holy f***ing shit, openid is confusing

So, to register an account using OpenID with bitbucket.org, you apparently have to select "sign up" and then in the OpenID text input box, put the following URI:

www.google.com/accounts/o8/id

Obvious, right? Of course it's obvious. I mean seriously, all those web sites about OpenID telling me to use my email address or a per user URI to login makes it obvious that everyone would be using the same URI that has nothing in it that identifies me.

Before the OpenID twits start falling over themselves to tell me I'm an idiot, let me remind them that I worked on real systems that were real and users could actually use. Sheesh guys, you're seriously making PKIX look intelligible. This reinforces my opinion that OpenID is a technology developed by myopic twits with their heads so far up their collective a**es they've never seen daylight, much less have the light to read a good book on user centered design.

Honestly, if OpenID is the future of the web, I'm moving to Fiji to implement SAML over avian carrier. You want me as an app developer to hype your lame assed s*** so your confused identity providers can confuse the f*** out of MY USERS with crap like using the same URI for everyone. And for *****'s sake, a******, it's not like you could have a standard or something that says, "open id's are [username]@[authority]."

No! That's way too understandable. Hell, if you did that, then actual users could use your technology. Oh! The horror! The horror! Someone who doesn't know what XRDS is could actually understand how to make the damn'd thing work!

And don't get me started about Plaxo and Facebook. WTF? Plaxo's putting up random IFRAMEs over the facebook page? What? Are you f****** high? You're seriously trying to tell me users can trust the OpenID experience because they'll always be able to look at the URL of the page they type their credentials into, but now you're using IFRAMEs? What?

FFS kids, the world isn't a blog comment. OpenID is a bag full of fail. Go back and finish your degrees already.

compiling apg 6.0 on MacOS X 10.5.8

so mi amiga infinity asked me to report the following:

It looks like MacOS-X 10.5.8 doesn't like APG 6.0 for the following three reasons:

1. it's a mac. it's a sullen little machine that likes to strike out randomly at people who love it.
2. malloc.h is in a mildly non-standard place
3. the version of autoconf that comes with it doesn't grok 'dist-lzma'

APG 6.0 is an ABNF Parser Generator from Coast to Coast Research that takes ABNF files and generates C and C++ files to make the creation of domain specific languages slightly easier. I'm not entirely certain, but my guess is she's working on a tool to manipulate LLIDL files; there was some chatter recently about an upcoming draft of LLSD and it's ABNF.

Here's what i did to replicate the problem and the solution:

1. Download APG 6.0 by going to the page at http://www.coasttocoastresearch.com/apg-6.0/download-60.php , reading the license, and clicking on your favorite flavor of compressed archive file.
2. Untar the file in your favorite place for parser generators on your hard drive.
3. Change directories to that location and enter the command:
   ./configure ; make
4. Witness the madness that is Autoconf:
   ./../src/CommandLine.c:31:20: error: malloc.h: No such file or directory.
5. Modify line 6 of the file to remove the reference to dist-lzma, so it reads:
   AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE([-Wall -Werror foreign dist-zip dist-bzip2])
6. Modify the configure.ac file so that line 8 reads:
   CFLAGS="$CFLAGS"
7. Then issue the commands:
   autoconf
   automake
   export CFLAGS=-I/usr/include/malloc
   ./configure
   make
8. and viola! you're done. if you're brave, you can also install the package with the command:
   sudo make install

And that's it, enjoy!

playing with freebies

oh... so... i might have forgotten to introduce myself. i'm arrogant cyberstar, a second life avatar. there's not too much to say about me. i live in california, i work in software and i think second life is pretty cool. well... the things you can do with it are cool, SL itself probably needs a bit of polish. i spend my time in SL wandering around mostly. but i like to chat about software and about adding bits of functionality to the SL viewer; that's why i've been playing around with the snowglobe viewer.

most of this blog is about software experiments, but from time to time i just wander around and look around, trying to get ideas for cool things. if you're new to SL, you'll probably want to grab some freebies. there are several freebie spots in world, but the one that seems to be high on the search list is the freebie warehouse in Burns. i was able to load up on several knick-knacks... clothes... animations... etc.

