I always struggled to find the right mail notification applet for my desktop. Furthermore I always stumble over the question: Why do I have to ask the mail server in a defined time interval “Do I have a new e-mail?”. Wouldn’t it be better if the mail server notifies me if a new e-mail arrives?
This is probably somehow a new form of the good old question “mailing list vs bulletin board” or in general: Do i have to fetch the information or does the information come to me? Personally i always preferred to get the information and not to hunt around for them.

Thinking about this question i realized that notification through Jabber would be perfect and the open XMPP protocol virtually invites one to do such things.

The idea was born. Now the first step was to find a easy to use XMPP implementation for a scripting language like Python, Ruby or PHP. At the end I found a quite nice and easy to use PHP library. While searching such a library I also found this guidance (German only), borrowed some code from it and my solution was born:

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<?php
// The script gets the input either as an argument, from a REQUEST-variable or from stdin
// If you use it within procmail you will get the input through stdin 
if ($argv[1]) {
    $msg = $argv[1];
} elseif ($_REQUEST['msg']) {
    $msg = urldecode($_REQUEST['msg']);
} else {
    // open stdin. Only read the first 4096 character, this should be enough to match
    // the FROM- and  SUBJECT-header
    $stdin = fopen('php://stdin', 'r');
    $msg   = fread($stdin, 4096);
 
    if (empty($msg)) {
        $msg = "empty";
    } else {
        // Get FROM und SUBJECT
        preg_match('@From:(.*)@i', $msg, $from);
	preg_match('@Subject:(.*)@i', $msg, $subject);
        $msg = "\n" . $from[0] . "\n" . $subject[0] . "\n";
    }
}
 
// now init xmpp and get the notification out
include 'XMPPHP/XMPP.php';
 
$conn = new XMPPHP_XMPP('schiessle.org', 5222, 'user', 'password', 'xmpphp', 'schiessle.org', $printlog=false, $loglevel=XMPPHP_Log::LEVEL_INFO);
 
try {
    $conn->connect();
    $conn->processUntil('session_start');
    $conn->presence();
    $conn->message('me@jabber.server.org', $msg);
    $conn->disconnect();
} catch(XMPPHP_Exception $e) {
    die($e->getMessage());
}
?>

Now I just had to tell procmail to pipe the mails through the PHP script. If you want to get notified about all mails you can simply put this line at the top of your procmail rules (Or maybe at least behind the spam filter rules ):

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:0c
|php /home/schiessle/bin/mailnotification.php

I want to get notified only about some specific mails so I extended my procmail rules in this way:

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:0
* ^(To:|Cc:).*foo@bar-mailinglist.org
{
 	:0c
        |php /home/schiessle/bin/mailnotification.php
 
        :0
        .bar-list/
}

That’s it! All in all it was quite easy to get e-mail notification through Jabber. Now I don’t have to search for the right applet, configure it etc.. All I have to do is to start my Jabber client and I will get notified about new mails whatever desktop or computer i’m using.

Today the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) announced their latest initiative: PDFreaders.org. The initiative started in the Fellowship and is coordinated by the Fellows Hannes Hauswedell and Jan-Hendrik Peters. The Fellowship increases FSFE’s financial independence, FSFE’s political weight, FSFE’s workforce and is the source of many great projects, activites and campaigns. Read more about the Fellowship.

Many websites with PDF documents have a link to a proprietary PDF reader from one specific company. This initiative tries to change this and offers buttons to link to pdfreaders.org which leads people to a list of free as in freedom and vendor neutral PDF readers.

FSFE president Georg Greve explains: “Interoperability, competition and choice are primary benefits of Open Standards that translate into vendor-independence and better value for money for customers. Although many versions of PDF offer all these benefits for formatted text and documents, files in PDF formats typically come with information that users need to use a specific product. pdfreaders.org provides an alternative to highlight the strengths of PDF as an Open Standard.”

Jan-Hendrik Peters, one of the coordinators of this initiative says: “Free Software gives us control over the software we use, and Open Standards give us control over our data and allow implementations by many different groups. We wanted to show that with the Portable Document Format people can have both.”

