I am trying to programmatic-ally set the Gnome 3/GDM 3 user profile/tile/face picture for a user's account in Gnome3/GDM. This is my first attempt at a simple program for Linux and I'm unfamiliar with the APIs and my searching has yielded little useful information. It seems like one can write data to a .face file but this doesn't seem to take affect (or perhaps my file type/specs are wrong). I found from this forum post that the information is stored in a user-specific directory under /var/lib/AccountsService/users, however I want my program to run with regular user privileges and writing (directly) to this file would require elevated privileges (despite an unprivileged user being able to specify an image for their account via the Gnome settings GUI).
Ideally, I would like to do the same for KDE/KDM and Gnome 2 versions as well. Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!
OK, here's the part I can shed some light on:
On any Unix'y OS, you can always fall back on the GECOS field update function putpwent. Traditionally, the “Real Name” is the first part of the GECOS field in the user record, up to the first ,. Different systems store different extended information after the ,, including things like department names, home and office phone numbers and the like.
In Gnome 2, “they” used to use ~/.face as your personal face icon. However, there are all kinds of situations in which one user can't look into another's home folder (including root: things like network filesystems, encrypted loopback homes, and more), so this was abandoned at some point (I believe 3.0) in favour of the /var/lib/AccountsService/icons/$YOURNAMEHERE location.
In the spirit of Gnome 3, the new system (the one you most likely want to use) is the Accounts Services DBus service. You can obtain a user object over DBus, and alter it. The interface is org.freedesktop.Accounts / org.freedesktop.Accounts.User and has methods like SetRealName and SetIconFile. There are also a “bunch” of other methods for things like location, language, eMail, …
PS: you can also use libaccountsservice to interact with it without calling the DBus yourself. EG: void act_user_set_real_name (ActUser *user,
const char *real_name) and void act_user_set_icon_file (ActUser *user,
const char *icon_file) are exported from that library.
However, I don't know if K (or which version(s) of K) might be looking at this DBus service. So, if you really want to set up the K information, I'm afraid I don't know…
For what it's worth, you can also just let the user adjust it themself with
gnome-control-center user-accounts
Related
I am using the latest versions on 2sxc (11.05) and the Content App on DNN 9.06. The Content-Type for Locations does not have a field for Region (or State). Is there already something in place to account for that to get Canadian or US addresses to output normally? I realize I can add the field and then maybe use the Dropdown from Query to hook it up to DNN's list of Regions, and then modify the Views accordingly...
But that seems like a lot of work for something that might already be built in (and I just don't see it?). Or is there another easy way to tackle this?
Truth be told - we never needed that so far, so it doesn't exist.
Is this necessary for maps to work, or just another field which a standard us-address needs? I'm curious because neither outlook nor SharePoint seem to require such a field, so I never really thought about it.
BUT: if you do implement it, please do share it back with us, so we can publish it.
Note that if this is important, a possibly nicer solution would be to use a public api somewhere which provides this information, as it's most certainly more complete & up to date for this purpose. If this is the case, ping me and I'll implement a string-dropdown-from-json or something like that :)
I want to use Blockly to do some calculations, and then generate text files (as opposed to exporting code to JavaScript, Python, PHP, etc.)
I can’t see an obvious way to create my own blocks to do this in Blockly, so using AppInventor (Version: nb168), I got storing and retrieving files to work, in a crude test app on my Android tablet.
In AppInventor/Designer mode, clicking Storage/File creates a “Non-visible component for storing and retrieving files. Use this component to write or read files on your device.”
Then, in AppInventor/Blocks mode, clicking the “File1” icon gives access to 7 “file type blocks”, e.g. AppendToFile, Delete, ReadFrom, SaveFile, etc.
Is it possible to create similar “file type blocks” to use in Blockly Web?
I have limited programming knowledge, so would appreciate simple answers, please.
Thanks, Pete.
Andrew N Marshall from Google/Blockly has told me this:
"This is absolutely possible ...as long as you willing to work within the browser's security restrictions. The resulting files will be need to be manually "downloaded" one at a time, rather than written directly to the user's file system.
