Google Apps as single authentication point for your corporate applications

This is an update to my post "Google Apps Premier federated login with PHP". Idea is simple, users do not like passwords, less passwords - less pain and more security.

Nowadays many companies have gone cloud, which covers most needs, but leaves space for homegrown small applications, ideas, prototypes, etc. It is convenient to organize user login into these applications using already existing Google Apps login infrastructure.

This is about using it with PHP.

Database isolation levels and their effects on performance

Some of us are not aware of the tremendous job databases perform, particularly their efforts to maintain the Isolation aspect of ACID. For example, some people believe that transactions are only related to data manipulation and not to queries, which is an incorrect assumption. Transaction Isolation is all about queries, and the consistency and completeness of the data retrieved by queries. This is how it works:

Tip how to manage files on mobile device

Ooops, do I have a backup of my files? Question is usually asked when it is too late (: Does anybody have a backup of files stored on mobile phone?

Login simultaneously: incognito mode

You may have heard about "incognito mode" in Google Chrome or "private-browsing" in Mozilla Firefox. In these modes browsers do not save anything to the hard drive, cache, cookies, etc. After exiting this mode all activity is cleaned up.  One interesting bonus you get of these features is login into different accounts at once.

Skype history: easy access, backup and search.

People who use Skype store important information in Skype chat history, that is true, unfortunatly. How often you realise that important url,contact,login info, etc left on your work computer or even was formatted with last OS reinstall ?  There is a perfect solution to overcome this:

Automated differential backup using 7zip for linux/windows

There are a lot of ways of doing differential backups, tons of software, freeware of shareware. I want to share one I didn't know about which I liked very much. It is unfair so little information can be found the Net about 7-zip archival tool, which can handle differential backups with ease.  Article is for CLI geeks, who understands where to push these commands )

Catsone gmail integration plugin

http://catsone.com/ is great SaaS recruiting tool used by many companies. One of the HR manager operation is sorting emails received from candidates. To ensure smoothness of the process this emails should be added to CATS system, so other managers can see full candidate history. There is an outlook plugin for this purpose. Assuming outlook is not in favor in our work place, I wrote GMail integration plugin.

Google Apps Premier federated login with PHP

Google supports OpenID authentication or behaves as openid identity provider, using Google Apps accounts. Basically it means, user can use GA credentials to sign in into different services. This is especially useful for companies to unite other internal services with Google Apps single sign-in point. This is related to Standard edition as well.

I have got it working for PHP. Here is the story.

SOCKS proxy server with SSH

SSH protocol and openssh are full of features. It is not just remote terminal program.

You probably know about static port forwarding, local and remote. It allows to map local port to any host via SSH gateway or map incoming port on SSH gateway to local one. It is very useful in some situations. But what is dynamic port forwarding ?

SPDY - new revolution from Google ?
Recently, everybody heard the latest news from Google about new protocol which can speedup and make more comfortable internet surfing. If not, better to read <a href="http://sites.google.com/a/chromi ...