Rob Ferrer’s Thoughts and Writings

I woke up on Easter morning to find a good covering of snow, which was a bit of a surprise! Unfortunately we had a bit of a lie-in, so a lot of it had melted by the time I got out to get some pics. There’s a few in my gallery though, including some of my faves:

According to an elderly couple, all 11 ducklings survived the snow.

I like this one, but it’s a shame the daffodils were dying!

This is my attempt at being arty on a walk on Easter Monday.

See the rest here.

I read about OpenID a while ago, and decided now I have a blog, I should get myself an ID to let me log in to the various sites that support it.

I assumed there would be a WordPress plugin that let me do this, and I quickly found and installed WP-OpenID. To my disappointment I discovered that this plugin only adds the option for visitors to login using their OpenID, but not to use my blog as an OpenID. This does mean if you want to comment you can sign in with your OpenID however!

There are lots of 3rd party OpenID providers, and in fact I probably have more than one through other sites, but I wanted to keep everything separate from other providers, so I decided to set up my own.

Now, from here on, I am not reliant on WordPress, and this applies to any homepage or blog, whatever the platform. This is why I didn’t find many useful search results when searching for WordPress OpenID providers/plugins.

The solution is to install a little PHP application called phpMyID. There are lots of other blog posts that describe this process, but I will put a quick summary of what I did here. This assumes basic PHP/technical knowledge.

Firstly I downloaded phpMyID from here and unzipped it. The readme is pretty good - read it! I renamed MyID.config.php to index.php since I put it in it’s own directory (in fact own sub-domain: openid.robferrer.co.uk). Note, somewhat unusually, the config file is the main file which should be loaded, and is not included by another file as you would find in many other apps.

The readme tells you to upload the files and visit them. In fact this is only required if you are running PHP in safe mode, but I did it anyway (I also noticed a PHP error, but I’ll mention that later).

Follow the instructions to create the MD5 hash. I did this on a linux command line, and don’t like entering plain text passwords directly because it stays in the history. I could probably have worked out another way of typing the command, but the easiest solution is just to type ‘history -c’ after you’re done to clear the history.

I mentioned that I had a php error. This seems to be any configuration options that aren’t set (left as default). It works ok, but may (depending on your server settings) display warnings which prevents the headers being modified. The simplest solution to this is to turn off error/warning display in the php settings or (as I did), add the line “error_reporting(0);” to the top of your config file.

Other changes I made were to turn paranoid mode on (this asks you each time if you want to share your ‘identity’ with a site), and set up the sreg array with my details (to save you looking it up, the UK timezone is ‘Europe/London’, and country is ‘GB’). I’ll leave it up to you to decide how much of this information you want to fill in, bearing in mind any site which you log in to will be able to read it. I also set the idp_url, but it’s probably not needed

Re-upload the files and check you can log in. You may have to use the .htaccess (I didn’t), see the readme.

Finally, you presumably don’t want to enter your phpMyID url when you log in to a site, so put the following tags in to your homepage header:
<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/” />
(obviously replace http://openid.robferrer.co.uk/ with the URL of your phpMyID installation). If you want to use your blog URL, edit the WordPress header in Presentation->Theme Editor. You should now be able to enter your blog or homepage URL on any site that supports OpenID.

I had a small issue that stopped me logging in as www.robferrer.co.uk instead of openid.robferrer.co.uk. Not sure what the issue was. but this seems to be ok now using the settings described above.

I hope this helps someone searching for the same things as me!

In September last year, Abby bought a phone from The Mobile Outlet offering completely free line rental in the form of cashback.

The first cashback was due in January, but we heard nothing from the claim. I discovered today that Mobile Matters (UK) Ltd (T/A The Mobile Outlet) went into administration on 15 Feb. We’ve submitted a claim to the administrators, but I don’t hold out much hope, which means we are £420 out of pocket!!

The next step is for Abby to ring T-Mobile to see if they will reduce her line rental - I’ll keep you posted.

The Mobile Outlet site is not working at the moment, but I got the administrator’s details from Google’s Cache. If you can’t get those details, they ask you to send details to:

Begbies Traynor, Burley House, 12 Clarendon Road, Leeds LS2 9NF or by e-mail to mark.pintar@begbies-traynor.com

Another thing worth doing is signing the Downing Street Petition to make the networks responsible.

Let me know if you’re in the same boat. I’ll keep this updated if we hear anything from the administrators or T-Mobile.

[Update: 26 March] : Abby got an email confirming she was listed as a creditor of the company -it’ll be interesting to see what happens!

[Update: 2 April]: We managed to persuade T-Mobile to reduce the price plan - see the main post.

I went to The Outdoors Show at the NEC Birmingham on Saturday.

I had a pretty good time. I was a bit disappointed about the small amount of kayaking stands, but the others were pretty good. There was a fun looking high-ropes course, quite a few climbing walls, and a temporary cave, but they seemed to be mainly aimed at the kids and I’d feel a bit odd queuing up with all the 12 year olds!

Events like the Outdoors Show seem a bit odd to me, in that we pay (well, I had a free ticket, but Abby and my dad didn’t) to go to what is essentially a big shop/advert! Plently of people seem to be happy to pay though - it was pretty busy.

I did get a bit of a chance to try out my new camera, so here’s a shot of the Ford Skymasters Challenge - some strange but cool climbing competition held pretty much on the ceiling of the NEC!

There are loads of cashback sites around these days, offering money for doing things like completing surveys, shopping, or social networking, but this is a new one on me:

My Search Funds pays you to search the web! it uses Ask as its search engine, which seems pretty good (although I have to admit I didn’t use it before signing up to this). I signed up yesterday, did 15 searches in my first day, and found 35p in my account. This doesn’t sound much, but it would add up over time, and all I did was change the search engine I use. Another good thing is that there are no toolbars or spyware to add - it’s just another search engine to choose from the main search box in Firefox (presumably the same in IE).

Use my link to sign up and I get a small percentage of your revenue - this doesn’t mean you get any less though!

I’ve bought myself a lovely new Nikon D40 DSLR camera - it arrived on Tuesday. Unfortunately I was tight and ordered a memory card from MyMemory, which is cheaper, but it takes longer to arrive. This means I can’t use it which is really annoying!

I’ll report more on it when I can actually play with it!

Update (11:14): The memory card has arrived, I’ve had a quick play, but I must resist otherwise my customers won’t be too happy!

Yesterday I returned from the National Student Rodeo 2008 where I was helping out with safety. Having spent two days jumping in the water attached to a rope, and hauling out swimmers and their kit, I am absolutely knackered and sore everywhere.

Thanks to Carrick (Pyro) for organising the safety team, Dave for the safety refresher, Martin for his advice and pointers, and Nick and his team for organising a great weekend, and everyone else!!

Welcome to my blog. I’m not sure what I will be writing here, and it will most likely be very boring - we shall see!

Feel free to comment etc!