Following yesterday launch of Google Checkout (Google’s Paypal equivalent) this morning I just noticed that they’ve opened their authentication to the world (at least to my knowledge…).
Anyone developing web applications can just use it and have users logging in using their Google user accounts… which is a neat thing to do although I still prefer the idea behind OpenID.
Add comment June 30th, 2006
Bricolage, the perl open-source content management system we use at SAPO for boosting up some of our sites (like it’sHomepage, the help/support site, two major national newspapers:DN and JN, etc.) have reached an important stage with a new version just released today! As you can attest by reading the offical announcement, there were a lot of improvements and house cleaning, To me, as bricolage system administrator and developer they are a few, very important ones, I would like to summarize here…
Seems also, an unfortunately for me (heheh) that there was also room left for some normalization, so some of the names changed, but I actually think might pay the effort of converting our templates and scripts, since the old namespace used had lots of tricky things and could became quite confusing at some point.
Well for all the effort, congrats David of this successful release! 
10 comments January 24th, 2006
For the last 2 days, i’ve been using Flock (developers release) in my daily browsing. Those of you who don’t know what Flock is (or better aims to be), nothing better than reading what the authors say about it:
We started Flock to build tools that empower people and smooth out some of the more hairy parts of living and working online. As it is, we live and breathe this stuff everyday and wanted better tools to do the things that we love doing online.
Well, that doesn’t say much, besides a great objective, which I find very pleasant, but as usual, words are easy, get a thing to work out it’s hard. So I’ll try to write down with a bit more detail my first impressions of this.
Flock is social Mozilla-based browser, designed to integrated itself smoothly with other tools available on the web, some of the examples of this: it’s his del.icio.us integration, allowing to easily share your bookmarks online. Flock is design as far as I can see, to easily integrate itself with any web service that provides an open interface to work with.
One of the tools that comes that it’s already working and I really appreciated was the blogging functionality, it allows you to easily and rapidly blog from the pages you’re visiting, the program automatic recognizes most common webloging platforms, relieving the user from the technical aspects of the blogging experience that when combined with a simple interface that does most of the work for us results in my opinion in a very smooth experience. It has problems, but I personally thing of it as very good beginning of something! 
The general interface, might trick the experienced eye to think that it’s a simple new “skin” for the mozilla browser, but I can assure you it seems to have lot of small and clever changes, the one I notice most, was the use of a more user centered speech on the dialog boxes, an example of it was when the browser asks us to store some form information, the answers became “remember” and “don’t remember” as opposed to the common “yes”, “no” and “cancel” we get to see on applications today. Seems a small thing regarding user experience, but as with everything details might make the difference!
It’s true when Steve Rubel writes that Flock isn’t ready for prime-time, but I’m surely enjoying the effort and can’t complain about it being slow on OS X, but I guess this all comes down to the machine one’s running and the personal experience of each of us with other browsers! Nevertheless take your shoot and try it, a take a special tour for the 13 new features.
1 comment October 27th, 2005
According to the Internet News, Google’s Sumer of Code program designed to introduce students to the open-source software development world as ended!
At the end it scored more than double the participants originally suposed to enter this program, scoring as high as 410 participants and 38 helped projects according to this same article. Each successful coder received $4,500 for his work, and to the mentoring organizations were offered $500 for each developer project they oversaw.
The Apache Software Foundation topped the list of awards at 38 projects and KDE came in second at 24.
On the list also appeared:
but the list doesn’t end here, many other projects were sponsered by this inovativeGoogleprogram.
Add comment September 12th, 2005
The EU recently ran a workshop dedicated to open source software and international cooperation - and its presentations (available online) make interesting reading, if you need an international view on public sector open source software, or you’re simply curious about other open-source initiatives trough out the world.
Add comment May 20th, 2005
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