Ikke's Blog

As mentioned before I wrote some PHP class to allow people writing PHP applications to (ab)use the authentication method UGent and DICT offer easily.
This is the documentation of it, rendered using PhpDocumenter. The code of the class can be found inside the docs (can't give a link here, b2evo bug :-/), a working demo is here.

The code uses 2 mechanisms to decrypt the RSA encrypted key we get from the authentication server: it tries to use PHP's internal openssl_* set of functions, if support for them is compiled in the PHP interpreter. Otherwise it falls back to shell_exec to call OpenSSL in a shell, which gives a lot of overhead, unfortunately.
Unlike the provided samples, I'm not using temporary files anywhere.

Just installed Evince. It got some more features than Gpdf already, let's hope it continues to grow :-)

Ikke • Technology, Linux, Networks, Desktop, Coding Corner 1 comment

Long time ago once more ;-)

I got lots of things to do lately, so I rarely find time to update this blog. Next to this, I got sick about a week ago, so I had to stay in bed for a while too.

Some thing's I've been doing lately:

1. Installed Xgl, dropped it because I got no hardware acceleration


2. New desktop (screenshot, slightly changed now: the line under my top panel is smaller)


3. Installed Hula some minutes ago.
   
   
   
   It is nice, but still needs some work IMHO.


4. Wrote some mass-mailing-with-attachment Python script. It's not 100% done, if you want it give me a call


5. At Ghent University there's a new system to allow web application developers to authenticate users against the universities student database. Whilst all sample code in the docs is written in Perl, usign a bunch of temporary files to decode/decrypt keys etc (I'm not getting into the implementation details here), I wrote some PHP class to achieve the same goals. Not using any temporary files (which is better, think of multithreaded webservers...), but still using a shell_exec call to openssl to decrypt a PKI string using some public key. TODO: use PHP's openssl functions, or shell_exec as a fallback when OpenSSL support hasn't been compiled into PHP. I think I'll send the class to the UGent admins once it's done, so others can make use of it too.


6. Just showed Nat it's easy to generate PDF files from MediaWiki pages using this software. He was looking for a tool like this to create PDF's out of the Hula Wiki pages (hey, I even pointed him at MediaWiki in a lengty mail I sent him upon his request describing all wiki implementations I got some experience with :-))


7. Installed PhpAdsNew2 today at VTK. It's not implemented yet (still need to give a demo to the admins), I hope it'll allow us to deploy a better, easier and more manageable ad management, including decent statistics. Hey, we need to know our market value, isn't it?

TODO:

1. Get a new harddrive (8.4Gb is too small on a modern desktop/development system)


2. Get NVidia Binary drivers working, play around with Xgl once more, and try hardware accelerated composition


3. Get semi-transparant Gaim chat windows and buddy list working


4. Play around with Galago


5. Get a Subversion repository somehow, somewhere


6. Find out how to get to FOSDEM, or I won't go once more


7. Finish reading the GStreamer development handbook (60 pages to go)


8. Get some new girlfriend?


9. Lots more, not willing to think about it at the moment.

Oh I almost forgot. We sold our first Dell computers today. Let's hope the ecommerce site will be up soon.

Ikke • Life, Technology, Linux, Networks, Desktop 5 comments

Check this out :-)

Sometimes people want to use X apps on a remote server through X forwarding on a Windows box. Of course you can run a VNC server and the Windows client, but this could be usefull too. Guess I'll try it once at VTK.

Ikke • Technology, Networks Leave a comment

Found this url in my referers list today. Looks like someone is coding on Ivman :) If you read this, please contact me!!! I can give you CVS access ;-)
I looked at the patch, but have to take a closer look later :oops:
It's true I don't have time to code on this project. Altough it's not only time that was lacking... :|

I have a love-hate relationship with Gaim 1.1. Sometimes it runs smooth, sometimes it just crashes (gets killed) when I e.g. close the last opened IM window. Besides, it almost continuously eats 15-30% of my CPU power, only dropping when other processes need the CPU cycles. And it still lacks Custom Emoticons support (like AMSN got). Maybe I'll try to code that last thing once I get time for it ;-)
I do love the new MSN icons tough :-) Finally you can see who is blocked by you.

Looks I got listed on a new Planet, Planet JD, too. It's a big one :-)

I found out Guadec 2005 will be in Stuttgart, Germany this year, which is great news, except... the date. Exams start end May - begin June. No Guadec for me this year, again :-( Going to FOSDEM should be possible tough :-)

Forgot to mention I went to a performance by the Simoens trio on friday. Three sisters that perform pianotrio's (one piano, one cello and a violin). It was great to be there, if you like classical music and get a chance to see/hear them, don't hesitate.

I decided to start writing a new blogging engine, once I find a server that gives me web (PHP) hosting, a MySQL database, and a Subversion repository. I know there are lots of engines aviable nowadays, but all of them lack features I really like, like modularity. Both b2Evolution and WordPress are nice suits, but sometimes the code just isn't modular enough, or they use some hacked-together templating engine whith a lot of PHP code inside the template file, which is plain ugly.
My engine will be modular to the extreme (authentication|authorisation|(xmlrpc & web) input|all sorts of output, both html and xml (rss,...)|...), it'll use the PEAR packages wherever possible, and last but not least, Smarty as a templating engine. But this is a long-term project (university exams first).

Looks like we found out what we'll do on New Years eve :)

Ikke • Life, Technology, Linux, Networks, Desktop 4 comments