as a homeless deadbeat, i don't have a place to go to rez my new freebies. fortunately, there are "sandboxes" that cater to people like me. the IBM sandbox is one such place. so.. even if you're a n00b homeless drifter like myself, you an still play around.

script to download and build snowglobe on MacOS X

so i started monkeying with things i shouldn't have monkeyed with, and very quickly decided i should probably just re-check-out the snowglobe source and start afresh. but i got a little crafty and wrote a quick script to automate this process for me. if it's useful for you, great! if not, don't blame me.

the script is available up on the second life wiki at https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/User:Arrogant_Cyberstar/Compiling_Snowglobe_on_MacOSX

Compiling Snowglobe on MacOS-X

Downloading and compiling the Snowglobe source isn't supposed to be that big of a deal. And for the most part it's not, but I figured I would blog my experiences anyway. I've been hitting my head against the wall for a while on Snowglobe; it's not difficult, it's just occasionally under-documented. 

So you might think the first step would be to check out the Snowglobe source and start compiling. Not so fast. Check to see if you have the right tools first. If you look on the Compiling the Viewer (Mac OS X) page, it'll give you a list of things to check. First, check to see that XCode is installed. I'm building on an intel Mac running 10.5.8. At the time i'm writing this, XCode 3.0 is the most recent version. You can download it from Apple at http://developer.apple.com/technology/Xcode.html . You'll also want to check your version of cmake is recent. I ran `cmake --version` and was told i have "cmake version 2.6-patch 4". The wiki page says you're supposed to have 2.6.2, but I like to live dangerously. You can go to http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html to download the latest copy. They even put together a .dmg image with an installer. nice!

Next I checked out the source from the SVN repository with the command:

svn co https://svn.secondlife.com/svn/linden/projects/2009/snowglobe/trunk snowglobe


It might ask you a question about the server certificate; I was a complete fool and just hit the 'p' key to accept the cert permanently.

Now that you've checked out the source, you can get the libraries needed to compile. Fortunately there's a script for this. Change directories to the "snowglobe" directory the checkout command created, then execute the command:

./scripts/public_fetch_tarballs.py

Depending on your network, this can take a while.

But wait, some libraries can't be distributed by Linden. The process is documented at http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Compiling_the_viewer_(Mac_OS_X)#Installing_Proprietary_Libraries , but the exact sequence of commands seems to be for the previous viewer (not Snowglobe.) So, I went to the FMOD Site, downloaded version 3.75 of FMOD (you don't want the latest version, you have to scroll down 'til you see the "FMOD 3 Programmers API" heading. Look closely at the table below it and you should see the MacOS-X download button. My browser is setup to download and extract files into the ~/Downloads directory, I cd'd into the snowglobe directory and used the following commands to put FMOD in the right place:

mkdir -p libraries/include
mkdir -p libraries/universal-darwin/lib_debug
mkdir -p libraries/universal-darwin/lib_release
cp -p ~/Downloads/fmodapi375mac/api/inc/*.h libraries/include
lipo -create ~/Downloads/fmodapi375mac/api/lib/libfmod.a ~/Downloads/fmodapi375mac/api/lib/libfmodx86.a -output libraries/universal-darwin/lib_debug/libfmod.a
touch -r ~/Downloads/fmodapi375mac/api/lib/libfmodx86.a libraries/universal-darwin/lib_debug/libfmod.a
cp -p libraries/universal-darwin/lib_debug/libfmod.a libraries/universal-darwin/lib_release/libfmod.a

Now, I'm kind of old school, so I like to do build things on the command line. So cd'd into the indra directory and used the following command to configure things:

./develop.py

Then I used this command to kick off the build:

./develop.py build

And then I went to grab a drink at the corner bar. When I came back, I found a copy of the Snowglobe application in the "build-darwin-i386/newview/RelWithDebInfo" directory. I'm a command line kinda joe, so i launched it with the command:

./build-darwin-i386/newview/RelWithDebInfo/Snowglobe.app/Contents/MacOS/Snowglobe --grid agni --channel "Arrogant Cyberstar"

And have been happy ever since.