Why geeks make horrible executives

A few months ago I spoke to Dana who was working on OpenID authentication for AuthAnvil. OpenID, eh? (not a slant on Canadians, just pure interest in decentralized authentication technology) It got me thinking, I comment on a ton of blogs and I almost always have to look up the password in my KeePass database. Pretty lame.

OpenID concept is pretty simple. You run an authentication server (which can literally be a single web page) on your web site and by embedding information using those cool META tags you allow remote OpenID-enabled to redirect you back to the script where you log in and get redirected back to the original site. In effect, you authenticate (ie: login to wordpress) and because you’ve proven your ownership of the site (www.vladville.com) the remote end can query and get extra info like your name, email address, etc.

Anotherwords, you do not need to generate another password and then guess it and request reminders when you forget it. For just a blog comment? Screw it, who would waste so much time doing something like that. I spoke to soon.

Enter The Geek

I saw that Pablo commented on my blog today. I go over to see what he said and apparently his site supports comments authentication via OpenID! Ohhhh really? Well, let me hook up this OpenID thing then, he doesn’t get to be cooler (work with me here, OpenID = cool!) than I am.

Three hours, two OpenID frameworks, and one broken WordPress template later, Vladville is OpenID enabled. Not  only can I use OpenID authentication to comment on remote blog sites, but you can use OpenID authentication to comment on Vladville!

Now back to stick it to Pablo; Comment time, auhenticate using other OpenID, http://www.vladville.com and go.. BAM, his site errors out. All this efford to make OpenID work on this end so I can post a comment back on his blog and his safe_mode ruins the day:

Warning: mkdir(./tmp/): Permission denied in
/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
openid/openid-classes.php
on line 101

Warning: opendir(./tmp/): failed to open dir: No such file or directory in
/usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
openid/openid-classes.php on line 401

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already
sent by (output started

 at /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/openid/
openid-classes.php:101) in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
openid/openid-classes.php on line 360

Son of a b….

It never ceases to amaze me how much time and skill I can throw to a complete waste. On the bright side, its likely that a blog spammer will implement OpenID before any of my friends (other than Sarah; come on girl where is your OpenID?) do and will have much easier time promoting drug sites over vladville.com.

It’s been a real victorious day at Vladville