My blog has migrated to a server with a new IP address (this is being served off the new server). I had to upgrade WordPress too, which means I now have shiny new 2.5.1. Go me!

Some tools like Trac require a local copy of your Subversion repository (this requirement might be fixed in a newer version of Trac I guess, but for now it’s an example). If your server is running Subversion version 1.4 or higher then you can happily use svnsync to create a read-only mirror of the repo, but what if it isn’t?

Well, then the trick is to use svk to create the read-only mirror. There’s just one catch (there always is right?) When you init the local svk repo it writes a commit, so when you pull remote changeset #1 it commits it locally as changeset #2 (ugh, that breaks all the Trac links now). With a bit of cunning, you can pass `-s 2` to ask svk to skip the initial commit in your source repository, and start at commit #2.

So the first two commits are rolled up, and committed as changeset #2, and then all following commits are imported with matching changeset numbers!

Things to note: You MUST mirror the root of the repository, otherwise changesets will again go out of sync. (svnsync has the same restriction, so it’s not like svk is worse off here or anything)

To enabled large file support (>2gb) in smbmount, you have to pass ‘-o lfs’ on the command line. Why this isn’t the default, I’m not quite sure. I think it is with smbclient, but it has to be enabled on the command line for smbmount. (ref)

I got an email from someone using VirtualGL to assist with doing 3D visualization over the network, and after discovering that ‘VNC is an “admin nightmare”‘ found my VNC Session Manager. It’s been a while since I tinkered with the source, so I dusted it off and started cleaning it up (It still runs on my FC3 box at home).

So, there’s a new release with features such as: A session chooser (if zenity is detected as installed) that lists your running sessions and allows you to choose which one to reconnect to. There are also fixes to make NFS home directories work correctly. Extra debugging was added by Adam Bradley at Novell, and the TurboVNC client now also has a patch.

So after getting all the VNC code working I wanted to test it out on my machine: a Dell Latitude CPx with ATI Rage Mobility – aka the ati mach64 chipset – aka the one that doesn’t have DRI support enabled by default in the in x.org 6.8.2 build

Sooooo after an entire day of searching, finding, download, installing, testing, failing (need kernel source, install X drivers with correct filenames, X won’t load video drivers with mismatched versions, aaaargh), fueled mainly by a single post on the ubuntu forums I’ve found the trick. The USE=”insecure-drivers” switch is the trick (in Gentoo), but in Fedora it’s BuildDevelDRIDrivers as I found the next morning via an excellent post on how to patch and build the xorg source. The dri driver has been fixed to be secure in x.org 7.2, and hence will build by default for new versions. Once the new x.org rpm had been built and installed (and all the other failed installs had been cleaned up), I had a working mach64 with direct rendering enabled!

Now to get the vglrun part working…. At the moment it complains that it “Could not obtain Pbuffer-capable RGB visual on the server”

OpenID is a decentralized digital identity system, in which any user’s online identity is given by URL (such as for a blog or a home page) [...], and can be verified by any server running the protocol. (wikipedia)

Okay so that’s cool – the idea is that you want to sign in on a web-site that you’ve never seen before, so you give it your OpenID and *poof* you’re in. As part of the package, the web-site can also request some profile information from your OpenID provider, so you don’t have to re-type it. Lots of work has happened behind the scenes to make sure who you say you are is valid, so that the web-site can trust your OpenID.

Unfortunatly you still have to log into your OpenID provider with a username and password. “I thought OpenID was supposed to help with this horrid multiple username and password problem”, I hear you cry – at least you (hopefully) trust your OpenID provider more than you do some abritary web-site.

Unlike most single sign-on architectures, OpenID does not specify the authentication mechanism. (wikipedia)

Cool! So we can pick our own. How about a password-less authentication, that uses your instant messenger identity to confirm your OpenID?

It’s actually easy, you just take a copy of the PHP Standalone OpenID Server, add the required PHP OpenID library, and add a sprinkle of XMPP XEP-0070 support in form of a patch. Bake for a short while, and be sure to serve hot

The SAIX ADSL User Statistics page is great (ADSL account details required). The Firefox Mimimeter plugin shows the current month’s details in you Firefox status bar, but something was lacking. Ahhh – it’s the disclaimer of “the above data does not include any active sessions”.

So I went an wrote a little php script that retrieves the data from the SAIX site, and adds in the current connection’s statistics. This way, the numbers in Firefox’s status bar match my real ADSL usage

Changelog:

• v5: added logout link to make it much easier to swap between accounts
• v4: the default month is now the month when the connection started, not the current month
• v3: only display modified stats for the connections month
• v2: whitespace trim for young connections
• v1: initial release

Mark Quinn pointed out back in August, that the imap authentication plugin suffered from a rather serious security risk. If you knew that a site was using it, you could create cookie that would let you in without having to know a user’s real password. (You did have to know a valid user’s account name).

So I’ve added a Secret Key to the imap options. This key is used to secure the cookie that is created, and will make it almost impossible for outsiders to create cookie to fool wordpress into letting them in. Users with a valid cookie (but they want to fake a login as a different user) will have to do a time consuming brute force attack of their own cookie to determine the Secret Key. (which they could then use to create a valid login cookie for another user account)

Firefox 1.5 is out. I downloaded it a few days ago, but only got around to installing it tonight. Of all my pluings only CuteMenus and Wayback haven’t been upgraded to work with 1.5 (I managed to find ‘bumped’ versions, so they’re working again). I give the Firefox team a 11 out of 10 for all their hard work. The new instant back/forward navigation rocks, the SVG support is cool. Hopefully the browser will pass the Acid2 test soon (Firefox 1.6 maybe? Unfortunatly I guessing we’ll probably have to wait till version 2.0)

I’m busy developing the irc-transport for xmpp.py and the debuging output is coloured via ANSI escape sequences. This works great on a linux terminal, or via PuTTY, but not so great in a win32 console. I searched quite hard on Google for a ‘modern’ ansi.sys or ansi.com replacement, but couldn’t find anything.

So here’s my attempt at making something work in win32.

The executable will spawn a copy of the default command shell (from COMPSEC), unless you give it something to run on the command line. Basically it pump’s stdout and stderr, and parses the ANSI escape codes into win32 console API calls. For quick development I wrote it up in c#, but it looks like some of the .net console async pipe handling code blocks badly, so I may end up porting it to plain c.

I’ve just been doing some coding for the irc-transport for the xmpppy project (now with vcard/whois and channel listing support!) when I came across Lobby4Linux in a channel topic. I think this guy’s blog is great!

In other news Gareth has been working on the G8 REBOOT site. I suggest you swing by and help Make Poverty History.

I’ve just noticed that Gareth picked up on the Rands In Repose: N.A.D.D. article, and that Mark Shuttleworth is behind Canonical/Ubuntu. I also noticed that Rands links to Joel Spolsky.

Man what a small world!