I’m a supporter of mail encryption since I started using free software.
At least, I sign all my own mails, with the exception of mails to people,
who don’t know what an *.asc file is and might not open my mail for this reason.
By the way, my public gpg key fingerprint is:
F6A9 332D AA28 625E 59A8 F758 7BF6 0F4A 861B C3A3
I’m also involved in the CAcert project. If
you want to get “assurced”, don’t hesitate to contact me,
if you are in Berlin.
There is just one problem. If you want to sign all your
mails, you have to type your hopefully long passphrase
at least once[^1] for every single mail. If you get some
encrypted mails from your friends, you have to type your
passphrase for viewing mails, too. That’s not so nice.
So were the gpg-agent invented, which task is to cache
your passphrase for a given time, but it didn’t work for
me - until today.
I followed the tutorial from the opensuse SDB with
no success. Please note, that you might need to change the
pinetry-qt to pinetry-qt4.
The solution, which works for me, was to copy the mentioned
line to ~/.zprofile instead of .xinitrc, as I am using the
awesome zsh.
Earlier this year I started writing a KDE application using
the Ruby programming language. Coming from the web development, I am no
expert at all in C++. So I decided to give KDE development a try using
the Ruby bindings for KDE 4 called korundum4.
It wasn’t as easy as expected. Unfortunatly the korundum4 project didn’t got
very popular by now, so I found a lot of bugs on the way. Now, three months
later, all the bugfixes are included in the last stable KDE. The idea, of
just copying the project folder and starting the app without the need of any
further setup1, becomes finally true.
Announcing Kubeplayer
I started a kind of clone of the well
known Qt-based Youtube player Minitube. When starting the development,
I had in mind to support Vimeo and maybe some other online video platforms, too.
The app should integrate itself better into the KDE workspace, and lately I had
the idea of turning it into a mobile app, too. It was possible to get a much
cleaner and shorter code, not only because of the nice KDE KIO classes,
but also by using Ruby.
Let’s Try It Out In Less Than 1 Minute!
Ok, to be fair, I have to admit, this is only possible using a recent
Linux OS2 with korundum4 and Ruby 1.9.x preinstalled.
To give Kubeplayer a try, you just have to checkout the repository, and start
the application.
That’s it. You can also install kubeplayer using CMake. Installation works like
you would it expect it from a CMake based C++ application.
If you get an error related to json, you are probably using an Ruby
version prior to 1.9.x. In this case you have to install rubygems via you distribution
package manager. Then you can use Ruby’s own package manager to install the
missing dependency.
gem install json
Get Involved!
Not everything is done by now. Youtube works in the most a lot
of cases. The GUI needs a lot of small improvements. I even thought about a
maemo/meego port, paid for an N900 on
eBay, but unfortunately got duped :(. So the mobile development has to wait.
After all, the project is still quite young, the code is very short, nice and clear.
If you ever felt like trying to develop for/with KDE, the barrier is now quite low.
You don’t have to deal with a KDE development environment. Just clone the repo
and you are done. Since yesterday, you can find the project in playground. git clone git://git.kde.org/kubeplayer
You don’t need to know C++.
You don’t have to compile anything at all!
You can use the shiny new git infrastructure of KDE.
Take a look at the code base. There are not many files at all. Summed up, there
are less then 1000 lines of code (including rare comments). For an already
functional multimedia application, this is really few.
How does the future of Kubeplayer look like? I have already a lof of ideas,
what could be done. Maybe you have also many, but different ones. What about:
allowing the use to login and comment on all supported video platforms
make flash needless on netbooks by providing an optimized app
create a scripted KPart to fetch youtube pages and open the video using kubeplayer
let the user download the videos (in a video library)
make it possible to share supported video platforms with the plasma media center team
So what do you think, can Kubeplayer do for you? What can you do for Kubeplayer?
