KDE is awesome because it can be other DEs

KDE 4.10 was released a few days ago so I decided to tell people why KDE is my favorite desktop environment (DE). I was a Gnome 2 user. I loved Gnome 2.32, the last Gnome 2 release I used, it was fast configurable and generally pretty bad ass. These are the same reasons I like KDE except KDE is better because :

• It doesn't need compiz for fancy effects they're built in. 
• It's the fastest desktop for gaming, even faster than xfce and lxde. 
• You can basically make any of the other desktops using KDE. 
• It is generally more polished than any of the other environments eg. you don't need to use the extra plugins like in Gnome3 but even if you want to they are built in to the menus in KDE. There's no need to go to a random website to download them.

In my personal setup, I have an activity for regular KDE setup, a Gnome2 like activity and a Unity like activity. I even installed the app menu runner for krunner because I like Unity's HUD but that's the only thing that I use that isn't included in KDE from Kubuntu to get all the setups seen below.

KDE 4 Default:

Gnome 2:

Unity:

Diary Down, Diary Software based on Markdown

I have been writing diary entries for the last year as part of my project and for other projects. It's a great way of not forgetting anything and I highly recommend it if nothing else other than to keep you sane on larger projects. I have been doing this in markdown, which is an amazing little language to write in that converts to html.

I had my diary in a git repo & scp'd the resulting html to a server every time I was finished writing so I could access the info anywhere. Eventually I wanted to index the entries so I wrote a little ruby script to generate a table of contents for me which worked great until I decided to over engineer the crap out of it now it's really awesome. In any case due to it's usefulness for me I decided to open source it so that it may be useful for others.

It requires:
markdown & ruby & a unix box (It probably won't work on windows)

Here's
An Example Diary
The Github for the project

The README on the github show's you how to use the diary. The git & scp stuff have been commented out but they are still in the code if anyone  wants to use the features. Play around with the example, re-size the windows, use the key board shortcuts & hopefully you'll see this can be useful for you too.

Quick Command Line Tip

This is really just for me in case I forget but it should be helpful to others. The 'notify-send' can be used to send desktop notifications when your program has finished running. This is quite handy for long running commands that you might forget about like dding images or what not.

My Raspberry Pi Cluster :)

So my final year project is to make a cluster of raspberry pi micro computers to crack encrypted office documents and here is my pi cluster :)

The distributed document cracker is based on John the Ripper which I've already started to contribute to

• https://github.com/ShaneQful/npdf2john_ruby
• https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper/blob/unstable-jumbo/run/pdf2john.py

I have a prototype for distributing John already built and while its not ready for public release everything made as part of this project will be open source once I feel the code is ready. (Probably under the MIT license)

Below is a gallery of how it got to this state. Sorry about the blurry images, I'm not a great photographer.

Argos runs CentOS :)

What I've been upto ... U1, JB & John the Ripper

So I haven't posted here in a while not because I haven't done any development but I haven't really had the time. The reason for this is quite simply, it's my final year of college and there's a lot of work to do especially to do with my final year project. I thought I'd do a quick post detailing some of the open source development I've been doing over the last little while.

Ubuntu One KDE Plugin:

I've added a few more languages contributed by the community, specifically Russian & Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese being a little bit tricky since it doesn't have a standard 2 letter language code like all the other languages added so it took a bit of trial and error to figure out the code KDE wanted. For future reference for anyone googling this because they have the problem its:

pt_BR

Also while I haven't added it to the installer inside of dolphin yet. A new branch has been created at thebehest of a user using dolphin with Ubuntu's unity. It removes the program's reliance on klipper, kde's clipboard manager, using xclip & autocutsel in its place.

https://github.com/ShaneQful/u1-dolphin/tree/without_kde

Jupiter Broadcasting:

 I've contributed to https://github.com/rikai/JBAR-Firefox but only in a very minor way. I've done some minor bug fixes on the android app and there's a bug that I still need to fix in the Java ME but considering it has a user base of me and like one other person I'm taking my sweet time getting around to it. I was contributing to https://github.com/dominickm/jupiter_broadcasting_mobile_community, a HTML5 mobile app but that project now seems dead. Hopefully some one will pick it up or I might jump back into it after college. I still have commit access to the repo and am willing to merge any pull request sent so if anyone wants to give it a go don't be shy.

Final Year Project:

I don't want to say to much on this in case some idiotic piece of academic software accuses me of plagiarizing myself but I'm writing a system to perform the distributed cracking of office documents(MSOffice, PDFs, ODFs) on a network of raspberry pi computers. 

John the Ripper:

I'm using John the Ripper as the base cracker for my final year project. Unfortunately I didn't discover it could crack documents until I'd already nearly finished some ODF cracking software. Actually the only thing left to do is finish the AES encryption which would be nearly pointless since all the lastest releases of OpenOffice & LibreOffice use Blowfish for encryption but I digress. This was more than a little irritating as it was thought that I might have to expand the project but for now helping John's development with a focus on office documents should hopefully be more than enough. You know along with a system to allowing for it to be distributed over a network with a really pretty web UI. So far I've created this https://github.com/ShaneQful/npdf2john_ruby. A PDF parser which takes out the necessary information from a PDF for decryption and passes it to John in the format in needs. Which lead to my first bit of code actually in John :) 

https://github.com/magnumripper/JohnTheRipper/blob/unstable-jumbo/run/pdf2john.py 

but more importantly it was the last thing they needed to get rid of the older pdf format which only supported up to PDF specification 1.4 and move to the newer format which supports all PDF's ie. up to 1.7.  I would like to point out at this stage that obviously most of the work on the newer PDF format was not done by me but by Dhiru. Who was amazingly helpful along with everyone else on John's mailing list when I asked about how things worked and what I should focus on in order to improve John. In fact I really think John is a great example of a project which is really easy to get involved in with and has what seems like a really nice development community.

Others:

There were other things but I think I've yammered on log enough. Anything else will probably be on my github page.

Quick Update to the Jupiter Broadcasting Android App

So I have replaced the parser with a variant of my parser from my JavaME app. I have also replaced the GUI from the RSS reader and will be implementing a download feature as well as the stream and go to web page features currently available. I have just replaced version on the market with the new version and will wait a few days before implementing the download feature as this will require a permission change and I want people to auto update to the latest UI before I ask anyone to update which I will have to do if I change the permission settings.






The code is now on github here under the MIT License so if anyone wants to help out feel free and don't just the code to harshly as I originally wrote most of this app a year or so ago, while overly caffeinated watching a live episode of techsnap.

On another note, the app now has a competitor Callisto. Frankly its awesome and choice is always good also since both the apps are free and open source its hardly that much of a competition as either of us could take each others code whenever we pleased. Although I think my license is more compatible with that sort of behavior. Its still in alpha but I recommend you check it out and see which one you like better. I quite liked the in built IRC client in Callisto. Another awesome thing about Callisto is that it supports from android 1.6 up which means it supports older phone that my app doesn't. Unfortunately it also means supporting the live video stream for Callisto is probably not going to happen. However the creation of Callisto might give me the opportunity to change the API version of my app to 3.0 to support the HLS video stream rather than the RTSP stream with the knowledge that my users have somewhere to turn in Callisto. Anyway best of luck to Callisto and its developer, who I have to give mad props to doing this in Android 1.6 as I personally wouldn't have creating my Jupiter Broadcasting app with out the Media API that came in 2.2.