Playing With Sharp Objects

In an effort to provide MonkeyChow with a little more color, I’ve decided to add favicons from the various feeds you browse into the view. As you can see, the individual feeds in the left get the icon as well as the individual items. This replaces the bland RSS icon that was after each feed for showing the feed source. For those sites that have decided not to use favicon.ico on their site, the same plan RSS icon will be displayed. This is a user preference and you can go back to the plain old RSS icon for all feeds if you like. The individual icons all add a slight bit more time to page loads, but browser and proxy caching all make this much speedier.

This is not yet in the SVN repo, but will be this weekend. A number of people have asked me when they can see some of these changes in a tarball since they don’t know how to or can’t use SVN. I will also be implementing some weekly automated SVN repo dumps to tarballs so that you don’t have to wait for me to make a release. These will be something like version 0.5.X until I get the multiple user code finalized for 0.6.

 This release has 
* user login - all users see same view at this time; default admin passwd is set at install time 
* a unified display code for frames and non-frames view,  
* user preferences, including the display of feedicons and their display size, the choice of frames or non-frames on individual login 
* digg icon for Digg articles (will be moved to plugin later) 
* Firefox 2 integration 
* lots of code cleanup

Reminder: to get the code from SVN, execute the following

svn co https://svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/monkeychow monkeychow

Update: What the heck. I updated SVN to version 173 and you can download the 0.5.5 version here.

 Update: Tarball lists can be found here.

This week we saw the trouble a number of sites, including Digg, ran into when the key to decrypting HD-DVD discs was cracked and posted all over the web. Now the site Freedom to Tinker has posted an applet that lets you claim your very own 128-bit number which they use to encrypt a recently penned haiku, giving you the freedom to decrypt using taht key as your heart desires. Mine is

3E EA 1E 84 24 C3 7E C0 25 2E 07 B1 0B 4D 95 DB

But it stands to reason that these keys have been around as long as 128-bit encryption has been around. Some time earlier in this decade, we probably used it in primitive VPNs or some PGP encryption, which could stand as some form of prior art. The idea that the AACS owns that key is ridiculous. Why aren’t they using something like 512-bit encryption when most commercial firewalls are already using cheap ASICs that can do AES512? Well, I imagine they are trying to cut corners and save by making a cheaper player - and this is what they have purchased for that cheapness.

This neat screen saver can stream your favorite RSS feed to your screen. However, I strictly recommend that you only point it at a feed that are devoid of NSFW articles or you may be in for a shock when you come back from lunch.