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.

• Backup files from
  • directories
  • MySQL
  • IMAP
• Transfer backups to:
  • Other directories (e.g. via samba to another machine)
  • SCP
• Encrypt backups using:
  • AESpipe

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

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.

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 )

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.

First up, Phil gave us a run through of the current services in the Windows Live portfolio, which currently stands at a healthy 17, with more yet to be revealed. Of the 17, we have Live.com, Mail and Domains and of course, Messenger. All of these are still under active development, and we can be seeing updates to all of them fairly regularly.

We were shown a demo of Live Local, which is Microsoft’s answer to Google Local/Maps. There’s not a lot to say about this to anyone who’s already used Google’s version. They are very similar. Major differences are that Live’s supports scroll-wheel zooming, and has transparency.

Koji gave us a brief run through as to what Live actually is. It can best be described as a Platform for which all the new services can run. At the core, we have things like Identity (who you are), Contacts (who you know), and Storage (everything else about you, e.g. mail). Sitting above this we have the Services, which means things like Search, Presence (whether you are online or not), and Advertising services. At the top level we have the things we most associate with live, and that is Email, Instant Messaging, Mapping etc.

It is because all these services sit on a single core, that we see as much integration between the Live services as we do. We’ve already seen this where your Messenger contacts appear in your Mail address book. These “Live Contacts” will be accessible throughout the entirety of Live’s services.

Koji then showed us several demos of some of the things users can do to enhance their Live experience.

Gadgets are a feature from Live.com, potentially elsewhere. Each of the items you can drag and drop onto your Live.com page is an instance of a particular gadget. They are written in simple JavaScript/JScript, with an XML manifest. Writing your own looks to be pretty simple, and you can add one to your page simply by linking to your XML file. The demos Koji showed us were pretty nonfunctional, but designed to show off just how easy it is to make one yourself. With just 10 lines of code on top of a simple framework, he had a drag-and-dropable gadget on his page, with a text box that responded to events. This same type of process is replicated across most of Live. Messenger activities are done in exactly the same way, as he showed in the second demo.

The most interesting demo by far was Koji’s search application. Most tech-savvy computer users find themselves spending a considerable amount of time searching for things. I dread to think how many Google hits I make each day. Using some simple looking C# he had a Windows Form with all the controls he needed to run and display a search query. The process of querying itself is typical of java and C#, horribly convoluted, with objects everywhere, but then I guess the only other alternative is like low level C, writing the networking functions each time - Guess they’re catering for the masses.

The fun started however, when he reminded us he works for the tablet divisions at Microsoft, and how he hates typing when he could be writing. He dragged a new Ink control onto the search form, over the top of the other controls, and with a small modification to the code, had a search application that worked directly from handwriting.

The most incredible think about Ink I reckon, is just how good handwriting recognition is getting. Koji’s was not the most legible handwriting in the world, but the control picked up every word exactly as he wrote it.

To set the priority of the words on the control, which basically acts like a sketchpad, he just dragged a selection round them (which was very cool) and moved them closer toward the top-left corner of the control, instantly changing the priority of the search terms. The literal comment in my notebook while watching the event is “ink layout > *”

Now we all know that Google is king when it comes to Internet searches, but did you know there’s one market where they aren’t number 1… Korea. Over there its a local endeavour that’s the most popular search engine, and if you’ve seen Yahoo Answers, you’ll know what it’s like. The new Live QnA is Microsoft’s answer to this. Instead of a normal search engine where you try to guess the write keywords to find the information you want, in QnA you simply create a new question and post it to the site. Over the next three days anyone can post their answer to the question. You can also vote on answers given, in a similar fashion to the Experts Exchange site. The more you interact with the community, the higher your Kudos.

This service is still very much in the dev/alpha stages, and we were potentially the first group of people outside of ms to see a demo. As such we got to observe all the silliness that happens when the developers are testing a new system with bogus data

As for the Kudos, it was hinted that this would be a similar theme throughout Live for community interaction, and that the might be better known as “points”. If you are an avid Xbox gamer, you might recognise the idea of points from Marketplace. It was suggested that this might become linked in some way in the future, that active members of the community would be rewarded for their efforts. I’ll be interested to see how that pans out over the coming weeks and months.

In my mind, the star of the show was the preview of the Live Mobile services (name subject to change). Imagine having Messenger on your smart phone (that is if you are lucky enough to own a smart phone ( ).

Bearing in mind the size of a phone screen, it was a little difficult to see what was going on, but essentially you get a buddy list that you can list your top contacts on. The list even included emoticons, and display pictures. Phil then demonstrated sending messages from his phone to his laptop over Messenger. Then he took a photo of someone in the audience with the built-in camera, and the picture was immediately sent as a file to the laptop’s Messenger. Now that is cool.