Kind regards,
Robert
This isn’t 100% true. You need to have korundum4 installed, but most distros
seems to ship this package by default. On opensuse it is called “ruby-kde4”. ↩︎
As KDE and Ruby is also available for many other OS, Kubeplayer is
actually cross platform. ↩︎
Since I wrote my last Blog post much time has past. After my last exam last
Friday I just started to do some hacking on KDE. As it should be something simple
for the beginning and something useful, too, I decided to provide a new plasma
dataengine for retrieving stocks information.
I used ruby, because plasma hacking with ruby is freaking awesome and totally
easy. Let’s prove it!
How To Use It
Before diving into the
development process, you probably want to test the final result yourself.
First you have to download the plasma package. Then you can install
it easily with the plasma package manager.
You won’t need to be root for that. You should get a success response afterwards.
As there is by now no plasmoid to display the provided data, you have to use
the plasmaengineexplorer to test the engine. Call this program on your shell
and look for ruby-stocks. You have to type in a stocks symbol like GOOG (Google)
or NOK (Nokia) to get the information. Is is also possible to just call:
plasmaengineexplorer --engine ruby-stocks --source NOK
You can remove the engine with this short command:
plasmapkg -t dataengine -r ruby-stocks
How To Create It
I started with a look on the plasma ruby examples and copied the inital
construct from the given time data engine example. There was also an attempt to
create a stocks engine with C++. The code is available in the playground.
The most time took the clean implementation of the cvs data parsing.
If you want to start yourself with a ruby based dataengine, I recommend to start
with the time engine example, too. Do not change the given file structure,
which should be:
The top directory gets packaged into a zip for distribution.
Let’s take a look on the main.rb. There a some important things you have to be
aware of, when you want to use ruby for plasma dataengines:
when you name your engine “ruby-stocks” (see metadata.desktop), you have to
name the top module RubyStocks. Otherwise your engine will fail.
Plasma looks for a class called Main in that module, which have to inherit
from PlasmaScripting::DataEngine
make sure, that you implement the member methods:
sourceRequestEvent and updateSourceEvent
As both methods should do the same in my example, I used an method alias.
If you ever did a plasma dataengine using C++ you have noticed, that it is a
straight forward port from C++ to ruby. There is hardly something different.
# file: 'main.rb'# kate: remove-trailing-space on; replace-trailing-space-save on; indent-width 2; indent-mode ruby; syntax ruby; replace-tabs on; replace-tabs-save on; space-indent on;require'plasma_applet'# the dictonary replaces the ruby hash as we need an ordered hash. only ruby 1.9 uses ordered one.# when ruby1.9 is the default version, we can switch back to native ruby hashrequire'dictionary'moduleRubyStocksclassMain<PlasmaScripting::DataEngine# the url needs to be extended by the stock ID at the end of the string# format code: http://brusdeylins.info/projects/yahoo-finance-api/DATA=Dictionary["j1"=>["market capitalization",Float],"p2"=>["percent change",String],"s0"=>["symbol",String],"d1"=>["last trade date",Qt::Date],"t1"=>["last trade time",Qt::Time],"c1"=>["change",Float],"o0"=>["open",Float],"h0"=>["days high",Float],"g0"=>["days low",Float],"v0"=>["volume",Float],"a2"=>["average daily volume",Float],"l1"=>["last trade",Float],"c4"=>["currency",String]]SOURCE_URL="http://download.finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?f=#{DATA.keys.join}&e=.csv&s="definitializeparent,args=nilsuperparent# don't update faster than once a minutesetMinimumPollingInterval60000# dafault update rate is 10 minutessetPollingInterval600000enddefupdateSourceEventsourcerequest_url=SOURCE_URL+Qt::Url::toPercentEncoding(source).data.stripjob=KIO::storedGetKDE::Url.new(request_url),KIO::NoReload,KIO::HideProgressInfojob.connect(SIGNAL('result( KJob* )'))do|aJob|parseCSVLinesource,aJob.dataendreturnfalseenddefparseCSVLinesource,dataByteArray$stderr.puts"ruby-stocks plasma dataengine: retrieved data: "+dataByteArray.datadataArray=dataByteArray.data.strip.split","ifdataArray.size>=DATA.sizeDATA.values.eachdo|aValue|data=dataArray.shiftunlessdata=~%r{N/A}ifaValue[1]==Floatdata.gsub!/B$/,"E6"data.gsub!/M$/,"E3"setDatasource,aValue[0],data.to_funlessdata=="N/A"elsifaValue[1]==Stringdata=data[1..-2]setDatasource,aValue[0],dataunlessdata.empty?elsifaValue[1]==Qt::TimesetDatasource,aValue[0],Qt::Time.fromString(data,'"h:mmap"')elsifaValue[1]==Qt::DatesetDatasource,aValue[0],Qt::Date.fromString(data,'"M/d/yyyy"')endendendendendaliassourceRequestEventupdateSourceEventendend
The second file you need is the metadata.desktop.
