Increasing Awareness of Privacy Policies through Graphical Representation

I've had a few people ask me for information about my research for my MSc; here's an overview of the current state of my research and where I'm headed.

Announcing the Dropbox Integration Module for Drupal

I've always wished that transferring files would be as easy as using Imageshack or Pastebin. There are many times when email just doesn't work; between content filters and email attachment size limits, attachments often don't get through. Instant messaging is hit and miss. After falling in love with Dropbox, I decided that integration with Drupal would solve most of my problems. A weekend of coding later, and poof!

This module allows each user on a Drupal website to have a "Send file" form for recieving files. Each user has control over permissions for receiving files, while site administrators can enact global policies if needed. Extra care is taken to ensure that a user's private Host ID (used to connect to Dropbox) is never transmitted insecurely. Eventually, I'd like to see this module turn into a full interface for Dropbox files, either through embedded media field or other similar projects.

Special thanks goes to Jaka Jančar for initially writing a PHP interface to Dropbox, and agreeing to license it under the MIT license so it could be used with the Drupal module.

Read on to see the screencast demonstrating the module and how to set it up for a single-user website so clients and colleagues can easily send you files.

Drupalcon Security Followup: Automatically use SSL logins on drupal.org

Today at the Advanced Security Drupalcon talk it was mentioned that drupal.org supports SSL access. Using user JavaScript, it becomes possible to modify the drupal.org login fields to use SSL. Here are the steps you need to ensure that logging in will use SSL automatically.

KDE 3's Mobile Support

Yet another unpublished entry from my evaluation of the MiniNote; perhaps I should find a way to set up an action / trigger combo to alert me about old unpublished content.

A few things which KDE 3 gets right:

  • System tray is populated with WiFi and Bluetooth applets.
  • The battery applet is the best designed so far, showing useful information like the current CPU speed.
  • The default theme looks good!

The C7: Bested by a P166

Anectdotal evidence of why the Via C7 is an inadequate processor:

Back when I was first using Linux (around 2001), one of the things I really got into was squeezing as much performance as I could out of my old, second hand desktop. At the time, I was running with a Pentium 166 MMX. Playing MP3's actually took quite a bit of CPU power. It was worth my time to learn how to apply a patch to XMMS (a Winamp clone) which enabled MMX decoding of MP3's. With the patch, playing an MP3 would drop from 30-40% of the CPU to 1-2% - an amazing improvement.

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