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June 6, 2008
Two facts lead me to write this little script this evening. The first is that my memory is terrible and the second is that in two weeks time I start a new job involving Perl and this was a great opportunity to get a bit of practice in.
Password Store is a simple script that stores passwords in an AES encrypted file, with an interface to add and remove passwords and list the saved passwords. Passwords are stored with a name so you can identify which one goes with which service. To prevent displaying a stored password in plaintext in the console, the script also allows you to guess at what the password is and it will tell you if you got the right one.
Being something I quickly threw together in an evening I’m not going to claim this is completely secure. Anyone with access to your user account or root on the box in question will be able to watch the interpreters memory and see the passwords in plaintext. It should however provide a simple means to store passwords on your own machine even if someone else gains physical access to the disk.
Examples:
Set up a new Password Store (you will be prompted for a master password):
$ passwords
New Master Password: ******
Confirm Password: ******
Listing all passwords in the Password Store (in plaintext!):
$ passwords –list
Master Password ******
== All Passwords ==
Test: 1337p@55w0rd
Adding a new password to the store:
$ passwords –set –id="My New Password"
Master Password: ******
New Password: *********
Removing a password from the store
$ passwords –remove –id="My New Password"
Master Password: ******
Changing the master password:
$ passwords –master
Master Password: ******
New Master Password: ******
Confirm Password: ******
Checking a guess against the password store (if you don’t want to see the password echoed in plaintext to your terminal):
$ passwords –check –id="My New Password"
Master Password: ******
Check against: ******
Passwords match
You can download Password Store 0.1. It will depend on the following things:
- Unix/Linux (haven’t tested Mac OS X)
- aespipe
- The following Perl modules (which will probably already be installed on your system)
- Getopt::Long
- IO::Prompt
- Digest::MD5
Just as a side note, the password input prompt is very naive and doesn’t handle backspaces. If you make a mistake, quit the application with ctrl+C and re-run it.
Filed under: development |
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January 2, 2008
I have just completed a working copy of Perlbak, and uploaded it to the project directory on dev.sihnon.net. Those of you with an LDAP account on SIHNON should be able to log in and retrieve a copy via subversion (details in the Trac environment). This copy of Perlbak features the following:
- Backup files from
- Transfer backups to:
- Other directories (e.g. via samba to another machine)
- SCP
- Encrypt backups using:
A sample, commented configuration file is included. To run perlbak:
$ ./perlbak.pl [--quiet --silent | -v[...]] [--file-mode=full|inc] <–all | backup …>
Perlbak is designed to be run from cron.
Update:
Perlbak uses several perl modules, some of which do not come preinstalled, at least not on my system. To install them, run cpan, and install them with the following commands;
perl -MCPAN -e shell
install <package>
The list of packages used by Perlbak is:
- BIND::Config::Parser
- Getopt::Long
- Pod::Usage
- Switch
- Sys::Pushd
- File::Copy::Recursive
- File::Recurse (At time of writing not available for install this way, get it manually from http://search.cpan.org/dist/File-Recurse/)
- FindBin
Filed under: development |
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December 29, 2007
I think one of the things that stops me writing frequently in one of these sites is the number of hoops that must be jumped through in order to do it. Open a web browser, log into the blog, navigate through the admin pages and then the write-preview cycle until it’s done. With that in mind, I figured it might be easier to try writing it in an application, and synching it up to the blog. This is my trial run with Windows Live Writer.
Windows Live Writer is a pretty little tool, colourful and fits in nicely with all the other Windows Live products. It interfaces with WordPress well, and as I type this in the application, the editor pane is themed with the CSS styles directly from my site - a nice touch. There is however a preview view that shows you the post as it will appear in the blog without having to post it as a draft. You can save draft copies locally or store them as drafts on your website itself. It’s also providing a much needed, well for me anyway, spell-checker which I shall now liberally abuse.
The most important bits of meta information attached to a news post in WordPress, the categories, tags, slug etc can all be edited directly. Writer can retrieve all the posts from your blog so you can edit ones written previously elsewhere.
The Windows Live Gallery also holds many plugins for you to customise Writer. There are plugins for among other things, inserting syntax highlighted code, attaching files, or pasting what song you’re currently listening to (Ego - The Sounds (Dying To Say This To You) for reference 
).
Overall, a very powerful tool that I could get to like a lot.
Filed under: Blog, Windows Live |
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September 8, 2007
After many months of this site not existing, solely because of my own laziness, I’ve decided to scrap whatever never-finished code I had and gone with an off-the-shelf solution. Yes WordPress. I’ve officially sold my soul to the devil.
Filed under: Blog |
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January 6, 2007
Three things today, and yes hasn’t it been a long time since I last posted.
First up, since I’m running in chronological order: I relented and set up a facebook account to stop all these random people harrassing me about it. I wasn’t going to, but I was bored. Really bored.
Secondly, since this site has been suffering rather a lot of comment spam recently (several hundred plus comments per post) I have nuked most of them, and disabled anonymous comment posting for the forseeable future. I intend to reimplement Andrew’s comment protection scheme, but haven’t had time this far. For the moment it’ll just be me posting, but such is life.