... I would start understanding what JavaScript functions are available to you. Attempt to construct a string and save it via a download dialog...
That means the "file" contents are really just a string in memory, a JavaScript variable. We have lots of "Text" blocks that can do a variety of operations on strings. If those are enough, you'll only need one new block to identify the string variable and initiate the download process.
Otherwise, you'll need to think about what blocks you want, and how they operate. They may operate on a specific variable in the JavaScript VM, not necessary exposed as a variable to Blockly.
Either way, you'll need to learn how to create a block and a Blockly app. We have a code lab that will walk you through all the steps. You'll learn how each block generates a string of code, and in your case, that code will be related to the download code I mentioned earlier."
So I'll press on - I just wanted to be sure my goal is actually achievable before I started.
Thanks, Pete.
Is there a way to check what is the target of a link, using NSIS ?
[ I want to check and update links on desktop, but I have a hard time checking if they belong to my application, because the name may contain a space or something, so it may not be identical...
I also want to delete links that are no longer used, that point to my folder.
So... I would like to look at the target, but can't fins anything that gives it to me. ]
You could try the ShellLink plugin or call the IShellLink+IPersistFile COM interfaces directly with the system plugin but normally a uninstaller/updater will only deal with shortcuts it created and not things the user might have created/renamed...
I have a collection of photographs (about 30,000) which I'd like to put online. I've tried doing this before, over the years, with static image galleries, applications such as Gallery2, and self-rolled scripts. None have worked that well, as my requirements are fiddly, but it still seems like this should be a solved problem.
My photos are currently organised into folders named YYYY-MM-DD short album title, using Digikam.
I need a system that:
Is Free software, is essentially feature-complete, and has an active developer community.
Allows new photos and albums to be added and updated automatically with little more manual intervention than rsyncing the source directory on my computer to the web server, and rescanning.
Allows visitors to leave comments
Allows re-captcha or equivalant spam filtering and bulk moderation of these comments.
Reads tags from the IPTC Keywords field.
If it finds a tag named "friends", requires the user to enter a password to view.
If it finds a tag named "family", requires the user to enter a different password to view.
If it finds a tag named "private", does not display the photo at all, or even better, does not upload it to the live web server.
Reads descriptions from the IPTC Caption field.
Creates sane permalinks, e.g. http://example.com/2009/03/28/shortalbumtitle/IMG_0001.jpg
I acknowledge that I may be asking for something that doesn't exist, but I hope it does.
I acknowledge that answers may be something like "use Django and code the bits that don't already exist yourself", in which case do you have any tips? :)
Thanks.
Use Django and code the bits that don't already exist yourself.
Seriously. I was going to write that and was tempted not to when I saw you'd written it yourself, but it really does make the most sense if you have any familiarity with it!
I'd start with django-photologue 2. Get a basic gallery with tagging and comments working. You'll need a couple of pl's optional dependencies.
Then I'd write a custom import wrapper that allows you to rsync to a dir and update your library.
Comments are handled internally (through photologue, I think) but if not, there are plenty of comment apps that "just work". There is a recaptcha script that works as just another form field.
PIL can read IPTC
The URL structure is up to you =)
I'm finally getting around to doing this. I'm using a local python script to extract image metadata (tags, captions and timestamp) using pyexiv2, then rotate the image according to its EXIF orientation tag if appropriate, using PIL, and export a hierarchy of files to a temporary directory, where rsync uploads it to my host, and a remote python script (actually a Django app) imports the metadata into a Django DB.
How can we restrict a user from saving the page?
Please provide some tips to disable File->Save and View Source options
EDIT: Obviously it can't be done, and probably shouldn't be attempted. But possibly a more interesting variant on this question is how can we make is sufficiently hard for a user to save a page in a usable format such that it is not worth their while doing so? The question doesn't pose a value, but say we were protecting an article subscription site where the user is paying a few hundred dollars per annum for continued access to text.
Since the page has been sent to the client, there will always be a way to get that information. Trying to stop a user from doing this will only frustrate them.
