A day or two ago I silently released a new update to TimeCert. It features amongst other things a new javascript that you can use in your own blog or other application by modifying your template.

TimeCert is a simple service to prove the existence of something at a certain time. Many writers, inventors and musicians have traditionally sent themselves sealed envelopes of their work so the postal mark provides a third party time stamp of their work incase of future dispute. TimeCert is just like this. Rather than send a sealed envelope you calculate a digest or fingerprint of what it is you want timestamped and send it to TimeCert. TimeCert will tell you the first time it was presented said digest.

These digests are pretty easy to calculate in server side languages such as Ruby, PHP and Java. You just calculate it and make a request to the server with it such as:

http://timecert.org/a94a8fe5ccb19ba61c4c0873d391e987982fbbd3

I provide a bunch of both human and machine readable formats, to make it as easy as possible to link it into your application.

What about blogs and other application where you might not be in control of the source control?

Now there is a fairly simple way of integrating TimeCert into your blog using javascript. This means you just have to modify your template 2 or 3 places to use it.

You basically load the timecert javascript and call a function on a element within your html page. This calculates the digest on the fly in the browser and inserts a TimeCert link in the page. For full instructions see the TimeCert home page

I have to say though that there will be problems with Typo based blogs like this one as it dynamically modifies the timestamp of the blog entry. But I’ve been testing it for a while on my blog Neubia and it seems to work fine.

I like to follow the situation in Colombia and Latin America closely for my libertarian blog Econotrix. For that the Colombian news paper El Tiempo is one of the sources that I read frequently.

Recently thy have featured a complete redesign into something that looks more like Wired than a Latin American newspaper site. It looks very nice and offers RSS, readers blogs (complete with beta badge), forums and much more.

My favorite paper here in Panama is La Prensa which is not bad from a technical stand point. They have recently introduced a news blog. Unfortunately La Prensa hide the URLs for their articles within an annoying single frame frameset.

Just released version 0.5 of EzCrypto my easy to use crypto library for Ruby as well as Rails. From a usage point of view theres not really much new, but I wrote a bit about it over on my nerd blog New EzCrypt release

OneCommune has just published an interview with me about my discussion system Talk.org.

OneCommune is a great resource for forum operators. Il foro de tutti Forae you might say if you like me know neither Latin nor Italian.

It appears that the new Google Checkout only support US merchants. How did I find this out? I signed in with my Danish AdWords account and they helpfully filled the sign up form in with my address and AdWords account details, only they changed my country to the US and won’t let me change it.

Now it doesn’t really suprise me. US payment processors are really scared of foreigners, so Google Checkout aren’t really that much different from most other vendors. However there is at the time of writing ZERO information on their site mentioning this tiny but relevant fact. It brings me back to the early days of the web, when 80% of all web forms would require a valid state, zip and US phone number for signing up for their free web services. This because no one tested non US services.

Actually come to think of it when I tried to buy TurboTax earlier this year to do my US tax return, they wouldn’t sell the downloadable version to me with out a US address.

The other funny thing is that Google already have the infrastructure via their AdSense program to handle international merchants. I guess I should be patient. It is the first release.