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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!

You know that your country is becoming a banana republic when the three main news items of the day are about three separate cases of corruption regarding important politicians.

Image courtesy of Emmanuele Bassi

The Minister of Justice Mario Clemente Mastella (UDEUR, center-left coalition), his wife (president of the Regional Council of Campania) and other members of his party have been accused of bribery. When, on Wednesday, his wife was placed under house arrest he resigned but he will continue to support the coalition on a case-by-case basis. This means that with only three seats, on a total of 315 elected senators, he will have a strong blackmailing power as the center-left coalition has a majority of one in the Senate.

The governor of Sicily, Salvatore Cuffaro (UDC, center-right coalition), was found guilty of having helped the Mafia and was given a five-year sentence but he will not go to jail until the automatic appeal process is concluded. This will take years so, despite the sentence, he can continue to govern Sicily.

In the meantime Naples prosecutors have called for Silvio Berlusconi (Forza Italia, center-right coalition), the former prime minister, to be sent for trial on corruption charges. In a separate criminal case he is also accused of trying to pay some senators elected with the center-left coalition to vote against the government.

When using drop-down lists it’s not always a good idea to preselect something. Why? Because someone will forget to change the default selection and you will get the preselected item, usually the first one in alphabetical order. Do you want an example? Look at my IELTS certificate:

Click for bigger image

Half a day of downtime is bad, but two major outages in less then ten days are too much! It seems that Unixshell (barisione.org is a virtual XEN server hosted by them) is having some serious connectivity problems and they don’t know what redundancy is, even if on their web page they say:

Built-in redundancy through multiple redundant network connections and redundant router and switch configuration.

By the way, my server is finally back online!

Whoever used g_hash_table_foreach() knows how painful is to use since C doesn’t have closures, so you have to create a struct to pass local variables to the callback.

Jean-Yves Lefort wrote a patch for bug #500507 (now marked as accept-commit_now) that finally adds iterators to hash tables. Using glib 2.16 you will be able to do this:

GHashTableIter it;
gpointer key;
gpointer value;

g_hash_table_iter_init (table, &it);
while (g_hash_table_iter_next (&it, &key, &value))
  {
    /* do something with key and value */
  }

Thank you Jean-Yves!

On Friday, I took my last exam!

Now it’s time to work full time on my thesis (I should graduate in January) and to start to look for a good job. Speakig of which, I already got some interesting proposals but if you are interested here is my résumé (PDF, HTML in Italian and PDF in Italian).

Cuba, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Myanmar (Burma), Quebec and Italy are excluded from the Android Developer Challenge. Probably Italy and Quebec are now in the axis of evil, American bombs are coming.

Just joking! Quebec and Italy are excluded because of local restrictions and I’m not surprised as we have plenty of stupid laws. For the details read Fabrizio Giudici’s post on the topic.

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