Recently I wrote about how to solve some issues with Mendeley Desktop in Fedora 14 but in that post I didn’t show how to properly install the application adding the necessary menu entries and installing the files in the right directories. The ideal approach would be to create an RPM to handle de installation process, however, this time I just created a short script that downloads Mendeley Desktop, install the files and apply the fixes from my previous post. Continue reading
Archive for the ‘Programming’ Category
Install Minecraft in Fedora
Minecraft is this game everybody is talking about lately. I found out it existed about two weeks ago and after playing around with the Classic mode in the Left-Handed Toons server, I was convinced I wanted to buy the alpha version which is currently under heavy development.
So I withdrew some founds from my oDesk account and bought the game last friday. That means I was now able to download the jar file and start the game in my computer using my minecraft.net username and password… and so I did.
The thing is having to double-click a jar file every time I wanted to play the game doesn’t look like the best way to “install” an application I’m sure I’ll be using quite often during Christmas. I’m a fedora user and I wanted Minecraft to be available in Gnome at the Applications menu, right under the Games category like any other game.
I decided to spent some time trying to get that done and as result I created the following Bash script.
Advanced Authentication in TurboGears 2 – Part 2
This post is the second of three posts about advanced authentication in TurboGears 2. In Part 1, the first post, we learn how to manually configure authentication and authorization in a TurboGears project. The same results can be achieved using the quickstart command, however, configuring the authentication middleware manually give us more control and allow us to easily add support for other authentication methods.
Part 2 is about adding support for FacebookConnect which allow users to login to a website using their Facebook acounts. You should read and complete the 9 steps from Part 1 before start following the instructions below. A working TurboGears 2 project including all changes introduced in Part 1 can be downloaded from GitHub.
After you have downloaded the project from GitHub or completed the steps in Part 1, let’s continue the process by adding FacebookConnect support:
Advanced Authentication in TurboGears 2 – Part 1
TurboGears is one of the best python web frameworks you can find this days. I could start listing its features but this post is already long enough and you can read about them in the official TurboGears website. Also, if you are interested in what the title of this post says it is about, you may already know one or two things about TurboGears. So let’s get to the point: Authentication.
Authentication is the act of verifying that somebody is really who he/she claims to be, is about finding who you are. Authorization, on the other hand, is the act of granting access to given resources depending on who would use them. For example, allowing registered members to leave comments on a blog, or allowing your friends to see your pictures while others cannot. In other words, finding what you may do (Authentication and Authorization in TurboGears 2).
TurboGears 2 uses two frameworks to deal with authentication and authorization. Together, these frameworks, are part of a robust, extendable and pluggable system that works in almost any situation but can be extended to suit your needs if it doesn’t. The two frameworks are repoze.who and repoze.what:
- repoze.who, a framework for authentication in WSGI applications. You normally don’t have to care about it because by default TG2 applications ship all the code to set it up (as long as you had selected such an option when you created the project), but if you need something more advanced you are at the right place.
- repoze.what, the successor of tg.ext.repoze.who and tgext.authorization (used in unstable TG2 releases), is a framework for authorization that is mostly compatible with the TurboGears 1.x Identity authentication, identification and authorization system.
Normal authentication, using username and password, can be easily enabled in existing TurboGears applications and is even easier to get if you’re creating a new project. However, if you need support for other authentication methods like Facebook Connect, Sign in with Twitter or any other OAuth based authentication method, you’ll be expending a few hours of your time playing with the authentication and authorization system.
This post is about how to create a TurboGears 2 project with support for standard username and password login, Facebook Connect and Sign in with Twitter, all at the same time. There will be a lot of code to show and thus the post will be long so I have split it in three parts: Read Part 1: Using a .INI file to configure authentication and authorization middleware in TurboGears.
jQuery TimePicker
jQuery TimePicker is a plugin to help users easily input time entries. It works by allowing the user to type times in a free format or selecting them from a dropdown menu.
The plugin will automatically convert all time entries to a format that can be changed passing the timeFormat option; the default value is hh:mm p which will give something like ’02:16 PM’. The following are a few examples of the supported “formats”:
- 1234 will be converted to 12:34 AM
- 1234 p will be converted to 12:34 PM
- 456 will be converted to 04:56 AM
- 1656 will be converted to 04:56 PM
- 1:1 P will be converted to 01:10 PM
- 1:9 A will be converted to 01:09 AM
- 8:59 will be converted to 08:59 PM
- 1:20:30 will be converted to 01:20:30 PM
- 46 will be converted to 05:00 AM (4 hours plus 60 minutes)
There are other supported formats, all inspired by the behavior of a similar timepicker used in Google Calendar.
To learn how to use the plugin and more, visit the official page.