Signingparty update 2

I recently found that the order in which our DBus interface spits out the display name of a selected key had changed from name (comment) <email> to name <email> (comment) which produced garbled output from the signingparty tool I wrote. I've fixed it but if it changes again it will need to patched again.

Here it is: signingparty.c

And the command line magic to compile it:

gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall

Signingparty - Update

Thanks to a suggestion from commenter Ondra on the LaTeX and some additional spare time I wiped the TODO's from my little program.

signingparty.c

It's been requested to include this in seahorse-plugins, so it will probably make its way there in time for 2.26.

Update: I forgot to mention that a new compile line was needed to add the auto-launching:
gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs gio-2.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall


Back from Chicago

I'm back from the URSI GA in Chicago and back in the office. While I was in Chicago, I wrote a little program to auto-generate a bingo board in LaTeX for a little game I dreamt up. While that program will probably not see the light of day, it inspired me to write something else.

I've been frustrated with the user un-friendliness of existing scripts to generate a sheet suitable for use at a key signing party. This frustration led me to write a program that uses libcryptui to select keys for the sheet and inserts them into a table in LaTeX. It's now at a usable point so I thought I would make it available:

signingparty.c

Compile with: gcc -o signingparty signingparty.c `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` `pkg-config --cflags --libs dbus-1` `pkg-config --cflags --libs cryptui-0.0` -D LIBCRYPTUI_API_SUBJECT_TO_CHANGE -g -Wall


An example of the output is party.tex

And the processed PDF party.pdf

Obligatory Screenshot:


TODO:
* Strip comments from display names (what's in parenthesis normally)
* Fix table grid lines (Help from a LaTeX guru would be appreciated)
* Auto-process LaTeX to PDF (via Rubber)

Seahorse libgnome/ui Free

With the help of patches from Saleem Abdulrasool (compnerd) I have spent the afternoon eliminating libgnome/ui from seahorse and seahorse-plugins (bug #524018).

The port of seahorse to gio is already complete and the port of seahorse-plugins should happen fairly soon (A big thanks to Saleem for volunteering to look at this too).

There's also a icon refresh underway that will hopefully bear fruit so stay tuned to unstable!

Success!

I successfully defended my Masters thesis Monday afternoon and my submitted manuscript was approved yesterday. This means that aside from my math final next Friday I'm a free man. I've been using my newly found free time to triage and fix some bugs in seahorse and upload state borders into OpenStreetMap. So far I've uploaded borders for SC, NC, FL, GA, TN, KY, AL and MS. I'm hoping to work my way across the country in the next couple of days.

I have some seahorse features I've decided to work on the next couple of weeks. They are in no particular order: adding passwords to gnome-keyring in the key manager, ACL lists for saved secrets in the properties of saved secrets, and possibly some evolution integration.

GMail part deux

I haven't noticed a lot of changes with the new GMail interface that has been recently delivered, which for the most part is a decidedly good thing. However, I decided to test out Seahorse's Epiphany plugin with the new plain text entry box and was delighted when my test email was delivered and the signature was good and the decryption didn't have a problem with the word wrapping. This was a major thorn in my side; preventing me from using signatures with my sent mail. Thank you to whichever brave Googler purposefully or inadvertently fixed this featurebug.

Also, I would like to join the band wagon in thanking the crowd over at Nokia and Maemo for accepting my application for a discounted N810. It will probably lead to an increase in my Verizon tax, but will be worth it.

Showing the GPG Key

Richard:

This might be an instance where Seahorse's DBus interface could help you. If a user is part of the web of trust already, the dialog could possibly be skipped completely. Also, the key in question could be automatically acquired using the DiscoverKeys method.

In any case, I agree with the other comments regarding your "signature identifier" field in that the full finger print should be shown. Also, signature identifier is not a commonly used term that I'm familiar with and in any case it's a key identifier and not a signature identifier.

Let us (the seahorse devs) know if there's anything in the DBus interface that's missing that would make your life easier.

