BarCamp Philly rocked this weekend. Somewhere around 200 people piled into the University of the Arts with amazing amounts of energy to share ideas on tech and community. I met a lot of great people from the local area that I hadn’t met before. There were people from all kinds of backgrounds: development, design, community organization, marketing, and social media. The organizers, Roz Duffy and JP Toto, and all the volunteers deserve lots of credit for making the event a huge success.
Dave Konopka's software development blog
Archives for the year of: 2008
I’m really excited that Philly will host its first BarCamp “un”conference in just a few weeks. There’s a ton of energy around the event with lots of folks from different backgrounds signed up to attend. The planners have put together a great location for the day in classroom space at the University of the Arts in Center City.
Craigslist is my goto site for second-hand gear. Concert tickets, computer hardware, gaming systems… No matter what I’m looking for I know eventually someone will put one up for sale.
Scanning through endless listings of unrelated garbage though is boring. That’s why I use Google Alerts to do the boring work for me. Google Alerts keeps an eye on Craigslist and sends me an email whenever keywords that I’m interested in are posted anywhere on the site.
One of the things I work on at Wharton is a student portal. The portal is a public web site but most features are protected by a web form log in. A common complaint from students is that they’re forced to log in to the web site after they’ve already logged into a school computer lab computer with the same exact account. Shouldn’t the portal already know who they are without another log in?
After doing some experimenting, I’ve found it’s possible to combine anonymous access, web form authentication, and Integrated Windows authentication. I’m throwing out my approach in case anyone needs to do something similar. We run ColdFusion on IIS servers to power our apps but you may be able to adapt this for other platforms.