Open id or open identity is another means to secure passwords by using centralized standards. It allows users to log into various sites that use Open-id by using a single digital identity or digital signature that is provided by the Open id providers. In layman terms, Open id is logging in and providing a password only once, and still being able to log into other sites without providing the password to all of them. It is only the Open id provider who keeps the password and provides an identity to the user and also, authenticates the identity whenever a website needs to authenticate the user. Thus, since the password stays with the Open id provider, it is more secure and effective.

Now, a word (actually, many words) about the technical aspect of Open id.

Elements or parties associated with Open id:

• End user
• Identifier
• Identity provider or Open Id provider
• Relying party
• Server or server agent
• User agent
• Consumer

For a complete cycle of accessing a site using Open id, an end user has to first register with an Identity Provider or Open id provider to obtain an identifier. The identifier can either be a Uniform Resource Locator (URL) or an Extensible Resource Identifier (XRI). The identifier identifies each end user uniquely. When a user wants to access any page of a Relying party (a relying party is basically a service provider whose service is needed by the End user, but securely), he/she enters his Open Identifier (which can be URL or XRI). The relying party login page, does not ask for username and password, it only asks for the Open id. Now, the relying party visits the web page located at that URL to verify the Id entered by the user. After that, there are two modes by which the relying party can communicate with the Identity Provider.

• The relying party requests the provider not to interact with the user
• The relying party requests a mode where the user communicates directly with the provider to control the interaction.

The mode where the user interacts directly with the provider is used more commonly on the Web.

The provider first verifies whether the relying party is genuine or not using a ‘Shared Secret’. Then the provider asks the user for his Open id password, and then asks whether the user wishes to trust the Relying party. If the user declines, the Relying party is notified that authentication has been rejected. If the user agrees, the Relying party is assured of the authenticity, and the Relying Party then verifies whether the authentication came from a valid Provider. The connection is complete, and the user can now use services of the Relying Party.

There are a number of benefits of using Open Id. Apart from providing security, it also saves login time. Also, there is no need for remembering multiple usernames and passwords. Most importantly, one can have a greater control over their activities over the Net. There are also various versions of Open Id available which provide secure communication in different ways, but ultimately perform the same task.

As of December 2009, there are 1 billion Open Id’s on the Net and around 9 million sites support Open Id’s. Some of the Open Id providers are AOL, Orange, and VeriSign etc.

Look around you will find open id everywhere (Google, Yahoo, AOL), photo stream (Flickr) or blog (Blogger, WordPress, LiveJournal)

SAFE BROWSING!

Stay digified !!!

Nitish jha

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Well, one simple solution to this is installing Samba Client on your Ubuntu machine. For that, use the command line.

sudo apt-get install smbclient

Make sure you are connected to the internet and proxy configuration, if any, is done on the command line. If everything is well, it will install Samba Client on your system. After this, use the command line

shares-admin

This will open a neat graphical utility to share your files and folders. After unlocking this window by entering your system password, you can simply drag-and-drop your files to share them. You will also get the option to uncheck the Read Only check box to make your files and folders writable by other users on the network.

Happy sharing!

Tanay Mathpal

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You might be having troubles adding files and folders to the /var/www folder of Ubuntu installation. Sometimes various other folders also require root permission to perform some action on it. So in that case you can use the following command.

gksudo nautilus

This gives the root permissions and open Nautilus File manager in the GUI mode. The folder opened inside the browser is /root by default and you can browse to the desired folder and perform the administrative tasks. If you want to add something real quick in a folder with root permissions you can do so using the terminal. Browse to the folder and add using the Sudo command, as show below.

> cd /var/www

>sudo vi index.php

This will ask for password and will create a file index.php file. You can also use sudo with nautilus, but gksudo is safer for GUI applications and is used in combination with GUI apps.

Hope this helps.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

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Why use WordPress?
Blogging is about expressing your views and opinions about a topic/theme as effectively as possible. The blogging system you use, thus, should be as less-intrusive in the process of blogging as possible. Once you install WordPress, WordPress will take care of everything else and let you focus on writing blogs. there is no other blogging tool with the ease of writing posts with WordPress or one that has a media library as powerful and as simplistic as WordPress.

However, no matter how simple the tool can be – there is always some learning curve. The good thing about WordPress is that this learning curve is almost non-existent. I have been now blogging on WordPress for over 2 years (I started in June 07) and I never faced a hindrance where I would have to look for another solution.

WordPress also has its set of richly developed plug-ins, most of them contributed by an extremely active community. To add to that, WordPress is very easy to code and design. In fact, of all the CMSs out there, there is hardly a CMS as easy as WordPress.

If you are new to blogging and looking out to learn stuff from references, do check these people out. I learned loads from them:

• Darren Rowse (ProBlogger)
• Lorelle VanFossen
• Cats Who Code.com
• and check out all the good things on wordpress.org

All good things said and done, one of the real good reasons for using WordPress is its theming support. Yes, almost every CMS has a theming engine – true! But WordPress is both simple and powerful at the same time. To add to that, there are numbers of awesome WordPress themes available for you to use (like I do), or if you want you can design your own theme (like the one here on Digimantra) – it’s very easy.

WordPress 2.8.3 has just been released, head over to wordpress.org to try it out now or if you already blog with WordPress, upgrade today.
Also watch out for WordPress 2.9 coming soon

Have fun
Kinshuk

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Ok, so let’s start. I am using one of my most used addon as an example – YSlow (You can also check our recommended list of addons for Developers).YSlow is a wonderful addon for your webpage optimisation and I sorely miss it in 3.5 as its not migrated yet. Let’s Begin.

What you should know first of all is that the .XPI file for all addons is actually a compressed ZIP file. So, if you use an archiving program to extract an XPI file, you’d get a lot of config files for the addon.

So, first of all let us download the latest available version of YSlow (version 2.0.0b3 released on April 29, 2009). Download it, don’t install it. If you have trouble downloading the file with Firefox, better use some other non-gecko/mozilla browser like IE, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Now open the file with an archiving program. For the sake of ease, you might also want to rename the XPI into ZIP. Extract the files from the archive now. Look for install.rdf now and open it in a text editor. The RDF is an XML file. You will see the following block:

<RDF:Description RDF:about="rdf:#$41y0G2"
                   em:id="{ec8030f7-c20a-464f-9b0e-13a3a9e97384}"
                   em:minVersion="2.0"
                   em:maxVersion="3.0.*" />

Simply change the em:maxVersion value to 3.5 or 4 if you please. Save the file. Compress all the files back into a ZIP archive. Rename to XPI. Open with & Install on Firefox 3.5 and you are done.

Remember, even though you have fooled Firefox 3.5 in believing that the addon is applicable to the version, however you have not modified the addon codebase. So, it will still use the older objects and elements present in previous versions and not use Firefox 3.5 to its best potential, and/or not perform properly. So do upgrade to the official 3.5 version of the addon as soon as it is released.

Have Fun!

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In this post we are going to walk you through installing Firefox 3.5 in Linux (no installers for Linux ). We’ll be doing it on Ubuntu 9.04, but it will work the same way on other Linux distributions too.

Step 1 is to download Firefox 3.5 tarball from the Firefox site. Extract the Firefox 3.5 files from this tar ball and move them to an application directory of your choice. Anything like /home/user/apps/firefox35 (we will use this path as example in this post) or /usr/apps/firefox35 would work fine.

Step 2: Now since you already have Firefox 3.0.11 (or previous) installed, we will not be able to upgrade the older version with the newer version. So, we will create a new profile so that we can safely work in the Firefox 3.5 environment. To do that, create a launcher for the Firefox executable with the -P switch. The command section of the launcher will look something like: /home/user/apps/firefox35/firefox -P

Step 3 Run this executable now, Firefox 3.5 will start with the “Choose User Profile” option. Create a new profile and start having fun.

Do note that not all addons have been migrated to Firefox 3.5 yet, so you might have to miss out on some of your favorite addons for a while. Also, you will have to export your saved passwords and other configurations in the new profile (checkout addons that help you do that or else you will end up doing it manually).

If in case, even after creating a new profile you end up with Firefox 3.0.11 (or your previous version) use the –no-remote switch in your launcher. This switch helps by creating a completely new instance of Firefox, instead of connecting to an existing instance. Using this switch, then, you can keep both your old Firefox version and the sparkling new 3.5

Have fun and do share your firefox 3.5 experience.

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What is the Drupal Content Management Framework

The real power of Drupal comes from what we can call the holy trinity of Drupal – Taxonomy, CCK and Views. But before we come to what these are let us understand how Drupal manages content. Drupal calls your content as Node. All of your content – be it blog posts, static pages, story articles, product reviews, etc are the same for Drupal – Nodes. What is different though is the content type. For Drupal, a content type defines a set of Nodes – Each content type has a distinct set of fields that define the node. According to Drupal Documentation, a node is a piece of content in Drupal, typically corresponding to a single page on the site, that has a Title an optional Body, and perhaps additional fields. Every node also belongs to a particular content type, and can additionally be classified using the taxonomy system. Examples of nodes are polls, stories, book pages, images, etc. (via Drupal Terminology) Savvy?

Now lets have a look at Taxonomy. Taxonomy is literally ‘the science of classification’. The Drupal taxonomy system enables authorized users to categorize content using both tags and administrator-defined terms. It is a flexible tool for classifying content with many advanced features. Further information can be found within the taxonomy system documentation. (via Drupal Terminology)
What taxonomy helps in achieving is define a system of categorisation for content on your Drupal-run website. Now, since this system of categorisation is system-wide, you can really play with taxonomy in wonderful ways. Taxonomy is a very powerful tool within Drupal and plays an important role in streamlining your content structure and organisation on the website. It is available as an optional core module in your Drupal installation.

Next up is CCK, which stands for Content Creation Kit. CCK is a ‘contributed module’ (which means it is not included in the core package of Drupal and needs to be downloaded and installed; more importantly, it is a community contributed module and not initially developed as part of core drupal functionality), which permits site developers to define custom fields and content types. A variety of extension modules to CCK exist permitting specialized field definitions such as images, dates, and computed values. (via Drupal Terminology). What CCK helps you in doing is define custom fields to define your content types. Say, I am making a corporate website and want to list all of my customers. How do I do it? I create a content type for my customers, where the Customer Website is a Link field defined by CCK, Customer’s Industry is a Drupal Taxonomy term, again being referenced thruogh CCK, Customer’s Logo is an Image Node being referenced through CCK. Could I have done it without CCK? No!

Finally, We look up at Views. It is again a contributed module, not part of the standard Drupal distribution, which allows site developers a simple graphical interface for modifying the presentation of content. Views permits selection of specific fields to display, filtration against various node attributes, choice of basic layout options, and other more advanced features. (via Drupal Terminology) The Views module starkly highlights the power of the Drupal Framework and how drupal abstracts your data from the presentation. Using the Views Module (and its GUI), you can create new displays from a set of related data. Lets say, I want to have a user directory on my website. So I pick up some personal information from each’s profile, then I query the drupal database and list the posts contributed by each user, and structure it along and persent it as a whole page using Views; with the ease of point and click. Think of it as the Report Designer from your favorite Database Application. It’s that powerful!

Finally, we should also make a mention of the Drupal API, which is a very robust and extensible API using which anyone can create new modules that implement new functionalities in your favorite CMS application. Do you need anything else than Drupal? Not in this life, maybe.

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Launchy in Windows - Who needs the Start Menu?

Notice anything different in this screenshot?

Well, if you have used Linux or Mac, you must have definitely come across GNOME Do (in Linux) or Quicksilver (in Mac). Launchy is a similar tool, and it is for windows.

What is launchy? “Launchy is a free windows and linux utility designed to help you forget about your start menu, the icons on your desktop, and even your file manager. Launchy indexes the programs in your start menu and can launch your documents, project files, folders, and bookmarks with just a few keystrokes!” (by Josh Karlin via launchy.net)

To an extent, it would feel like the search bar from the Vista Start Menu. What Launchy actually accomplishes is that it enabels you to access your favorite and most used applications with just a few keystorkes. That helps getting work done lightening fast. And yep! Launchy is open source.

Head over to launchy.net for a download and the new launchy experience. Don’t forget to share the experience.

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Drupal is a Content Management System aka CMS. (In fact, it is so powerful that it is commonly referred to as a ‘Content Management Framework’, but that’s not for beginners). Content Management System is a software that you install (generally) on your domain to manage content (over a website). In short, Drupal is a software that will help you in making ‘pure-awesomeness’ websites quickly – by removing all the overheads of coding, maintaining, security etc and giving you freedom to write quality content. Savvy?

Sample this: You are creating your website that talks about you as a person, as a professional, a photo gallery of your last trip to Manali, downloads of nifty softwares written by you, and your blog. Imagine coding this. Easy? Not so easy. Install Drupal, make some configurations, write content and you will be up and running in a couple of hours.

But be warned, Drupal has an initial learning curve (maybe not for small website like our example, but definitely for huge, complex websites), but the good news is that the initial time that you invest in learning how to work in Drupal, gives you manifold returns in performance.

Also, Drupal is open source. What that means is that thousands of developers are working around the globe in making the software better and better. What it also means is that if there is a feature that you need and Drupal doesn’t have (which is a very rare occurrence, if ever), you can open up your favourite IDE, write the PHP code (Drupal is written in PHP, and requires a LAMP stack), and add the functionality. You can also contribute the functionality back to the community as a module (do follow the Drupal Standards while coding, else the community would reject the contribution, more of it later). So, its robust, scalable, efficient and awesome.

Oh, and by the way – Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez use Drupal. So does Firefox, and MTV, and Warner Bros Music, and many more.

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In the mediawiki/includes/skin.php file, search for the function bottomScripts(). You will see something like:

   /**
    * This gets called shortly before the  tag.
    * @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before
    */
   function bottomScripts() {
      global $wgJsMimeType;
      $bottomScriptText = "\n\t\t
         if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook ();\n";
      wfRunHooks( 'SkinAfterBottomScripts', array( $this, &$bottomScriptText ) );
      return $bottomScriptText;
   }

Now, define a new function addGoogleAnalytics() with the following code, we will call it later in the bottomScripts() function:

   /**
    * This function will embed the Google Analytics Tracking Code in Mediawki
    * We will call it in the bottomScripts() function
   **/
   function addGoogleAnalytics(){
      $printGoogleAnalytics = “\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol)
         ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= "document.write(unescape("<script src='"  
         gaJsHost   "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'></script>"));\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “try {\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker
          ("UA-XXXXXX-XX");\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “pageTracker._trackPageview();\n”;
      $printGoogleAnalytics .= “} catch(err) {}\n”;
      return $printGoogleAnalytics;
   }

In this function, replace “UA-XXXXXX-XX” with your own Web Property ID.

Now, all that is left to do is to call our own function addGoogleAnalytics() in the bottomScripts() function, and it will be done. So modify the bottomScripts() function to include the function call:

   /**
    * This gets called shortly before the  tag.
    * @return String HTML-wrapped JS code to be put before
    */
   function bottomScripts() {
      global $wgJsMimeType, $gStr;
      $bottomScriptText = "\n\t\t
         if (window.runOnloadHook) runOnloadHook ();\n";
      wfRunHooks( 'SkinAfterBottomScripts', array( $this, &$bottomScriptText ) );
 
      // the following is the function call added by us
      $gStr = $this->addGoogleAnalytics();
 
      return $bottomScriptText;
   }

We are done. Nifty! Aint it
Note: Due to embedding code in this post, the “->” in our function call is being displayed as “->”, do correct it.

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You can order server edition or a desktop edition of Ubuntu

I had order 400 DVDs for distributing in an Open source event and they shipped it in say 4 weeks straight to India. But i would request all the readers to be decent and order what is required and do not forget to redistribute. And the best part is Ubuntu allows you to copy the disc and create as many copies as you want to, because “Sharing is Caring”

Cheers !!
Realin !

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I say linux then you might think of that black terminal window, but what if i say now your Gnome desktop can be more flexible and you need not to scroll thru menus or start your program using a terminal window. Well, yes!! this is true. A very light weight sexy ,powerful tool “gnome-do” makes your life wonderful !!

Look at the screenshot

Awesome !! eh ?

Ok enough! how do i install it in my machine ?

one step install, i am using ubuntu 8.10 and i typed the following command in my terminal, and it got installed in fractions of seconds.

 sudo aptitude install gnome-do

it may vary for different version of linux distros.Detailed installation notes can be found here

Ok, I am good installed it, now how do it start it ?

well its very simple to initialize this plugin, goto the terminal and type gnome-do and that would start the gnome-do plugin. You can bring this in action using windows key(super key)+space bar and just type whatever you want to start/run.

its a great tool and you must give it a try

Cheers !!

Realin !

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This entry may be useless for people who are using UBUNTU for a while now. But still i am writing this for the newbies

you can assume these files to be like .exe in linux flavour. To install a run file follow the steps

1) Open terminal window ( Applications>Accessories>terminal)

2) Browse to the run file which you want to install

3) Type ./nameoffile.run

4) It may give you error that it requires root credentials, then please type sudo .nameofile.run

That should solve the purpose

cheers !!

Realin !

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Cheers !!
Realin !

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