Cool Programming

Windiff for Vista

Fri, 25 May 2007 07:01:16 GMT

I searched for hours today for a version of Windiff that'll worked on Vista. There were many options, but nothing from Microsoft that would install successfully until I found the Windows 2003 SP1 Support Tools.

Single Sign-On

Tue, 22 May 2007 23:28:45 GMT

I've been working on a new computer network lately and they have this concept of single sign-on. I don't think they quite understand what single sign-on means. IMHO, it means you sign-on once and get authenticated across many systems, so you don't have to sign-on a second time. The operators of this network seems to think that single sign-on means you have one sign-on ID across the various systems. In fact, it's not even possible to synchronize your passwords across the various systems, becaue the password have conflicting requirements. So, you have different credentials in every single system across the network. This is really difficult, because I have to sign-in twice, just to get to what I want.

Facebook API

Thu, 10 May 2007 21:56:37 GMT

I just finished applying the Facebook API to import a resume into ResumeBay. I have to say that Facebook has the most complex API that I've even developed against. It's so complex, that it clearly out of the capability of the average developer. To start, you have to redirect the user to the Facebook website in order to login. Once the user returns to your site, the real complexity begins. Even after the user has logged-in and you receive an authtoken, you still have to get a session id. Stop. getSession is a REST call and all the REST calls require a signature parameter. The signature parameter is an MD5 of a string. The string is the catenation of all parameters in name=value format with a secret string appended. Each API also has a call counter that must increase with each new method call. Now I have the session id. Call another API to get the user id and finally a last API call to get the user profile. Don't forget that you have to enumerate every field you want in the profile in another comma delimited parameter. A total of 100+ lines of code just to get the user's profiles. Imagine if I wanted to do something complicated.

http://www.resumebay.net/blog/?guid=20070510163857