Blog

A picture is worth a thousand words:

Flash plugin in the WebKit GTK demo application

Flash plugin in the WebKit Qt demo application

Since a few hours ago both WebKit GTK and Qt support plugins! Thanks to everyone who worked on this, in particular to Rodney Dawes (who wrote the original patch in the past months) and to Marc Ordinas i Llopis (who maintained the patch and worked on the Qt port, and who recently joined us at Collabora). A thank you also to Alp Toker and Simon Hausmann who reviewed the patch.

Update: See also Marc’s blog for details.

$ history|awk '{a[$2]++ } END{for(i in a){print a[i] " " i}}'|sort -rn|head
368 cd
355 l
274 git
231 vi
131 u
130 q
101 find
94 time
86 grep
79 svn

Some clarifications:

• “l” is an alias for “ls -lhA --color”
• “u” is an alias for “cd ..”
• “q” is an alias for “exit” (I also use CTRL-D for that)
• “time” is there because I use “time make” to see how much time I need to compile things

This blog post was brought to you by the huge time required to link WebKit (I want gold as the default linker!)

“People who open a blog should be identifiable and they should ask people writing comments to be identifiable too.”
– Maurizio Gasparri, from punto-informatico.it

Do I have to use my passport every time I write a comment on a blog? And what do I have to do if the server is hosted in another country?

The sad thing about this is that Gasparri is not just a random ignorant politician: he is the former Italian Minister of Communications, and maybe also the next one as his party is probably going to win the elections on Sunday.

Speaking of which, yesterday I watched a report on BBC about Italian elections and now I’m very sad .

Dear LazyWeb,
  Every time I log into GNOME I have to disable the “Allow to control the pointer using the keyboard” option in “Keyboard Preferences” if I want to be able to use the numpad on my external keyboard. Why disabling it once is not enough? How can I permanently disable this option?

Matthew is leaving the house to move to London:

I wonder why I took a OS/2 Warp box (21 floppy disks + 14 for the bonus pack), a KDE bag and a linux.conf.au 2007 bag…

The LazyWeb was not that useful but I was able to find a plugin that does what I need. It is listed in the plugins page on xchat.org but for some reasons I didn’t find it the first time I searched.

The notify channels plugin has every basic feature I need, and it’s also simple enough to be modified adding some other useful features I would like to have.

Thanks Vlad!

Update: the plugin doesn’t work anymore, xchat-gnome doesn’t load it even if it’s listed in the gconf key /apps/xchat/plugins/loaded. The plugin is not even listed in the “Scripts and Plugins” tab in the preferences dialog. Suggestions on how to fix this?

Dear LazyWeb,
  Is there a way to get a notification pop-up every time someone says something in some IRC rooms? But only in some configured rooms! I don’t want a pop-up for every message in every room as I’m paid to work, not to read IRC.

I’m using xchat-gnome and no, I don’t want to use xchat.

King’s College Chapel by Jonathan Rawle. License:
More King’s College Chapel pictures on flickr

Sorry Alban, next month we will swap desks .

Everyone on Planet GNOME is starting a new job, so now it’s my turn: tomorrow I will move to Cambridge (this Cambridge, not one of the other ones) where I will work for Collabora.

It’s sad to leave so many friends here but I will work on cool technologies like Telepathy, Cambridge is very nice (the office is just in front of King’s college), and everyone at Collabora seems nice.

Today Emanuele and I defended our thesis (but the graduation ceremony will be on Friday)!

The topic of the thesis was the Telekinesis project, a system to easily transfer files on a LAN without having to configure a Samba share or something similar. The project is based on the Telepathy framework, Empathy and telepathy-salut, a connection manager for serverless instant messaging in local networks which discovers automatically available contacts using Avahi. Despite being based on instant messaging programs you don’t have to rely on the chat to send/receive files thanks to nautilus-sendto and to the modularity of Telepathy.

Sending a file with nautilus-sendto

An important requirement for the thesis was to develop a secure system: other users should not be able to intercept the files you are sending and they should not be able to pretend to be someone else. This is hard to achieve without relying on a certification authority or something similar, so we decided to use an SSH-like system where it is the user’s responsibility to decide whether to trust or not the other contact.

This means that contacts that support secure chats and file transfers will be considered untrusted and identified in the user interface with the “security-medium” icon. When the user decide that a contact’s identity can be trusted (by chatting online or directly as you are in a local area network and maybe you’re both sitting in the same room) he marks him as trusted and, from that moment on, the system will check the contact’s credentials (i.e. auto-generated X.509 certificates) to verify they didn’t change. This is not the best level of security you can reach but it’s the best you can have without something like a certification authority and without requiring any extra efforts for users.

Contact list with trust levels

Chat window with trust level button

Accept file transfer dialog with trust level button

  
Credentials dialog

Note that the file transfer part of the thesis will be merged soon with upstream programs but the security part is a proof of concept and cannot be merged as-is, so don’t criticise the user interface too much!

Telekinesis screencast (Ogg Theora video, 946 kB)

Both the thesis and the slides used during the defence are available on my web site (but they are in Italian).

We would like to thank all the Collabora guys who worked with us, in particular Sjoerd and Xavier. And, of course, our supervisors fog and gg!