Anything or more and less

Some weeks ago I started a python module for Friendika (yes that was before the name change and I have not changed the name of the python module lazy as I am for historical reasons) friendika.py. One of the things I wanted to do with it and finally found the time to implement it was a Desktop Notification Applet for friendica.

Today I pushed the source of notifyfrndc to bitbucket, where you can either clone the Mercurial repository of grab the latest code as tar-ball.

It uses py-notify to display the number of new items to your wall or the network tab, the number of new private messages and the number of new introductions. It also displays a list of all the stuff behind those numbers and when it happened.

It is a bare script at the moment, without any fancy installation guidelines but you should be fine with a

$ python /path/to/notifyfrndc.py

Also you need to create a file in your $HOME directory called .notifyfrndc.cfg with your favorite editor (vim) or emacs your choice). The file should look something like that:

[account]
api = https://your.friendica.tld/api
user = yourusername
password = yourpassword
[settings]
timeout = 5
lookevery = 60

The stuff in the account section should be self-explanatory. The settings options are used as follows: The lookevery parameter gives the seconds after which the script should check for new stuff on your account. The timeout parameter is the number of seconds the notification shall be displayed. This is the base time, one additional second will be added for every item in the list, so that you can read it all.

Although the script may check your account every 60 seconds (or whatever you choose) it will not display the results every time. It will only do so if there is new stuff and it had not shown you the numbers before.

Ok, that’s all—have fun with it

Social networking is only fun if you have somebody to social network with, that’s the case in all form of reality the digital as well as the non digital. If you are using ~friendica there are several ways to find interesting people. None of them involves scrolling through the user directory although this can be fun too!

The 1st step in your search process should be your default profile. Scroll a bit down to the Public Keywords and enter some reflecting your interests and yourself. Those keywords will be published along with your profile picture in the public user directory (hover the star in the corner of some user pictures). You can also add additional keywords into the field below. Those private keywords will not show up on the user directory. You should enter the keywords in English and your native tongue, except you don’t want to have international contacts but the network is relatively small and English keywords could provide better results.

Once you have filled in your interests go to the Contacts tab¹ where you find a listing of your current contacts. Depending on your theme this page will look differently, but at the side there will be a menu.

At the top of this menu you find the add new contact box which can be used to add any contact from a service that ~friendica supports², followed by a list of the groups you have created to sort your contacts³. Below these two things you find the tools to find new contacts.

1st a search box. If you are interested in something, say “opensource” you can enter it there and ~friendica will search for profiles with matching public and private keywords.

If you now search for Linux there will be some more results, you have to play a bit with the search. Not everybody thinks about the same keywords you think about.

Below the search box there are three links. The third Invite Friends is self-explanatory but what are the other two for?

If you click on the first link Similar Interests ~friendica will match your keywords against the public keywords of other user in the global user directory. When you use this link without entering any keywords, friendica will tell you to do so.

Once you have found some friends you can use the 2nd link Friend Suggestions which will offer you a selection of the friends of your friends. These suggestions are drawn from all the networks your friends are connected to. At the moment I see suggestions from friendica, Diaspora*, identi.ca and Twitter.

And finally, if you have a homepage or blog and use friendica, you should consider linking your profile so that visitors stumbling over your web content can link to your friendica account for further networking.

Have fun

I had a funny little problem with my StatusNet instance which was that I was unable to change the theme of the page. What ever theme I selected in the config file, I always got the default neo theme in the browser. I should have read the logs more carefully, as is was written there…

During my upgrade from version 0.9.7 to 1.0 one piece from the old config remained there that was not overwritten by the setting in config.php. Obviously the theme setting¹—and StatusNet kept looking for the cleaner theme I used with 0.9.7 which wasn’t there anymore so as fall-back it used neo.

I was reading @sazius article Setting up my personal StatusNet instance finding, among others things, the filter setting for the logs.

Now, being able to change the theme I played through the available ones (those coming with SN and the neo-kafai theme by Ryan Weal) it was nothing there for my taste. My taste is something against the gray outside, that is supposed to be called winter.

The result is something that I call neo-sand with the yellow of my smily-logo in the background and something sandy as background for the rest. Except the default font, everything else stayed the same as in the neo-kafai theme.

Have fun with it

Download: neo-sand (tar.gz)

While I was abroad visiting Cologne and Velbert Mike Macgirvin released Friendika 2.3 which includes many great new features.

