Opening IDs to a new era of Single Signon ?

I've been looking a little at the new OpenID system. This is a lightweight, distributed ID system. So what's the story and hype with this - well think about this question "How much of an issue is it for you to have multiple logins for your various web accounts ?". If you answer "Its not a big issue for me" well skip the rest of this post as OpenID is still in its infant stages and you may be better leaving it for a bit. OpenID is the start towards solving the headache of online identity problems using an open standard and it is at this stage heavily focused on deployment and handling rather than usability and security. In essence, its trying to develop a community and from there address the issues arising. The best introduction to OpenID is Simon Willison's talk or his screencast, followed by these two Ruby on Rails talks. Hype-free has a nice post on integrating Blogger and OpenID. I've already set up an account with MyOpenID, just check the header in the source of this page. Another interesting article talks about using OpenID as a means for creating decentralised social networks.

On another note Hivelogic have updated their article "Building Ruby, Rails, Subversion, Mongrel, and MySQL on Mac OS X", its as useful and important for all those using Rails on Mac OS X as ever. If you ever need to bust a Firewall using Ruby and UDP - read this article. For more system administration type reading check out Cfengine vs. Puppet. On another Ruby note, even the guy who wrote the book on Applescript has started to see the benefits to "Replacing AppleScript with Ruby".

Speaking of Ruby, my auditory display for group presence / awareness is nearly ready for testing, more on that with code and notes to follow as it uses a blend of Python, Ruby, Objective-C and Shell scripting to talk across the LAN using Growl and to parse presence / availability details from IM systems including Skype, all hooked into an Arduino IO board which reads a set of QTC Pills pressure sensors.

Here's a little idea with some help from cyberviking: