I just realized I didn’t post any of my links.  Here’s where you can find more information.

openid.net – Official site
openid.org – Get your own Open ID
openiddirectory.com – Sites using Open IDs

I recently came across a cool technology.  I saw on someones blog a field for entering my Open ID to login.  I did a little research and it looked pretty neat.  Basically you tie a specific URL to your self.  Since I have been running my own server for quite sometime I thought it would work well for me.  I found an easy implementation so that I could install it on my server.  Now I can authenticate on sites that use Open ID by entering my web address, notsopc.com.

It seems to work pretty well, I installed it so that people with Open IDs can use them here.  I haven’t really used it on a site for real but I have it when I need it.  Now I just need more sites to support Open ID.  It’s a cool idea.  Anyway, that’s my cool technology of the week.

This is the second time I’m writing this because I wrote last night and this morning moved the database and somehow corrupted the file or copied the wrong one. Anyway, here I go again.

As my one an only reader, you probably noticed that my site was down. Somehow my primary data drive failed with out warning. Had I been a good IT person, I would have been doing consistent backups. Unfortunately, this was not the case and I didn’t have any backups of any of it. I did have some copies of stuff from development so that was recoverable but I lost all of the dynamic data in the databases. I feel bad for everyone else that had information that was lost.

So, I was able to purchase a new server with help from family and friends. (THANK YOU!) The new one has 2 drives that are mirrored so if one fails the other one maintains a good copy of the information. I also used this server as a test environment for a Storage Area Network at Decagon. All of the user files, website, and databases reside on a special super geeky set of extremely reliable and redundant hard drives on the network. It’s working really well so far and it is really cool.

Anyway, enough of that talk. Here’s something rather entertaining. We passed it around Decagon and got mixed reactions. My initial reaction was a slight chuckle. Then I started to imagine what this person put themselves through.