The three I like most from the list are

• the admin panel
• the improvements on the StatusNet compatible API which makes many StatusNet/Twitter clients Friendika clients as well

• that Friendika now natively supports the Diaspora* protocol, so that Friendika now truly federates with StatusNet (OStatus) and Diaspora* making those one big FLOSS social network.

The federation with Diaspora* has two little issues (1) Diaspora* does not support pods in subdirectories of a server, thus my Friendika profile cannot be reached from Diaspora* ATM and (2) Diaspora* needs a browser compatible SSL cert which does not include CACert.org I’m working on the federation at frndk.de (in contrast to the Facebook connector there).

Belate as this posting is also the latest network graph update. You should look at the SVG version of the graph, you don’t see much in the PNG version.

How do you share files with others in the cloud, or for that matter with yourself using cloud services? Dropbox you may say, or wuala – this morning on Diaspora* I was reminded of ownCloud a self hosting solution for this stuff. From their homepage

ownCloud gives you universal access to your files through a web interface or WebDAV. It also provides a platform to easily view & sync your contacts, calendars and bookmarks across all your devices and enables basic editing right on the web.
Installation has minimal server requirements, doesn’t need special permissions and is quick. ownCloud is extendable via a simple but powerful API for applications and plugins.

So I downloaded ownCloud from the repository and put it on my Debian Squeeze LAMP server and gave it a try.

All you need for using it is PHP and a MySQL (or Sqlite) database. You should have the MySQL credentials handy when you call the ownCloud URL for the first time, you’ll need them for the installer, which also sets up an admin account for your own cloud.

Make sure your /owncloud/data directory on the server is not open for the world as described here after you installed ownCloud and things are fine ready for you to use it. Either via WebDav from within your file manager (I’ve tested pcmanfm and Thunar) or the web interface, which is almost self explaining.

The only thing I struggled a bit with was with sharing a file from my cloud. On the Public Links page you just have to start typing the filename of the file you want to share, say images/me.jpg and ownCloud will offer you matching filenames from the files you’ve saved to it. Once you’ve selected the file, choose a date until which you want to share the file (or leave it unset) and hit the “share” button. Done!

It’s been a while since I have touched the code of the Gtk2 GameName program because it simply worked the way I wanted it to work. It was the adoption of Gurth’ original GameName program which he had written for Windows 3.1, so I didn’t have to use wine to run it and I could just generate random names from all the characters of the various role playing games.

Recently Robert Habenicht contacted me and we talked a bit about the GameName program and a back-port to Windows. He sponsored me some cups of good coffee to fuel the development of the Windows port and I adopted the code the FreePascal / Lazarus (which is a wonderful tool for cross-platform development btw) and now we have a new version of the GameName program that has some extended functionality compared to my previous adoption and is runnint on Windows and Linux.

Even better, as I did not do anything platform specific in principal it should be compile able on any of the other by Lazarus supported platforms too, I just don’t have any access to them That is why you can currently only download tthe source code (which is hosted at bitbucket), an installer for Windows XP and above and a zip file for Linux that does not have any installation routines but I’m sure you can execute the one file.

To use the program efficient you will also need name files if you don’t already have some, Gurth is offering some for various languages.

Have fun generating names for your gaming sessions!

While working on improvements for the StatusNet plugin for Friendika I realized that I haven’t announced my MathJax addon properly.

MathJax is a library that allows you to easily integrate LaTeX syntax for mathematical formulae within your websites and takes care about the proper display style of them. This plugin thus allows you to easily employ LaTeX within conversations with your colleagues / buddies from university.

You can see the plugin in action here, displaying the Maxwell Equations. All information about the configuration and download possibilities can be found on this wiki page. Have fun!

Over the last couple of days I’ve made some small changes to the reportspammer.py script I’ve written to report spammers to the @support team of identi.ca or any other StatusNet instance.

1st the script is now supporting different character limits then 140 chars. 2nd https is now used per default for API calls. 3rd the !sr alias is now included in new config files and 4th the spamming account is no longer included in the notice addressed with an @ but only by screen name and user id.

@histleweb pointed out that he wanted to use !sr per default and not !spamreport, you can change this easily in the config file by editing the line group=spamreport to group=sr and deleting the line for the altgroup.

Usage questions? Requests? Feel free to read the docs and ask me.