Many companies have tried to make a universally-acceptable login system. Microsoft tried to promote their .Net Passport for years. Google owns so much it feels like a universal login for almost everything. It's the same with Yahoo! But, in each case, they were doomed because everyone was afraid for security reasons. If I give Microsoft my payment information so that I don't have to put it in on sites again, just how much does Microsoft know about me? How much information are they collecting and sharing about me? No one really knows.

Open-source advocates always say that the solution is an open-source thing that is tested by the community for security reasons. But creating a decentralized system is really hard. Thankfully, some people have started such a decentralized and secure system.

OpenID is a specification for a decentralized login system.� You can register for an account at any number of places such as LiveJournal and MyOpenID.� Also, if you're a bit tech savvy, you can create your own OpenID server to authenticate yourself.� (I just installed it in 20 minutes through phpMyID and it works great.)� An encrypted version of my password is stored on my server and therefore no OpenID-enabled site even gets a password from me.� The OpenID site redirects to my site to be authenticated.� I can also give the OpenID sites information such as my language, time zone, etc.

Who knows if it will catch on, but it seems to be a good idea.� Just to help it catch on, you can now post comments on my blog with your OpenID (thanks to the WPOpenID Plugin).

Everyone seems to like Skype. (Although, no one that I know ever feels free to call me.) Apparently Skype was started by the same people that started Kazaa. And apparently they're about to do it again.

Their newest project is called Joost. I'm not sure why, but apparently they're trying to recreate network TV over the Internet. I'm not sure why I'd want to choose from a number of channels because there's usually nothing on. I mean, I like podcasts on demand better.

The funnest stuff, in my opinion, is the stuff you can do while watching their full-screen TV video. Apparently you can get little semi-transparent widgets to chat with other people watching the program, get your IM application up on the screen, etc. It seems like a new way to watch TV where you are doing other interactive things right on top of the screen.

To build buzz and build up their network infrastructure, they are using that old, "You can only invite a friend or two" method. And no, I don't have any invites.

I've always been a fan of animated movies, but everyone knows my favorites are from Pixar. Found via digg, here's a detailed look into the history of the company and the rise to a film studio. It's pretty amazing that John Lasseter started creating Toy Story with no feature film experience at all. Also, I had no idea that animation from The Wrath of Khan was so amazing for it's day.

At work, this week is going to be all about CakePHP. What's CakePHP? For those programmers, it's similar to Ruby on Rails or Django for Python, but it's in PHP. For the less technical, it's also called a web framework for PHP.

So what does it really do for those who don't understand all that mumbo-jumbo? Well, once you get the hang of it, it's an easy way to create websites. All of the form and templating functions are entirely built into the system. I was just following the CakePHP tutorial for making a simple blog. You only need to add a aouple lines of code in the right spot to make a simple create, edit, and delete section. Plus, it uses mod_rewrite to make the page system work very easily and easily editable. It's a lot easier to get a quick handle on than content management frameworks like Drupal or Joomla.

I'll tell y'all how well it went at the end of the week. I think the week after that will be Drupal week, so hopefully I'll give you some tech tips over the next weeks. And I don't want to hear abut how I should be using Django or something - I'll get there one of these days after Emmaus Project is in pre-pre-alpha.