my first post in 2.1 and if it goes well, it will mark the succesful upgrade of this blog to the new and fine WordPress version.

In the process I had the oppertunity to also verify that my MicroID Plugin for WordPress as well as my OpenID Delegation Plugin for WordPress works in version 2.1 as well as they did in WordPress 2.0.x.

I just read on the official Linden Blog that they have completed an initial version of hosting Mono within SecondLife.

What they have done is to compile the Linden Scripting Language (LSL) into Intermediate Language (IL) code and they automagically gain all the advantages of the .NET Runtime – Just In Time (JIT) compilation, advanced Garbage Collection and, hopefully, the ability to extend SecondLife with other .NET supported langauges (though that’s a personal wish ;-) having .NET so close to me – my Advanced .NET Debugging blog)

I recently ordered a couple of books from Amazon.

When reaching the check out screen I, obviously, selected to group my shipments to as few as possible. I then looked and saw that it was grouped into two shipments, one book should be shipped the next day and the other 4 should ship only on the 20th of March – almost two months afterwards!

This was a bit strange considering the fact that Amazon showed that all books were in stock.

I just bumped into this post by Martin Atkins that talks about proxy OpenID services that can delegate OpenID formated requests to their respective browser based authentication identity providers.

I’m actually working on such a thing that will delegate OpenID to Yahoo’s BBAuth authentication allowing anyone with a Yahoo ID (and, of course, anyone with Yahoo Email) to authenticate using OpenID.

The only annoying thing is that the URL is a bit ugly. Currently, my version uses a URL structure of /users/john@yahoo.com which is a bit annoying, but should be sufficient for now.

I, as many other WordPress users, have encountered a problem with Full Text Feeds not actually showing on FireFox Live Bookmarks (the thingy that shows you the feed in a nice way) as full text, but are rather cut.

It seems this is not a problem at all. This is a feature in FireFox’s Live Bookmarks which simply shortens the text only on display. If you’ll look at the page source (View -> Page Source) you’ll the see the XML file of the feed and that the tag contains the full text.

You know what would be a cool feature (and even a useful one) to Gmail?

Integrating Gmail with Google Video and/or YouTube to provide video previewing of videos received as attachments.

I haven’t received a video as an attachment on my Gmail for quite some time now, but I see no reason why it shouldn’t work same way as it works with previewing attached images.

Gmail could convert the video on the fly to a Google Video/YouTube private film, one that is not posted on the site and is only available to the people using Gmail and allow me to preview it directly.