Stream of Consciousness

Mt Lebanon and the whole South Hills is about to lose (IMO) one of its most valuable assets - Great Harvest Bakery located directly across from the Lebanon shops. Tomorrow, Friday the 30th of November, 2007 will be the last day this fine bakery will offer its unique-to-this-area mix of whole-wheat and cracked-grain breads, muffins and other delectable delights. Nowhere else in this area (that I know of, anyway) can one escape the bland, unhealthy white-flour breads and muffins, and as of Saturday, well, I guess we’ll just have to bake our own. Even the Giant Eagle Market District only bakes with white flour.

I understand the reason for the closure: owner/baker/proprietor Jen - a wonderful and friendly woman - is just plain tired of waking up at 4am to get the ovens going for the morning rush. I know I couldn’t do that, so no hard feelings. But she and her cranberry-raisin, apple and chocolate-chocolate chip muffins will be sorely missed.

Just finished installing OpenID into the IIW MediaWiki - please see http://iiw.idcommons.net/

This was much harder than it should have been, as there are multiple OpenID plugins that claim to work with MediaWiki, and several of these claim to work with the latest OpenID-2.0.0-rc5 but finally the new version 0.7.0 of the standard MediaWiki OpenID extension fit the bill perfectly after dropping back to the v1.2.3 library. A million thanks to evanpro and, of course, JanRain.

All that tech stuff aside, I’m excited to have the opportunity to attend the first day of the Workshop (I have other commitments for the the other two days. which I am actually happy for as they are paying my fare across the country). In particular, I want to explore the use of barx to support alternate XRI/i-name roots so that federations of running proxy resolvers can be upgraded on the fly to include new local roots, simply by distributing a new plugin. The value of this to the many grass-roots organizations I work with at CivicActions can’t be over stated.

I look forward to seeing many of my colleagues next week as they gather to move the state of the art of user-centric digital identity forward another step.