Till Klampäckel’s profile

This is some code I use to manually decode:

<?php
 
public static function decode($data)
 
{
 
    $vars = preg_split(
 
        '/([a-zA-Z_\x7f-\xff][a-zA-Z0-9_\x7f-\xff^|]*)\|/',
 
        $data,
 
        -1,
 
        PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY | PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE
 
    );
    $result = array();
 
    for ($i=0; $i<=(count($vars)/2); $i=$i+2) {
 
        if (!isset($vars[$i])) {
 
            continue;
 
        }
 
        $key = $vars[$i];
 
        $val = $vars[$i+1];
        $result[$key] = unserialize($val);
 
    }
 
    return $result;
 
}

I think I found it in the PHP manual a few years back.

Posted in PHP Session Debugging.

Sat, 26 Mar 2011 at 02:06:53 GMT

While I agree that OpenID is far from perfect, I see a magnitude of issues with outsourcing 'identity' to any commercial entity.

And it's not just that I don't want Facebook, Google or Twitter to know everything about my social graph, it's also the technical issues that come with it when you rely on a third party.

For me the number one problem with OpenID is that the so-called providers a) never advertised it enough and b) they are just providers, never consumers. So what good is OpenID from Yahoo, Google and what not if they don't accept anyone's OpenID themselves?

Btw, to ease the pain we started using Janrain (formerly RPXnow) to support Facebook Connect, Google, Yahoo, AOL and OpenID in general. Integration has been extremely easy and smooth.

Of course in a perfect world I'd rather implement this myself but the issues that come with it with all the different providers are unreal. And realizing that e.g. OpenID with Google requires a special quirk is just one of the issues people face when they attempt to support this idea.

Posted in Using Twitter for Comments.

Fri, 11 Mar 2011 at 12:32:00 GMT