Finally, and indeed the big news item of tonight, I have been involved in a minor car accident (but I’m ok 
). It would seem some lovely people decided it would be great fun to stick a giant lump of concrete in the middle of a main road. Yes, again I applaud the intelligence of our here nation. Apparently the car wasn’t too keen on the idea of railroading over a fence post at 40mph. And before you make some kind of comment, it was dark, and the bastard thing was just over the brow of a hill. Didn’t see it until it was somewhere behind me. Time will tell as to how badly the car might be damaged, but at this point I must thank the two local police officers who kindly gave me a ride home. It would have been a long cold walk without it, so thank you very much 
Nice to know that in this world of chavism, there are still some nice guys out there.
So now, with a sufficiently low pulse, I think I shall head off to bed; (but not before syndicating this feed to facebook 
)
Filed under: Blog |
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August 8, 2006
This month’s event was hosted in one of the Kingsway College buildings, aptly named Zero101, down in Soho, London. Way to go Microsoft, arrange a meeting right practically inside London’s Red Light District.
From Microsoft were Phil Holden, who was by all accounts present at the first session, and Koji Kato, a developer from the Tablet division, who flew all the way from Redmond for the event.
(more…)
Filed under: Windows Live |
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August 3, 2006
First up, let me say a big thank you to Romain at Heaven, and Phil Holden, from the second Windows Live session who sent me this new toy.
It’s the Philips VOIP433 Messenger Phone, a dual device that can make ordinary calls via a land line, or if you link the base station up to your PC running Windows Live Messenger, make and receive all your messenger Internet calls.
Having spend the last few hours playing around with it, these are my thoughts.
(more…)
Filed under: Windows Live |
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April 30, 2006
A short while back, someone was asking on the msgplus forums about my old Audiator plugin. Tis a tad antiquated now that plus has Custom Sounds, but apparently it has some merit after all.
So when Patchou removed plugin support from msgplus and added scripting instead, I thought I might try rewriting the old thing in JScript!
I must say, thanks to the plus APIs, its so easy to make beautiful looking UI. So I thought I’d share some of the development screenshots with the world.
Remember that these are screenshots of something that is very much in development. A lot is going to change between now and the time I finish/release it.
For the most part, Audiator Live is just a clone of the original plugins. Most of the Dialogs, although completely redesigned, map directly to the originals.
However, I do still have a couple of ideas up my sleeve…
Filed under: Blog |
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April 30, 2006
So ive spent the last week or two setting up a new server. Its a box I set up a couple of years ago, to be a mandrake webserver. Then it moved to become my Windows 2003 server. Shortly after that my family started using it as a workstation. Now its down in Southampton here with me.
This time it’s running Gentoo, an operating system im growing quite attatched to these days. (Though as I’ve said before, I’m not quite ready to give up my desktop to linux yet.)
This box is doing some nice NATing in my hall so that I can connect my desktop, laptops (now in the plural, I love you ECS!), WAP etc all up to the single network connection.
As I write this post (well, as I write the dev-server version of this post), its running on freshly installed apache2/php/mysql setup.
Enough about my server
So i went to one of MSN’s new marketing events this week - a dinner in London.
It was a good night out Met a few people I’d heard of for the first time, namely Zero1 and dwergs. Met some completely new people, including Sarah (sorry, didnt catch your last name ) who I caught the train back with.
There were a couple of microsofties there too, but I didnt really get the chance to speak to them, they took up camp at the other end of the dinner table ¬_¬ (perhaps next time).
In other news, thanks to the bank holiday, 3-day weekend, score! I’ve written myself a TODO list, which includes spending a bit of time on this site, and some work on Audiator Live! (but more about that later 
)
Also scheduled myself some time to play some Burnout this week, since I bought it right before I went away on holiday, and haven’t had much free time to play with it since 
Filed under: Blog |
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September 20, 2005
So I spent several hours tidying up my start menu, desktop, quick launch, uninstalling crap, the general housework you can never be bothered to do.
Then I thought… hmm, I want a new theme for windows. I headed to the place I normally go for such things - ThemeXP.org. Its here I find that nearly every single theme is now "wrapped" as they call it. Basically this is an euphemism for "they filled it with adware/spyware/IE Toolbars". Now we really don’t want that do we.
So what did I do? I googled for a way to bypass installing their crap along with the themes. And it wasn’t easy but here it is.
- Save the .exe file to a folder on your hard drive, for example C:\themes
- Open a command prompt to this same folder. You may need to cd \themes
- run the command filename.exe /x temp. This will extract all the files from the installer into a subfolder named temp
- Go to C:\themes\temp\, where you will see a handful of files. The one you want is %EXENAME%
- Rename this to mytheme.rar and move it to where ever you want to keep it.
- Delete all the other files. Do NOT run any of these as they will install adware/spyware/toolbars on your computer
Now, you can extract the rar file to your resources\themes directory, and provided your uxtheme.dll has been patched, you can switch to that theme using Display Properties in control panel.
Filed under: Desktop |
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