In response:

I received a couple of comments regarding my last post on Seahorse's GNOME Keyring integration and would like to respond to them here so everyone not following the comments on my posts can see them. :P

Étienne: I would suppose this would depend on how you changed your session/login password if you did it via the About Me control applet, it could probably be modified to change the keyring password as well. I'm not sure how secure entries would be implemented for it without copying code though, perhaps with GNOME keyring's new secure memory API?

Esteban:
- What about thinkfinger integration? It seems like about some of gnome password dialogs support this (gdm,console), some do in a broken way (gksudo) and others don't (keyring manager, gnome-screensaver).

This might be useful but would need to be implemented on the gnome-keyring end. Luckily gnome-keyring is just a generic secret store and can do many such things. Also, I would imagine hardware for testing would be required.

- Why doesn't gnome-keyring just use your user password as the master password? Or, why can't gnome-keyring store my user password and my sudo password? One way or the other would seem more unified and consistent.

gnome-keyring can't simply use your user password unless you enter it as your master password because as a user, you don't have access to the hash of your system password stored in /etc/shadow. Étienne's comment mentioned libpam-keyring, but it's my understanding that you still have to originally set gnome-keyring to use your session password. Although now you should be able to get around the problem mentioned at the libpam-keyring site of not being able to change your keyring password. I suppose gnome-keyring could store your sudo password but I'm not sure that would be advisable (i.e. you might as well always run as root). This would probably require a patch to gksudo/whichever graphical auth library you're using for privilege escalation.

- It would be nice if gnome-keyring had some notion of "important" passwords vs everything else so that it can just go ahead and fill in the right values when I don't care sort of like firefox does when it doesn't have a master password set. Something in between where on a per password basis I can say "Always ask for master" would be cool.

This might be where an editor is needed to be able to set/unset the application access permissions. Right now if you select 'Always Allow' or 'Deny' there's no way to change that.

- Firefox and other apps integration: Firefox reimplements exactly the same functionality. Could gnome-keyring be swapped out in the gnome native builds like they have done for print and file dialogs?

I'm not sure about Firefox, but possibly Epiphany. There are some thoughts on that on l.g.o.

Seahorse - GNOME Keyring Integration

For all of you that have set your GNOME Keyring master password and long to change it, long no more! This previously missing functionality is now available in the 2.19.4 release of Seahorse. The text entries are "secure" in that your passwords will never be paged out of memory onto the disk and with recent upgrades to gnome-keyring itself, they shouldn't be paged out there either (development branch only). Here's what the tab in the Encryption Preferences control applet looks like upon a successful change:

Behold the power of GNOME!

I'm a little bit behind on my /. reading, but today I noticed an article published Monday about the FireGPG extension for Firefox.

You may be thinking, "This news sounds familiar" and you'd be right sort of. That's right, if you've been using Epiphany and Seahorse, this functionality has been available since September in development versions. That's a good 6 months before a similar extension was available for FF. Behold the power of GNOME!

I wonder if they have a similar problem with GMail inserting <cr> or <lf> into text they want to verify?

Also for the keen observer, check out the FireGPG icon they included in the URL bar: Yep, that's the icon Seahorse provides for use in the GNOME menus and as our window icon. Hooray reuse! I wonder if they could use our DBus API if it's available?

Also, currently we don't have icons for the context menu items in our extension (I'm not sure FireGPG's are the most appropriate for this) but if anyone has icon ideas or better yet icons ;) you know where to put them.

Long time no blog

I realize it's been almost half a month since my last post, but end of semester duties and such take precedence. So in no particular order...

Seahorse: I've been made a co-maintainer and have mostly been focused on bug fixing and mentoring our SoC student, Pinar.

