April 2009
9 posts
Is it really the economic crisis?
AP: German car maker Daimler AG has reported a 1Q loss of nearly $1.7 billion as the world economic crisis weighs heavily on demand.
AP: Honda says fiscal year net profit at 137 billion yen, beating forecast for 80 billion yen.
“When a politician says his opponent is mistaken, that’s a straightforward...”
– Paul Graham
I just realised, it worked.
The latest Facebook redesign. My news feed on Facebook looks exactly the same as my Twitter feed. The new design has made users use Facebook exactly like how I use Twitter. My Facebook friends see no point in joining Twitter because they’re already ‘Twittering’ on Facebook.
Another thing. They way Facebook implemented the new organisation/celebrity pages. It’s perfect....
Google GData API: Works for almost all Google services (GMail, Docs, Youtube etc). Includes comprehensive client libraries for most languages and a RubyGem. Took me 5 minutes to authenticate a session with my GMail account and start pulling out data.
Google Search AJAX API: Works for Google Search only. Consists of a pile of Javascript. Pretty much sucks.
Guess which one I need to use.
“VOLUNTEER FDP photographer, Max, reports that he has cleaned his teeth. ‘It was...”
– I don’t mean to diminish the situation in Fiji but this is hilarious. See also this and this.
Converting lurkers to members
I took a paper in Online Communities over summer. For the course we were split in to teams and tasked with building an online community. My team chose to create a social network for Stationery fans on ning.com called Stationary Stationery. The site was pretty successful and we got full marks for the assignment.
This is where it gets interesting. After the course ended we stopped contributing to...
March 2009
9 posts
Security and the University
It’s my understanding that three components are required for a secure system: Identity, Authentication and Authorization.
For example, on Cooked.co.nz a username and password are required to login. The username is public, it represents the users identity. The password is confidential, only known to the user. It provides a way of authenticating the users session. Authorization relates to...