Archive for the 'FOSS' Category

irssi, putty and unicode characters

Published
by
Julian
on Wed, July 16 2008
in FOSS, Ubuntu, apps and foss4win
. 0 Comments

People love irssi. Why wouldn’t they? It’s the best irc client in the world.

The problem is that not every company runs Linux powered computers, not every employer allows you to install an irc client on your pc at work.

But you as a geek of course always carry around your USB-flashdrive with the latest version of putty to play nethack and/or to connect to your irssi at home via ssh. The only problem you got is that you can’t get utf-8 characters to work and from what I heard a lot of people are having those problems.

irssiputty4.png

Accents, umlauts or even kanji aren’t going to be displayed using the wrong configuration. That they’re displayed for you on the other side doesn’t mean that you’re outgoing text is encoded correctly and that other people are able to see what you wrote.

irssiputty1.png

The first step is to set putty to use the utf-8 encoding. Open putty’s configuration and go to Window -> Translation and set the encoding to utf-8.

irssikde1.png

Next step is to set up irssi. Use the following commands:

/set term_charset UTF-8
/set recode_autodetect_utf8 ON
/set recode_fallback UTF-8
/set recode ON
/set recode_out_default_charset UTF-8
/set recode_transliterate ON

KeePassX, Cross Platform Password Manager

Published
by
Julian
on Mon, July 14 2008
in FOSS, Ubuntu and foss4win
. 4 Comments

I bet I’m not the only one having to remember countless of passwords for a unknown number of different sites, mobile phones and all the stuff requiring the use of passwords. Today, passwords are used everywhere you look, face it, they won’t go away any time soon.

Another thing people just start to realise, passwords like “123456″, “qwerty” or “password” aren’t really secure and the convenience you gain using such simple ones stays in no relation to the risk they put yourself at.

So, what do you need? You need something to save your passwords, you need to know where this password belongs to, you need something to help you create secure passwords quickly.
In addition to that the software should be open source and being cross platform wouldn’t harm either.

And again, looking on Sourceforge was a pretty good idea. I found KeePassX, an application satisfying all my needs.

The download page features, besides the source code, distribution packages for Ubuntu, OpenSuse, Fedora just as a package for OSX and a zip file for Windows. I know that at least Ubuntu does offer an older release in its repositories but when it comes to security, I want to stay up-to-date.

After installing it you can find it in Applications -> Accessories -> KeePassX on your gnome-panel.

The first thing is to create a new database. The database will be the archive of you passwords, usernames, websites and so on. Databases can be protected by password, by a small key file or/and by both.

keexpass08.png

Next step is creating groups for the different kinds of passwords you want to same like forums, websites, svn, ftp-servers, games. Besides the name you can assign icons to those groups for better usability.

Now that you created at least one group you can create entries, those entries may contain title, username, url, password, expiration date, comment and an attachment. You can either come up with a password yourself, or use the built-in password generator. Come to speak of it, this password generator is really worth mentioning. Checkboxes enable you to choose which kind of characters you want to be used, like lower/upper case letters, numbers, special characters, spaces and underlines. You can define a list of characters to be used yourself as well. Let the randomness begine! ….wait, there’s another feature of the generator: The option “entropy collection” allows you to generate your own little randomness recording mouse movements and key strokes.

keexpass05.png

Once you saved the password you want be able to use them. KeePassX allows to view them, to copy them to your clipboard or to use a feature called “Perform Auto Type”, which types in your username and password on your page of choice.

keexpass06.png

“It’s not just about privacy. It’s about user autonomy”

Published
by
Julian
on Thu, July 10 2008
in FOSS, Ubuntu and www
. 2 Comments

copyright by dgen, some rights reserved

The sacrifice … is user autonomy. If you decide that Google Docs doesn’t the way you want, you can’t tinker with the software and fix it. If you want to share a map on your website, you need Yahoo’s permission. If you want to use a new social networking site, you have to re-enter all your personal data and re-invite all your friends. The data and code belong to someone else, and they’re hidden behind servers that you, the user, aren’t allowed to touch.

–Evan Prodromou, identi.ca

Take the power back, take control, use free software, use laconica powered µ-blogging

Google open sources browser sync

Published
by
Julian
on Thu, July 10 2008
in FOSS and www
. 0 Comments

A while ago Google announced the discontinuation of their browser sync addon and service which, at least for some users was a pretty shocking step.

Google now just announced that they released its code into the open source world under a BSD License.

I’m curious and exited at what the community and if they will engage in development, google apps integration? Firefox 3 support is, without a doubt one of the first things you can expect.

What I’d love to see is the support to use personal servers, webspace or maybe even your gmail account to store your browser’s settings and bookmarks. To give users the choice where to store their data is pretty much all I want.

Can’t access identi.ca with Firefox [UPDATE]

Published
by
Julian
on Sun, July 6 2008
in FOSS and www
. 2 Comments

In all seriousness I’m starting to get convinced the internet is trying to pwn me.

After my ongoing struggle with OpenID now Firefox won’t open identi.ca anymore.

There’s a error page displayed saying that the page seems to be valid but Firefox can’t establish a connection to the server. I tried using new, different profiles and safe mode but nothing did the trick.

I thought maybe the server, for some strange reason, banned my ip but restarting my router did not help either.

Now, what’s really weird is that other browsers are working fine, they can open the site. And no one seems to have the same problem over at identi.ca, so I’ve to assume that somehow I, my computer or my Firefox is causing it.

Maybe sacrificing a chicken, while dancing naked on the street will help… dunno

I’m all open for ideas what to do, where to look and so on.

UPDATE: It’s working again! I’m not really 100% sure if something I did or something Evan did fixed it. I’m just glad it’s working again :D