Pie Palace

The VrtuCar reservation page sort of sucks. It works, but it’s ugly:

It’s also hard to use, as it:

• mixes available cars with unavailable cars,
  
• gives tables varying widths,
  
• places the reservation buttons inconsistently.

My greasmonkey script makes the site look a little better:

If you’d like to improve the look of your VrtuCar reservation page, grab the script from the GitHub repo.

Blogawa.ca now has three new contributors: our geeky pals at Zone 12, the highly fashionable Dare to Unravel, and the contentariffic Hello Ottawa. ((blogawa++)++)++

For some of us, making it big is getting cross posted to the Make blog. By that measure, the folks on Ottawa’s Zone 12 Project blog have made it with Nigel Vezeau’s fantastic child-size recumbent trike. (And yes, I’ve asked them if they’d be willing to have Z12 added to Blogawa)

For the past couple of weeks, Blogawa has been misbehaving. It’s been quietly ignoring posts from Perspective Ottawa. I use FeedWordPress to aggregate posts from around town, so this weekend I looked into it a little more seriously.

After I upgraded to the latest FeedWordPress, I started seeing errors like:

WP HTTP Error: Operation timed out after 10000 milliseconds with 48,382 bytes received

when I manually refreshed Perspective Ottawa’s feed. With a bit of digging, I discovered that there’s a default timeout of 10 seconds in the library FWP uses to download and parse RSS feeds. I’ve pinged the author about it, but in case you’re having a similar problem, here’s my fix:

1. Edit your-wordpress-directory/wp-content/plugins/feedwordpress/feedwordpress.php.
2. Search for function fetch. You should find the function near line 1407 (for FWP version 2010.0905).
3. Under the line $feed = new SimplePie();, add: $feed->set_timeout(25);.
4. When you’re done, your code should look something like:
   
5. Go to your blog’s Syndication admin page, and update your feeds. If you get PHP syntax errors, you made a mistake.

With that fix, FeedWordPress and I are now BFFs again.

Boo! After hours of hard work, I managed to get an AWN helper (nerdspeak for “a thing that shows stuff on my computer’s status bar”) for Workrave included in the official distribution (nerdspeak for “now everyone can use it”). I pinged OMG Ubuntu to say “hey! you like docks, and I wrote this thing! you should mention it,” and they did. They just left my name off the attribution. All that hard work and no cred to go along with it.

I’d like to welcome a bunch of new bloggers to Blogawa! In chronological order:

First among equals is GJ Hagenaars‘ now ex-campaign blog. He’s no longer in the Bay Ward municipal race for all the right reasons. It sounds like he intends to keep his blog updated with his thoughts on the future of our city.

Keeping in the electoral vein is Municipalities Out Of Control – sort of a Girls Gone Wild for city politics, but with finances instead of sex and city councillors instead of drunk/stoned/payed teenagers. (Mr. O’Malley, I apologize if you don’t like the simile, but the name of the blog was too good to pass up)¹

Blogawa also welcomes its first online magazine, in the form of UnFolding. The whole thing looks pretty snazzy, particularly the previews section.

iKEN is an excellent photoblog by a Korean exchange student visiting Ottawa. The photos of Korea are particularly cool.

We also get to welcome ThumbShift a cycling blog. Fellow cyclists are always welcome, especially those who post pictures of street art.

1. Mr. Francis, you really don’t deserve this simile. Best of luck on your legal battles. I encourage you to consider joining a religion. Like Scientology. (back)

I’ve put together a Gnome applet that checks the balance of an online bank account at predetermined times and emails the balances to a selected email address. It’s unimaginatively titled “balancer“.

It’s (1) useful, and (2) scares the crap out of me.

The useful part is pretty self evident. I want to know my current balance so I can reign in my spending if I’m going overboard.

The scary part is equally self evident. balancer keeps bank credentials on the user’s computer. That’s a terrible idea. An attacker who wants to make some cash just has to trawl the secrets stored in the GnomeKeyring to get access to the user’s life savings. In theory, GnomeKeyring could be secure-ish, if it kept all of its secrets on a portion of the disk hidden from users and blocked access on too many failed access attempts. But it doesn’t seem to. It looks like it keeps secrets in ~/.gnome2/keyrings. If an attacker can subvert an app owned by the user, then they can read ~/.gnome2/keyrings/balancer.credentials.keyring and pass the file offsite for an offline dictionary attack. Eep!

On top of that, GnomeKeyring differentiates between apps based on the path to the app binary. I guess this works for native applications, but it breaks when the app runs in a virtual machine. My app, balancer, is written in Python. After I run it, other Python apps are able to dig into the GnomeKeyring without the user being prompted for a password. Noes!

It’s funny. I tried Wesabe, and had no problem putting myself at the same risk balancer would inflict on me. Even though the Wesabe client has the same security problems, I put them out of my head because someone else wrote the code. But I’m having a hard time doing that with something I wrote.

A couple of years back I wrote a javascript version of a quasi-diagnostic test used to help diagnose Asperger syndrome. I wrote it for a lark: I was working with peeps that were socially awkward (like me), and I wanted to play with javascript. I stuck it on this blog and forgot about it.

Today I noticed a link from Common Sense Atheism pissing on some god-botherer’s ebook. It turns out that my AQ test has been tramping around the intertubes and is now moonlighting in theist/freethinker debates.

The apple falls close to the tree.

I occasionally get emails regarding the Asperger test hosted here on PiePalace. Some of them are heartbreaking:

I am trying to find information on how to test my son for Asperger’s. [... he has a hard time socializing... has difficulties with kids his own age...] Our insurance does not provide for testing and I can not afford to have him tested.

I know Canada’s health care system has problems, but at least anyone can get their kid in front of a doctor.

Blogawa welcomes TheatreGirl to its fold. TheatreGirl is writing reviews of Ottawa’s theatre shows. She promises to be keeping an eye on the Fringe – which I’m looking forward to. I refuse to have any experience unless I’m told beforehand that it will be good.