Open Street Maps: It owns my soul and is my new favorite form of procrastination. There is a warning on one of their pages about mapping becoming compulsive. I apparently read the warning and continued without a slackening of pace. OSM has replaced my attempt to use Google Maps' MyMaps feature to detail Clemson University. I have mostly been prepping for a future job with the NRO and updating the map via Yahoo!'s donated aerial imagery. If you've ever wondered where trains go and come from, the imagery is a good way to find out and why not map the tracks at the same time? I have purchased a USB GPS receiver (I know the box says Microsoft, but the receiver can be used with pure FOSS in the form of gpsd.) and can't wait to hit the trails with my bike to map the Clemson Experimental Forest. This may be the final straw in purchasing a N800, although if some kind embedded developer were to intervene on my behalf I may be interested in performing a Maemo port of Seahorse :).

School: Grades aren't in yet but between a take home exam and an in exam presentation, I can't help but believe the semester ended well. Hopefully, the metal shop will find the time to machine the parts I need to make measurements for my Master's thesis so I can wrap that up in time for August's graduation deadlines.

Conferences: While I probably will be unable to make GUADEC, my paper entitled "Prolate Spheroidal Monopole"
, the subject of my Master's thesis, has been accepted for presentation at the North American Radio Science Meeting in Ottawa from July 22-26. I'm already planning on trying to crash the Ottawa Linux Users Group picnic that week, but if there are any other Gnomies that would be interested in sharing a pint or signing GPG keys that week shoot me an email.

Google SoC

I'd like to join the crowd and welcome my mentee, Pinar Yanardağ, to the GNOME community and Google's SoC. I'm sure her blog will be syndicated in a prominent place soon enough(hint, hint p.g.o admins) so you all will be able to learn about her progress all summer and into the future (hopefully). She's so on the ball she's already created her own hackergotchi:



She'll be working on integrating Seahorse key selection dialogs(libcryptui) into Evolution as well using Seahorse's DBus interface for encryption and such. I'm also hoping to see some rocking integration with the e-d-s address book.

Please join me in welcoming Pinar and all of the other Summer of Coders to our fine community.

Message Area Redux

In response to my earlier post about the message area, there were several more people that voiced the need for such a widget.

In fact pbor in #gnome-hackers voiced a vision I would support:

<pbor> sadam: actually I'd prefer to have a sexyer widget upstream :)
<pbor> sadam: it's something I wanted to try for a while but really can't find the time
<pbor> sadam: I want a GtkCurtain widget that drops down from the top (or the side) and covers the text *without* pushing it down
* lucasr|afk creates the page
<pbor> sadam: obviously it should drop down with a smooth animation and maybe be even slightly traslucent for the crack-addicts :)
<pbor> sadam: maybe it could be part of the "Make some core GNOME modules sexier" SoC proposed by vuntz

Of course I would be happier with a curtain widget that gave the coder the choice of whether to push the text down or not.

Gedit Message Area

Lucas and Gedit developers,

Is there any interest in pushing the message area widget upstream to gtk or libegg? I've looked at it and would like to make use of it for Seahorse plugins. Three of us probably shouldn't be maintaining our own separate copies of the widget.

GNOME Build Bot

I noticed that builds of at least seahorse, gnome-applets, and gnome-power-manager are failing with the following error:

/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_get_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_layout_get_lines_readonly'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libgthread-2.0.so: undefined reference to `g_thread_gettime'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_font_description_set_gravity'
/home/gnomeslave/gnome/work/bin/lib/libpangoft2-1.0.so: undefined reference to `pango_gravity_get_type'

If anyone knows how to fix this, please let me know.

New Seahorse Release

We've just pushed a new version of seahorse out the door. Please give us a hand with shaking out any remaining bugs before the 2.18 release by grabbing it and using it. You don't have to even be a 1337 2.17 using hacker to help, all of the new features work properly using libraries available in 2.16 and the appropriate non-gnome libraries, of course.

Code of Conduct

I've been following the discussion concerning the Code of Conduct on the foundation-list and agreed with one poster that is concerned about "signing" something on a wiki. I have now signed the Code of Conduct and made sure there is no question about what exactly I was signing.

I invite my fellow Gnomies to do likewise using Seahorse's Epiphany plugin, panel applet or Gedit plugin or gnupg on the command line (If that's the way you roll).