Steven Osborn
"I would love to change the world, but they won't give me the source code".

Archive for the ‘Software’ Category

Lamest “security” ever.

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

Normally I would abstain from pointing out security issues on other's websites, but since this bit of code provides absolutely no security at all I can do so with a clear conscience. The bit of code below is from my former banks personal account login. I quickly changed ...

Custom error pages in GAE/Django

Friday, April 11th, 2008

To allow for custom error pages (404,500) in Django/Google App Engine all you need is this bit of middle-ware that stubs out the request class for you so that it doesn't blow up. Add your custom templates to your template directory and name them 404.html, 500.html etc. Paste the following into middleware/errorpages.py class ...

Django manage.py wrapper script for Google App Engine

Thursday, April 10th, 2008

I'm used to running mange.py in my Django apps and I kept forgetting the name of the Google App Engine equivalents. My script only knows how to do two things at the moment, "runserver" and "publish" but now I can manage everything the way I'm accustomed to. Update: Aprill ...

Google App Engine SDK

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

I just learned about Google App Engine a couple of hours ago and I have to say I'm pretty excited about what their doing. I really like the fact that they didn't go out and try to invent their own IDE and scripting language. I'm still really reluctant ...

Keeping Google’s Android Honest

Monday, March 31st, 2008

I just want to start off by urging anyone who is writing open source applications for the Android mobile platform to release their applications under the GNU General Public License V3. The Open Handset Alliance is about to wrap up the first round of the Android Developer Challenge and they're ready ...

OpenID Personas = Cruft

Thursday, March 20th, 2008

I use personas in the same way I think most people are using them in OpenID today. I don't think of them as identity containers, but as address bundles. I have one very creatively labeled "Work" and another labeled "Home". Hmm.... That sounds exactly like how I ...

Distributed Versioning - The new wheel

Friday, February 15th, 2008

With all of the great distributed versioning tools out there it's a wonder everyone is still using traditional client-server versioning systems like SVN or CVS. Especially when you consider how trivial distributed systems are to setup for small projects. Unless your hosting your SVN project with some one ...

Miami Here I come

Thursday, February 14th, 2008

I'll be in Miami along with Kevin Fox, also from Vidoop, toward the end of the month for a couple of different events that should be a lot of fun. I'll be catching BarCamp on the 28th followed by FOWA - Future of Web Apps. I can't wait to ...

Using JanRain OpenID with Zend Framework

Monday, January 28th, 2008

Ok, I know Zend_OpenId is on the way, but for those of us who don't like to wait here's a way to get OpenID working with Zend Framework. Besides, JanRain's libraries tend to be pretty solid and up to date so you won't go wrong using this in place ...

What everyone’s Zend_View_Helper tutorials leave out.

Sunday, January 27th, 2008

There seems to be several Zend_View_Helper tutorials out there and all of them talk about what a view helper is and does, but I always left with one question: How do I make the helpers available to ALL of my views? Then I learned a bit about Zend_Controller_Action_HelperBroker This class can ...