I don’t like too much people writting posts about other people’s posts, but I think this time it’s mandatory to do it :D… since the idea of Davyd about writting an applet which turns Gnome into an MMORPG game looked so funny to me.

Just take a look into this post from Davyd’s blog and judge it by yourself.
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– Everquest
– World of warcraft (WoW)
– Lineage

As many of you (“igalians”) already know, some time ago we[*] started working in the development of a new widget for a gnome application called baobab. The main motivation for us to work on this task was being able to get a better graphical view of the disk space usage information retrieved by the original baobab program, in a similar way as done by the KDE’s filelight application. This KDE app shows such that disk usage as a beautiful ringchart (which offers a very good idea about the size of scanned dirs), instead of just using a treeview with one scanned dir by row, which is not so visually impressive as in the filelight’s ringchart.

However, you could notice that baobab already has got a graphical representation (apart from the treeview), which shows the disk usage as a colored treemap as described on this web page from the University of Maryland. I’d like to say here that this is a very good visual representation for the disk usage too, but I think that is not so “practical” and understandable as the ringchart one… and that’s why we began to work in this issue.

Nowadays, we’ve currently developed an alpha version for this new widget and have sent source code and an screenshot to baobab’s main developers to see what they think about it. As a result, since first feedbacks seemed to be good enough for us, we expect this contrib could be added to the original baobab in a near future :) if we keep ourselves working in it.

Meanwhile, you can take a look into our work by watching the following screenshot:

[*] :: Alex, Miguel, A.Piñeiro, Henrique and I.

Last afternoon I spent some time in the Lfcia talking to Miriam, and she told me about Gaim storing passwords in plain text. I had no idea of this before she told me, and that’s why, as soon as I was warned about, I took a look into my ~/.gaim directory and I realized how my password was really stored in the accounts.xml text file.

The reason for my password to be there was that I’d checked the typical “Remember my password” checkbox when adding my IM accounts to gaim, with the only purpose of not being annoyed each time I login into my accounts. Somebody could say at this point that the only real security would be not storing passwords at all (and this is true, of course), but I think that if a program asks you for doing something like that, you should be able to trust it about how your password is going to be saved at disk (hopefully, in a secure way).

After thinking for a while, I googled a bit looking for information about this and to see if there’s a plugin, a patch or something similar to fix this situation… and here is the final result of my search:

http://gaim.sourceforge.net/plaintextpasswords.php.

In this URL, gaim developers tell that gaim does not now and is not likely to encrypt the passwords in the accounts.xml file, nor is it likely to be encrypted in a future release. “Hard declarations!”, I thought ;)… but, after all, I think their arguments are not so bad, except that they are not taking into account a common situation when using gaim that makes unsafe storing passwords in the accounts.xml file (even when that file is only readable by its owner): what about using gaim on a computer whose superuser is not you? That superuser could read your accounts.xml file even when nobody but you couldn’t, and that’s not seem to be “pretty good privacy” :).

I know that gaim developers would say that I shouldn’t use this feature in such those environments, but this means assuming gaim users know what’s really happening when saving passwords, and this is not always true (just look at me :P). At least, I think showing an informative message warning the user about how his/her password is going to be stored could be a good thing in order to avoid this kind of surprises.

What do you think about?