But more, you could be driving along in the car, as you do, when you receive a text message. Its a tad dangerous to try replying to an SMS while driving, Phil started speaking his imaginary response into the phone. Low and behold it shows up as a voice clip on the other client. True interconnectivity. I’m sure this is why voice clips were actually added to the Messenger client.

Although I typically hate the idea of nudges, and find the noise they make annoying to the highest degree, I was impressed to learn that the mobile client supports them. When you receive on your phone vibrates and makes a distinctly similar noise to that of the PC version. Despite that I think I’d probably still be tempted to turn that off almost immediately.

As for how much of this gets supported is going to depend very much on the phone you have and the operator you use. But this is very exciting technology and I’m looking forward to seeing some more of this in the near future on oh yes, the smart phone I won \o/ We chucked our names into a hat/cardboard box, and joy upon joy my name got drawn out as one of five. I love Microsoft (shush you uni linuxy peoples ).

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.

Packaging

The phone comes in a rather multicultural box, with all the text in at least three different languages. Inside the box is pretty much the normal level of packaging, so I wont bother going into any detail about this whatsoever. Let’s just say that I’ve seen things arrive in presentation cases, and this is not one of them.

What you get

The package consists of three main parts. One rather ordinary looking, cordless digital phone; matching charger with a Windows Live Messenger sticker hastily attached to the front; and the rather sleek, slimline base station, with all the wires sticking out of it.

Connections

You plug the base station into the wall, the telephone line, and your PC. The charging unit also needs to be plugged into the wall. Now I can see some benefit to being able to put the charger separate from the base unit, but for me, I just have to ask why. I’m a computer geek, I have about two dozen things plugged into the wall at any one time via a probably less than safe mass of extension leads and cables. So when I get a new toy that’s USB connected and requires not one but two wall sockets, a little part of me dies inside.

That said, the base station does to well to hide the wires from you as much as possible. Everything connects to the underside of the device, and is piped through a few channels, before neatly extruding from one corner.

Installation

Installing this phone is a piece of cake. You plug it in, and I assume the drivers are distributed with WLM itself, because there are no driver CDs, or downloads required. The add new device wizard ran a couple of times for each of the phones USB interfaces, and that was it.

I had only two minor issues with the installation, but they were easily resolved. After I installed the drivers, I had no sound. Since I’d just moved my PC from uni to back home, and hadn’t yet used audio, I ran through the normal diagnostic processes, and couldn’t find any problem with the hardware or software. I then checked the Sounds and Audio Devices applet, to find that windows had moved my default audio device from the SoundBlaster sound card, to the VOIP phone. A bizarre thing to do, but easy to change, and sound returned instantaneously.

The second issue was a strange \”PC SOFTWARE NOT RUNNING\” message on the phone whenever I pressed the WLM button. It took me a long while to suss, but it was very clearly my own stupidity that caused it. Whenever you connect the phone to the PC, you get an XP autorun dialog popup, with two choices. One has a phone icon, and the other is the take no action icon. I instinctively clicked the no action icon, and clicked ok, assuming the phone icon was for making a call, or some other such silly action that I’d never normally want to take. It was however the enable/disable function for the phone. Once you plug the phone in and accept this autorun box, you get a nice little phone icon in the system tray, and the WLM button on the handset does what you would expect.

Using the phone

As a land line phone, usage is completely self explanatory. If you’ve ever used a phone before then this one is no different.

As a VOIP phone, it’s actually pretty simple to use.

First up, I ran the Audio and Video Setup wizard in WLM, and set the phone to be my default speaker/microphone device. Then all you have to do to call someone is press the WLM button on the handset, navigate to the group the contact is in, then select the contact in the list and press the call button.

If you receive a call invite from a contact, the phone automatically starts ringing, and you can pick up, or cancel the invite from the handset. There are no hoops to jump through in this regard.

One slight oddity, is that if you use WLM on your PC to start the call, it doesn’t get routed through to the handset. This means you must have the handset to hand in order to make a call; you can’t say start the call from the PC, then pick up the handset to start talking.

Also, and I suppose understandably, when you make a call using the handset, a conversation window to that contact is automatically opened, with and the invite in it sent.

Conclusions

If you make a lot of telephone calls, most of whom are on your messenger contact list, then this phone is for you. It replaces your traditional land line phone, but offers you free calls to your IM contacts.

Pros:

• Easy to set up and use
• Cheaper calls over VOIP

Cons:

• Only worth spending money on if you often call people on your WLM list, either VOIP or normally
• Requires your PC to be in reach of a telephone socket to make normal calls, and your PC to be on to make VOIP calls.
• You can only VOIP call people on your WLM contact list, so far as I am aware

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…

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

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.