twittering rubbish!

I’ve decided to let the renewal of my domain name “calcylator.com” slip. The site was my web 2.0 idea that never got off the ground, the idea was simple, if you use ebay (as a seller) you need to calculate your costs, although ebay don’t hide fees from you the listing process doesn’t make it very obvious and if you sell a lot keeping track of your profit & loss is difficult… so I developed a site to track these and other costs (packaging etc).

I stumbled across this the other day, I’ve no idea why the fedora team would go to the effort of making a really nice theme for the lock dialogue for gnome screen saver then leave it “disabled by default”. After a quick google I found the ubuntu guys have been up to something similar, so here a quick how to enable the fedora art work on the gnome-screensaver lock screen.

To enable paste this into a terminal (NOT root, as your normal user).

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme system


To switch it back:

gconftool-2 -s --type=string /apps/gnome-screensaver/lock_dialog_theme default


It’s taken me much longer to get this together than initially intended, so my apologies for that. Depending on your reasons for buying your n800 will make a difference to how much this document is relevant. What I wanted to do was concentrate on getting your n800 up and running, i.e. you’ve covered the basics, now lets install some applications to make this brick useful.

Before re-flashing my device, I always take a list of what is installed, here’s what’s on there at the moment…

becomeroot
camera,
canola
dates
devicescape
fmradio
hildon-theme-cacher
hildon-theme-plankton
maemo-serivice-handler
maemo-wordpy
maemokrypt
media center
microb-browser
openvpn
webmail notify
mplayer
navicore
openssh
oss-statusbar-cpu
pidgin
python2.5-runtime
simplelauncher
skype
videocenter

I won’t cover them all here, as we’d all fall asleep, so I’ll pick out some favourites…let’s get installing!

Before.

As part of my website overhaul, I’ve finally gotten round to styling my /files/ directory. I was surprised at how easy it was actually, and the benefits far out way the time taken to set it up, not only does this part of the site now “fit in”, but I can apply analytics tracking and adsense I’m sure there probably is a wordpress plugin that can achieve the same thing… probably better, but I find my list of plugins ever growing and since I don’t need on for this I figure if Apache can do it, let Apache do it!

I’ve been following the activity over at blogsecurity, their activities are very interesting and quite commendable. After some shameless delay I decided to read though their WP Security White Paper and apply some of the steps… yes I did say some, harden security folk will insist that you should follow all of the whitepaper to be security, which is probably true, but one should never forget that security is about risk… and in basic terms accessibility vs security, for example I won’t ever lock my wp-admin down to a single IP as I’ve been know to blog at work, home, around my parents place and even moderate comments on the train! Thus my wp-admin isn’t as secure as someone who did lock it down, but this is a risk I’m willing to live with.

I saw this digg article the other day and it lead me to something interesting. …

All Firefox add-ons must now use a secure method for auto-updating (see bug 378216 and this guide for more details)

Reference: Mozilla Gran Paradiso Alpha 8 Release Notes

In general this is a good thing, and I’m 100% behind any security improvements the mozilla team make….I just hope they make this amenable to the newbies, I recently had a go at writing a small “status bar” firefox addon, and the 1st thing I spotted when installing it was that it was “unsigned”… I looked into the documentation and found it very confusing, and when I finally got it to work I ran into the age old issue that I didn’t have a certificate that was signed by a main stream CA, as such I would need to distribute that as well.

• Pidgin Plug-in SIPE (Sip Exchange Protocol)
  The Microsoft Live Communication Server has support very similar the Sip/Simple protocol , but it has non standard especifications classical for a MSN product, is an extend version SIP.
  (tags: linux pidgin im)