every108minutes

On some recent Grails projects, I have been looking at using the Twitter and Facebook OAuth signin process. This process allows you to authenticate users based on their Twitter/Facebook logins, without the need for the user to expose their passwords to your site. When you create your 'application' within Twitter or Facebook, it is necessary to define the URL where the application can be accessed. Twitter and Facebook will only redirect to this URL during the authentication process. I have tested running some applications on Heroku or Appfog , with Twitter and Facebook happy to redirect to the appropriate URLs with successful authentication. However, when testing locally, I follow these steps to work through the authentication process. 1. App Context Ensure that the Grails app context is '/' - as the application is generally deployed this way on Heroku/Appfog: Config.groovy grails.app.context = '/' 2. Port Binding: While the local application w...

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Arthur C. Clarke Its been talked about before , but while reading the ' The God Delusion ' by Richard Dawkins (and no he doesn't Twitter !), the meme of the Cargo Cult once again caught my attention. Cargo Cult: Waiting for Frum Anthropologists have observed the phenomenon of island inhabitants (most famously of Pacific Melanesia and New Guinea) mimicking and performing rituals of visiting advanced cultures in the belief that these acts will provide them with material goods and wealth. This phenomenon is known as a Cargo Cult . The islanders observed that the visiting people enjoyed great luxuries, with seemingly little or no useful work required in return - they sat behind desks while new or repaired items appeared on the island as if by magic. In one instance, on the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides (now known as Vanuata), the islanders awaited the return the messianic Mr John Frum who would bear ...