Day of Mistakes

Yesterday was the day of mistakes. It all started with me submitting updates to my FreeBSD ports maintained by me: x11/libxcb and x11/xcb-proto. I initially submitted both PRs of both ports in misc category. When I realized that I’ve posted in wrong category, then I reposted them into ports category. But at the same time, some FreeBSD committer changed category of my old PRs from misc resulting in duplicate PRs. Then they discarded the duplicate PRs. And then, within an 5-6 hours my port x11/xcb-proto is committed and for x11/libxcb, I received a bug report. Oops, I’d forgotten to include graphics/graphviz as BUILD_DEPENDS, which is causing doxygen to fail during documentation generation.

Finally, XCB v1.0 is in ports :). Thanks to FreeBSD porters for not shouting on me. So from next time, I’ve to be careful not to make any silly mistake.

Decrypting Gmane addresses

I’ve found a way to decrypt Gmane encrypted addresses. The encryption is quite easy. What they’re probably doing is calculating the hash (or any unique id) based on the domain portion of the email address and then appending the it to the username portion of the email address. And finally, add @public.gmane.org domain name. e.g. Hash for gmail.com domain is Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w. Now to encrypt any @gmail.com address, say wahjava@gmail.com, we will pipe the email address to this sed command line: |sed -e 's/@gmail.com/-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org/'. So to encrypt wahjava@gmail.com, we’ll do: echo wahjava@gmail.com |sed -e 's/@gmail.com/-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org/'.

To decrypt it, if you’ve plenty of bandwidth, visit this URL: http://gmane.org/get-address.php?address=wahjava-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org. Or if you run GNU, just: echo wahjava-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org |sed -e 's/-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org/@gmail.com/' will decrypt it.

Following is a shell script, which contains decryption for some domain names:

#!/bin/sh
# gmane-decrypt.sh
exec sed -e 's/%2d/-/' -e 's/%2b/+/' -e 's/%2f/\//' -e 's/%40/@/'\
 -e 's/-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org/@gmail.com/'\
 -e 's/-\\/E1597aS9LQAvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org/@yahoo.com/'\
 -e 's/-cunTk1MwBs8\\/MmOfgqcDl+ys7Bb73OIl@public.gmane.org/@lists.linux-delhi.org/'\
 -e 's/-T2eDObkLWuUhGesrpoKtVg@public.gmane.org/@linux-delhi.org/'\
 -e 's/-qF0zOz33zB8dnm+yROfE0A@public.gmane.org/@au-kbc.org/'

Now to use it, just curl the URL, and pipe to this script. And you’re done. :)

P.S. BtW, Gmane didn’t use hashing it uses encryption. How ?

0install rocks

I just tried this great application named 0install, a cool way to deploy apps. No need to su, just a DnD, it will automatically download all dependencies and start the app. If I’m not mistaken, when I was living in properietary software world, there was a similar technology named ClickOnce introduced in .NET Framework 2.0 by Microsoft. Well there is similar technology for Java also, known as Java Web Start.

Anyways, I just installed zeroinstall-injector package from Fedora Extras repository. And then created a launcher for 0install on my xfce4-panel. And now, from this 0installable software directory, I’ve chosen MiniClock to install, just DnDed its Zero install feed on the recently created 0launch launcher. Then it prompted me to trust GPG keys of the software maintainer (for security reasons), and after this it downloaded the dependency and I’m running MiniClock.

Now, to create a shortcut, I’ve to do: 0alias mini-clock http://rox4debian.berlios.de/0install/MiniClock.xml. This will create a shell (/bin/sh) script named mini-clock in ~/bin directory, which will launch the application. Isn’t it cool :)