One World, One login

After setting up personal website, one of my first objectives was to setup my own OpenID Server, so that I can use one login for every new website I sign-up for (provide they support ubiquitous OpenID authentication.)

A little research showed that we don't have to setup a personal OpenID Server just to use personal webpage as an OpenID.

OpenID has delegation feature, explained here [1], which effectively allows you to use a personal URL as OpenID and yet use a bigger OpenID provider who can guarantee better availability of the service.

And if you don't like your current OpenID provider, or if they go out of business, you can always switch to a new one without having to change your OpenID registered with various services.

So, I used my existing account at www.myopenid.com to setup delegation from gurjeet.singh.im to myopenid.com hosted service.

I added these two lines to gurjeet.singh.im/index.html and was done!

Now my OpenID is gurjeet.singh.im, and I can use this as a login for any service that supports it.

OpenID++! Kudos to whoever first came up with the idea of OpenID!

Update June 15, 2012: Just 3 days after I implemented this, the technique has paid off! www.myopenid.com seems to be down today, I waited for about 3 hours for it to come back online. Finally I gave up and decided to switch my OpenID provider. I replaced the above mentioned 2 link tags with these two, to use www.blogspot.com as my OpenID provider:

... and my personal OpenID url gurjeet.singh.im is back online!

Busy weekend: www.singh.im, Redmine, Dream Studio Linux

Had a great fruitful weekend.

Finally setup a server for www.singh.im, setup personal Redmine, with Postgres as the backend.

Migrated from Linux Mint 10 to Dream Studio 12.04 and am loving it, so much so that I seeded a torrent for its ISO. It's 2.7 GB! Much larger than Ubuntu's 600 MB, but totally worth it since it comes preinstalled with all kinds of media related software, which was a pain to get working in LinuxMint/Ubuntu earlier.

With this distro (based on Ubuntu 12), I can finally not feel ashamed of using a Linux desktop. It looks good, feels snappy, and is very keyboard friendly. I used to miss Windows particularly because of Windows' ability to be a keyboard friendly GUI. Yeah, I know, Linux Desktop from any distro can be very easily configured to do what you want, but I want it out of the box in a distro.

Finally, I got hold of Sri Guru Granth Sahib's line-by-line English translation and transliteration in a .doc file (thanks to the leads from the announcer at Medford Gurudwara). I hope to start work on making that amazing work available in a single HTML file, with search functionality built-in.