Support Free Software and Open Standards! Put one of the PDFreaders.org-Buttons next to PDF files on your websites!

At Friday, 30.Jan.09 we had a joint event between KDE and the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) and it was simply awesome! Beside a lot of KDE and FSFE people we had a lot of visitors and at the end we were about 40 people! All interested in KDE 4.2 and Free Software.

At the beginning Frederik started with an introduction and showed all the new and cool things in KDE 4.2. After that i gave a talk about the work of FSFE, especially in 2008, explained the role of the Fellowship for FSFE and highlighted some cool activities from our Fellows. My slides can be found here (German). I think i could attract some people and would be really happy to see some new faces at our next Fellowship meeting (probably somewhen in March). If you don’t want to miss it, subscribe to our mailing list for South Germany.

After my talk we made a small break and than Frank continued with a very interesting talk about the KDE community and how to get involved as a developer, writer, artist or user. Last but not least Sven talked about the new version of Amarok and what we can expect from the new release.

This was the official part. Now the party started and we had a lot of fun and many interesting discussions between KDE developers and users, FSFE Fellows and all the other people who joined us at this evening. We also discussed some possible activities for the Fellowship Group Stuttgart. Some Fellows seems to be quite interested in the topic “Free Software in school and education”. I also think that this is a really important topic. Remember, the pupils from today are the decision makers from tomorrow.

As it becomes later a small group of people survived. One of them was Martin Konold, a KDE Developer from the very first days of KDE. He told us a lot of interesting and funny stories about the beginning of KDE and the development of the Free Software desktop.

At 2:30 at night a great event was over. I really want to thank Frederik for his great help in organising this event and all the other KDE people who helped to make this event that awesome! It was a lot of fun and a great cooperation between KDE and FSFE people! Looking forward for the next opportunity to organise such a great event!

More pictures can be found here.

The FSF has released a Quick Guide to GPLv3. This article explains all major changes in an easy-to-understand overview. So it is a good staring point for everyone who wants to understand GPLv3.

It is also a good resource for developers who plan to release their software under the GPLv3.

While browsing the Web i have found the video presentation “Free Software and the Matrix” by Alexandre Oliva.

Just take some time, watch this presentation and you will see how much the movie “The Matrix” discusses the issues of the Free Software movement.

At this weekend Rainer and I were in Chemnitz at the “Chemnitzer Linux Tage” (CLT). It was the first time that FSFE had a booth at this event and for me it was the first time going to a fair especially to work at the FSFE booth.

The first day was really hard for us. Because of the late decision to go to Chemnitz we had a bad place for our booth and many visitors hadn’t seen us. But luckily we had found a much better place for the second day. This is a picture of our booth at the second day, it was in the central corridor in front of the entrance:

While reading some FSF Blogs i found a link to a license quiz where you can test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL.. If you want to test your knowledge of the GPL and LGPL than try the license quiz.

I remember that i had found this test already some years ago but forgot about it. So i tried it again to see if my licensing knowledge has improved. The last time i did the test i remember that i answered a few questions wrongly but this time everything was correct. Too bad that in a few months we will have a new GPL and LGPL.

I’m back from the SFSCon and the first international FSFE Fellowship Meeting in Bolzano (Italy). For me i can say that it was a great event and it gaves me the opportunity to meet a lot of great people from the Free Software Foundation Europe and around Free Software in general.

The Fellowship Meeting was also the place were a new project of the FSFE was launched, the Freedom Task Force (FTF). A project which works in partnership with gpl-violations.org and offers licensing education, fiduciary services and licence enforcement. For more information follow the link above.

