OpenID, GWT 1.4, Zooming Timelines & more

MyHippocampus now supports OpenID. While this may mean nothing to you I promise you it's a good thing. The idea is that you'll be able to say goodbye to remembering 5 different passwords and 10 different usernames for all the sites you login to on the Internet & having to register and enter your mother's maiden name just to post a comment on some dumb philately forum.

Yes I see you in the back wearing the penguin t-shirt and rolling your eyes saying 'announcing OpenID support is sooo November 2006.' Be that as it may, we're still letting you sign up using a standard username & password, but I'd definitely recommend getting an openid. It's easy and you'll have all the cutting edge nerd points you can handle. You'll even be able to berate other sites for not having OpenID support, which is half the fun.

Next up is some huge improvements to the MyHippocampus timelines. After much searching and omphaloskepsis, I believe we've developed a nice intuitive method of visualizing your temporal data. We won't rest here long, but if you found the old version kludgy (it was) you should zoom around the new one.

Finally everything just works a lot faster & better, due in no small part to a new release of the Google Web Toolkit. Version 1.4 is of course just as wonderful as 'the google' promised it would be. If you're skeptical about GWT, check out the sublime beauty of ImageBundles. If this doesn't light your fire... you must not care much about minimizing HTTP round-trips! sigh.

That's all for now and apologies for the technical nature of this post. Sometimes the nerd part just takes control. A couple days ago, out of the blue, Microsoft just decided to up and send me, unbidden and in very expedient looking 'next-day-by-6:30am-hand-delivered etc etc' packaging, a black t-shirt that says simply 'geek.' Eerie that they can just tell. Disconcerting that they send t-shirts when they know.