The only way to have a user not be able to save a file is to not send it to them.
While the best answer is "Don't do this," there are ways to make it more difficult for them. And since the point of this site is actually answer the question even if it's bad, here is the best way:
First you'll need to have the page open in a new window where you turn off the address bar and toolbar and everything else. That will make it so the user can't easily get to the File menu at all. To do this you'll need a "splash" page that the user loads to and then when they click a link, it opens the popup that serves the main content of your page. Details on how to create popups without things like the toolbar are here:
http://blazonry.com/javascript/windows.php
Then you'll want to add some javascript to each page that prevents the user from right clicking. Here is one method:
http://javascript.about.com/library/blnoright.htm
Finally, if it's your Javascript code that you don't want to be seen, then obfuscating your code is a pretty effective way to do that. They can still see the code if they have much know-how, but the obfuscated code would be a gigantic pain to actually interpret. There are lots of obfuscators out there; here is a free web-based one:
http://www.javascriptobfuscator.com/
This is far from foolproof. It will stop all "casual" users, but any power user will probably be able to easily figure out a way around it. Still if the idea is to at least prevent a good majority of it then this should suffice.
Update for updated question:
To address your new expanded question, I would say the best way to accomplish what you're saying is to use a format that supports DRM. Adobe Acrobat would probably be the best choice because almost everyone has the reader installed. You can prevent PDF files from being saved to the computer so that they can only be loaded from the webpage by a logged in user. The user could still do a screen capture of the document itself which I don't believe is preventable (unless Adobe Reader has some security in place for this, which they might) but it should be sufficient security for most uses.
Don't do it.
Seriously, if the user can see the page in their browser they can see the source code and/or save it to their computer.
You are fighting a losing battle here.
What about the browser's cache? It can be saved from there.
What about a print screen? That could also save the page.
The only way to prevent a user from saving something is to not show it to them in the first place.
It's really a waste of time and resources to try and do this in html as any method you use can be trivially circumvented.
Instead I would use some other technology to display the data - you can never get around a screen capture. but if you're for instance displaying text and you want to make it hard for the use to save that text for use elsewhere then possible options include
PDF - which can disable save and print. There are extensions to most popular web languages that will write a pdf on the fly. Indeed you might be as well just to go down the DRM route with Adobe and embed a document
Flash - most probably via Flex which could be used to write a general-purpose app to display text and images. The advantage of Flash is that it's easier to set up links than pdf.
Or something else, a custom java applet, or even a vrml plugin and display the text in 3D!
In all cases you could display text against a disruptive background to make OCR more difficult, and images could be watermarked. However nothing is going to stop a determined and resourceful viewer, although you can possibly make it sufficiently hard that it's not worth their time.
The least you can do is... the content is generated dynamically by Javascript. In that way, they cannot simply save it. Of course, in FX, they can still view the generated code and then copy&paste. however, normally people cannot save the page.
It shouldn't be an issue, but if you really don't want a user from seeing your code (javascript, css or html) for some reason, than you could use some obfuscation tool which makes the code less readable.
Try javascript "encoding" and obfuscation.
Something like
if(document.location == 'mydomain.com') {
content = getAjax('mycontent.xml');
// content will hold something like 72, 94, 81, 99, ... - encoded ASCII codes
document.write(String.fromCharCode(content));
}
It will always be possible to save the page, but for non-technical guys it will be harder to make it work.
There are 2 protections
domain name
converting ASCII
It's only pseudocode, but I think you get the idea.
add these to code sets in script tag
document.addEventListener('contextmenu', function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
});
document.onkeydown = function (e) {
return false;
};
I'd like to add one more method which, imho, is hard to circumvent: Ctrl+S! (for me, Apple+S)
how can we make is sufficiently hard for a user to save a page in a usable format such that it is not worth their while doing so
Nothing hard: add on every page: "Personal property of John Stealer, company Zetabeta, paid with credit card 756890987654, billing address ..., subscription expires 12/20".
This is an "extended text format" that I just invented... it has an amazing property: though it looks like a regular text, user is much less willing to print it out and give to others...