But that’s not enough something more happens. Sun announced to release Java as Free Software under the GPL. Already many people have written about it and so i just want to refer to Georg Greve’s good analysis of the situation. Also Richard Stallman has already reacted really positive:

It will be very good that the Java trap won’t exist anymore, it will be a thing of the past. That kind of problem can still exist in other areas but it won’t exist for Java anymore. The GNU general public licence is the most popular and the most widely used software licence, used for some 70% of all free software packages. The special thing about this licence is that it’s a copyleft licence. That is to say, all versions of the program must carry this licence. So the freedoms that the GNU GPL gives to the users must reach all the users of the program, and that’s the purpose for which I wrote it. To ensure that all users of the software have the freedom that users should have.
I think Sun has, well, with this contribution, have contributed more than any other company to the free software community in the form of software. And it shows leadership. It’s an example that I hope others will follow.

And this is the response of Eben Moglen

As Java became one of the most important languages for the expression of ideas about technology of programming in the last decade the question of Java’s freedom, wether it could be use freely and made part of free software projects, has been a crucial question. Sun’s policy of GPL’ing Java, which we are celebrating now, is an extraordinary achievement in returning programming technology to that state of freely available knowledge. Sun has now GPL’ed hardware designs, Sun is GPL’ing Java: that’s an extraordinary vote of confidence in this way of sharing information. And we, in the free software world, are very pleased and very flattered to see Sun taking its own very valuable and very important product and agreeing with us that they will be more advantageous to Sun as well as to the rest of the community if they are shared under these rules.

So i just have to say thank you and congratulations to Sun for this step.

Libpam-poldi allows you to use your Fellowship crypto card to log in your GNU/Linux system.

First check if poldi detects your cardreader: ‘poldi-ctrl -d’. Unfortunately some cardreader doesn’t work with poldi and the existing free driver. For example the cardma4040 needs the non-free driver from Omnikey.

If poldi successfully detected your cardreader you can start to configure poldi. Poldi has a pretty good documentation so i will keep my explanations rather short.

1. Root has to register the new card for poldi:

   poldi-ctrl --register-card --account <your-user-account> --serialno <serialno of your card>

   You can also execute this command without ‘–account <your-user-account>’ but than the user will not be able to install or update his card’s keys.
   The serialno can be found by executing ‘gpg –card-status’ and looking for “Application ID”.

2. Now we have to establish a mapping between the user and the smartcard he owns:

   poldi-ctrl --associate --account <your-user-account> --serialno <serialno of your card>

3. Now you have to write your public key into the appropriate key file (you have to do this within your user account)

    poldi-ctrl --set-key

4. That’s it, now you can test it with ‘poldi-ctrl –test’
5. Now you have to tell pam, that you want to use poldi.
   Therefore you have to edit the files in /etc/pam.d. If, for example, you want to login to kdm with your card, edit the file /etc/pam.d/kdm. Replace the line ‘@include common-auth’ with

   auth    required   pam_poldi.so

   If you want to login unattended, use

   auth    required   pam_poldi.so try-pin=123456 quiet

   And if you want to fallback to regular unix passwords, use

   auth    sufficient pam_poldi.so try-pin=123456 quietauth    required   pam_unix.so nullok_secure

Now you should be able to use your GnuPG smartcard to log in your GNU/Linux system.

You can find a more detailed howto on my personal homepage which will still be available if this blog entry is already forgotten.

The so-called “iPod law” contains reduced fines for file sharing and forced companies to open their DRM specification to enable competition.

The French Constitutional Council has declared this aspects unconstitutional. The justification: The “iPod law” violated the Human Right of constitutional protections of property.

Mr. Menard, a partner at the Lovells law firm and a specialist in “intellectual property” said: “The Constitutional Council effectively highlighted the importance of intellectual property rights,” and added that Apple Computer and other companies could not be forced to share their copy-protection technology without being paid for it.

Does it sound like a joke? But it’s true. For more information read:

- New York Times: Parts of French ‘iPod Law’ Struck Down (English)
- Golem: iTunes-Gesetz verstößt gegen Menschenrechte (German)

UPDATE: Jacques Chirac, president of France, has signed the law and so it become valid. I don’t know if the French Constitutional Council will stop the law but as long as nothing happens the law is legally valid. Great Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Poland could be the next countries with similar laws. Source (German): The Inquirer DE.