# file: 'metadata.desktop'
[Desktop Entry]Name=Stocks Data EngineComment=Stocks Data Engine powered by Yahoo! Finance (real time delayed by around 15 minutesType=ServiceServiceTypes=Plasma/DataEngineX-Plasma-API=ruby-scriptX-Plasma-MainScript=code/main.rbX-KDE-PluginInfo-Author=Robert RiemannX-KDE-PluginInfo-Email=saloution@googlemail.comX-KDE-PluginInfo-Name=ruby-stocksX-KDE-PluginInfo-Version=1.0X-KDE-PluginInfo-Website=http://plasma.kde.org/X-KDE-PluginInfo-Category=Online ServicesX-KDE-PluginInfo-Depends=X-KDE-PluginInfo-License=GPLX-KDE-PluginInfo-EnabledByDefault=true# Icon=alarmclock
What Comes Next?
The engine should be quite usable by now. I plan to create a plasmoid which
lets you search for a company name to get the stocks symbol and then shows
some important numbers (like the weather widget, but without these nice graphics).
After that I want to create a second plasmoid which just shows a chart from
Yahoo! Finance. The most work will probably be to create a settings dialog similar
to the one you find here below the chart.
What do you think? Would you use a stocks plasmoid? What do you expect it to display?
Why didn’t you have already used ruby to create a dataengine? And after all,
how do I get this engine into KDE trunk?
Hi planetkde, hi readers from planet gnome (so called aliens1),
I’ve just stumbled upon a blog post dealing with a potential
collaboration of KDE and gnome to initiate a replacement for dropbox, called
ownCloud.
There are already thoughts about possible GSoC projects giving attention to the
gnome/KDE frontend clients and to the server backend.
Nice idea, but in my humble opinion there is a problem, at least for me:
I haven’t a hosted root server, but a lot of unix accounts with user webspace,
where it is impossible to run any kind of background services/daemons.
Think of:
university accounts
(scientific) institute accounts
accounts from your IT related work
Think of people, who probably use linux.
In the case that ownCloud is meant to be the centre of all data synchronisations,
it would be sad that those people who only have webspace cannot take advantage of it.
So I encourage the developer to design the ownCloud in a way that makes the
server-side backend software only optional, but not a requirement.
This would be similar to git, which can use a server side backend (git://), but
is also satisfied with a simple sftp connection (ssh://).
(Please correct me if I am wrong.)
After all you might want to read an article about the disadvantages of
SaaS published by http://www.gnu.org. Exaggerated message in one sentence: Don’t get dependant of other
people server services.
In my last blog entry I explained how to send the clipboard content via
KDE Klipper to a pastebin service.
Now I wrote a quick-and-dirty script to transform a URI in the clipboard to a
shortenend version using http://ur1.ca (U R One; it is GPL).
I never figured out how to get automatic URL shortening with http://identi.ca
and Choqok. That’s a kind of universal work-around for me.
Copy the file ur1.rb to a folder which is in your $PATH and add a Klipper
action as I explained in the last post. To setup your Klipper action you will
need the following: