I’m no expert in security, but the master password dialog in Firefox is calling for problems. There are tons of websites that require you to create an account, the password manager helps you cope with it. If you use Firefox you are likely to be a person with ADD, err use tabs to browse multiple sites at the same time. A generic query dialog from any random javascript looks exactly the same as the master password query. I sense a huge potential for phishing.

It did happen to me. A friend was wondering why I’ve sent him a password-looking message over last.fm messaging service. Typing that password took less time than to figure out I’m making a fool of myself (last.fm does need you to authorize to send the recommendation message and I really had a Homer’s D’OH
moment).

There appears to be a bug on this filed in 2001.

There is an intersting and very scary presentation on phishing techniques I was pointed to recently that presents studies showing that a majority of tested users disregard hints such as the protocol (https://), the colored URL widget and the lock key completely. But I still believe that presenting this dialog in a distinct way that’s outside the possibilities of document scripts/css is long overdue.

With some help from the nice folks at #gnome-art, I’ve updated my dark gtk theme, Darkilouche, to use symbolic colors. The theme appears to look very similar to my previous effort, but symbolic colors make gtkrc much more bearable to live with. It became a lot more readable – shade (0.6, @selected_bg_color) will tell you a lot more than
#ff7423. And for the user it’s absolutely lovely to be able to define a basic set of six colors and have the theme shade appropriately. I love that about metacity themes.

• So go ahead and enjoy darkilouche (in pink if you choose so).
• Bugger, a tooltip color fix– 0.2.3.

Local Gtk Themes

Since I brought up metacity, I’d like to throw a bone if some art-inclined hacker feels compelled to pick up.

Observing stars is better in the rural areas and not in a light-polluted city. Similarly Darkilouche is sweet for artwork/photo editing apps. It brings up the actual content, not the background/widgets. That’s also the only thing I don’t like about flickr, photos tend to get lost in the shining white surroundings.

Majority of web pages use a white background, and editing documents on light grey feels unnatural to many people. So a dark theme doesn’t work so well for those applications. Gtk+ allows to launch an application with custom gtkrc file. To launch F-Spot with Darkilouche:

GTK2_RC_FILES=$HOME/.themes/Darkilouche/gtk-2.0/gtkrc f-spot

But there is something that bothers me about using Darkilouche for GIMP, Inkscape and F-Spot only. Good metacity themes don’t hardcode colors, but make use of the colors defined in the Gtk theme. Metacity currently doesn’t consider local themes, so the window border is usually a lot lighter for the ‘dark apps’ and creates an unnatural frame.

I have a dejavu feeling about it, but I’ve filed a new enhancement bug for this on metacity.

Maybe a workaround in making Devil’s Pie forcing a theme with hardcoded colors for the specific app windows would be a more
feasable approach?

I would love to spend a bit more time on it, but a father has to wake up in the morning, you know

I’ve blogged about switching to Ekiga for PC to PC calls. I have still been using skype for US calls though. Not anymore. There might be many SIP service providers, but they seemed expensive to me. One of the cheaper ones is Gizmo. They have their own free beer client, but also provide a SIP proxy.

To get a call credit you can use with Ekiga, I:

1. Downloaded the Gizmo client and created an account.
2. Launched Ekiga and filled in the account info
   (edit>accounts): Account Name: Gizmo, Registrar proxy01.sipphone.com:5060, User: SIP#, Password: GizmoPWD. The SIP# can be found in your profile page in the Gizmo client. There are additional entries in ‘More Options’: Authentication Login: SIP#, Realm/Domain: proxy01.sipphone.com
3. Selected GSM as the preferred audio codec in Ekiga’s preferences. Speex was selected by default and didn’t work for me when I tested it with a landline.
4. Bought some credit. At $0.02/minute for US calls, this is going to last a while

Note that you get a little credit when you create an account, so you have an option to test things out before you buy. Also there seem to be no problems with dial tone based PIN entry as with Skype. The disadvantage of using Ekiga and not their client is that you don’t see how much credit you got left.

Nothing for colorblind people like me, but perhaps you want to vote for your favorite color scheme for Openoffice Chart? The OpenOffice folks are running a web poll.

Inkscape has had manual font kerning since the beginning of time. You can press Alt+Left/Right to tweak. Yet it doesn’t have an interface for tracking (or letter-spacing in CSS speak).

The XML editor comes at rescue and allows you to add your custom CSS to the appropriate svg:text element. The good thing about the editor is that reflects the selected objects on canvas and your changes update on Ctrl+Enter so it’s not as bad as it sounds. Would be nice to have the style parameter content nicely laid out though. It is hard to read
when there’s no newlines and it reorders automatically. Ultimately tracking is something to be exposed in the UI, which I’m sure is the plan. Neverthless I’m happy about today’s find.

Update: I’m a doofus, apparently you could have done that for ages with Alt+, and Alt+..

The features. The new site. The demo videos. The unparalelled presentation of the release log (at least among free software).

Grab it while it’s hot.

Many of the control center applet icons aren’t up to date, making the
awesome work of the CC team shaded by the style inconsistency. Let’s change
that for the 2.18 release!

I invite all artiste types, but also hackers who are willing to
lend a hand to make sure the capplet icons install and use all the appropriate
icon sizes to join us on irc.freenode.org #tango tomorrow.

There’s a few bugs open already, but far from complete. CC needs some love.

• #397310 – Menus and toolbars
• #397305 – Sound
• #397312 – Preferred applications
• #399051 – Network proxy
• #375230 – Resolution

Update: D’oh, for some reason I’ve looked at January
thinking it’s February on the release schedule page. Still
a worthy plan for Friday, but sadly not in time for 2.18. Thanks Andre.

While enjoying Jono’s talk I didn’t like the appearance of the instrument loudness preview at first glance and I thought about how to make it prettier. I thought the 2px stroke is what makes this clunky. Yet there is something about the typical waveform preview that makes it both nicer to look at and thanks to the symmetry also giving you a better overview of the track.

It appears it actually helps to identify the really loud and silent parts better as it exaggerates the extremes. I’m not really having time to spare and don’t want to get involved, but maybe the following mockup could spark up some interest in making it a bit more polished?

The freesound integration is awesome! Inkscape and openclipart would be just as sweet.

There’s a couple of bugs that deal with icons being inappropriately scaled. Not only does scaling a 48x48px icon down to 16×16 almost never work, but even scaling a 24x24px icon down to 23x23px ends up in a blurry mess.

It’s great to have a caring hacker around. I’d like to appeal to all other GNOME developers to follow the same algorithm. The pixel-precise desktop icon nirvana is on the horizon.

• How to look up the right icon size