I guess I never actually mentioned it here on my site, but I’m getting married in two weeks. If you remember, I originally moved to California for Elisabeth a little over two years ago, and now we’re finally getting married. We’re both definitely excited about it, but at least for the next week and half we’re just stressed out trying to get everything ready.
Every marriage counseling book in the world would probably recommend otherwise, but I’m also taking a new job when we get back from the honeymoon. I resigned my position at USC early last week, and my last day will be next Friday April 25th, 2008. It is a bit bittersweet, as I really wish I would have had the time to wrap up more of the unfinished projects I’m leaving behind, but I trust that they are in good enough hands and will be well cared for. If things go as planned, I will continue on as part of the core Shibboleth development team, which I feel is very important. There are a few major additions to Shibboleth we’ve talked about adding, but simply haven’t had the time. The primary attraction to the new job is quite simply the work I’ll be doing and who I’ll be doing it with — I’ll finally be able to really dig in to some of the projects that haven’t received the level of attention I would have liked to give. Aside from that, I don’t think I’m ready to say too much else about the new job, only that it is in San Francisco and that we will be moving up there as soon as the wedding is over and we find a place.
March 21, 2008 – 12:46 am
Yesterday I called Bank of America to find out what had happened to my income tax refund check. I was prompted to enter my account number for ‘faster service’, but I instead simply pressed zero to bypass it. Entering your account number leads you into this drawn out description of your current balance and such, which I frankly had no interest in. I pressed only zero at another menu or two, and after waiting a few minutes I was greeted with a human being who as able to look into my missing refund check. What struck me as a little odd is that the guy began asking me to verify my identity with the typical things like mother’s maiden name and such, but he never asked me for my account number or anything. Apparently, their phone system looked up my account based on the phone number that I was calling from. It was so nice!
Compare this to other times I call in to various companies, go ahead and enter my account number at the automated prompt, only to be asked for the exact same information all over again when I actually get to an operator. What’s wrong with these people?!
(Though I still have my share of complaints with them in other areas…) Just another thing I <3 about Bank of America.
The DiSo Project (well, wp-openid specifically) is participating in the Open-Source Identity System Interop Testing happening now until the RSA Conference in April. WP-OpenID is an OpenID 1.1 and 2.0 consumer, and additionally uses the simple-registration extension. We do not yet support attribute exchange. Under the covers, we use the JanRain PHP Library… a version somewhere between the 2.0.1 release and the latest code in the darcs repository.
Testers should be able to leave an authenticated comment on this page using any OpenID 1.1 or 2.0 provider. We are aware of a bug that prevents interop with Vox OpenIDs in certain cases. Please do limit OSIS testing to this blog post. If you run into trouble, you can contact me directly, or the DiSo Project List. Happy testing! :)
December 15, 2007 – 11:44 am
oops… meant to post this before I left town, but I’m out on vacation for the next few weeks and will likely not be answering emails or comments. I’ll be back around the first of the year. In the meantime, I’d recommend directing support questions for wp-openid to the wordpress support forums or the diso mailing list.
December 10, 2007 – 12:59 pm
In case you missed it last week, Steve Ivy and Chris Messina announced the DiSo Project as an incubator of sorts to develop distributed social applications. Initially, they will be focussing on plugins for existing publishing platforms like WordPress and Drupal. On the WordPress side, they are using wp-openid as a foundation to develop additional plugins that build on OpenID to bring other social functionality to WordPress powered blogs. I am therefore pleased to announce that wp-openid is moving under the umbrella of DiSo in an effort to allow better integration with the other social plugins that are being developed, as well as get some other really smart people working on the code. I’ve been working with Chris on various identity projects for a while now, and have been very impressed with Steve’s ability to really grok this topic, so I have no doubt this move will be good for all involved.
Over the next week or two, I hope to get the wp-openid codebase migrated into the DiSo subversion repository. The plan is to synchronize changes made there back over to wp-plugins.org so that the wordpress.org project page as well as plugin update notifications will continue to work as they do now. Any existing bug reports at wp-plugins will also be moved over to Google Code, which should provide some better features and flexibility. If you’re interested in following the progress of wp-openid or the other DiSo projects, feel free to join the DiSo Google Group.
