1. In $HOME create the following directory structure: ‘texmf/tex/latex’.
2. Add the lncs folder as a subfolder of ‘latex’.
3. Run the command texhash Other latex packages not found in the latex package manager can be installed the same way, baposter for example.

On Linux $HOME is ~, and on Mac OS X it is ~/Library.

Also for those that want a version of LNCS that works with href, one can be found here.

1 Overview

(setq org-log-done t)
(setq org-export-with-toc 4)
(setq org-export-headline-levels 4)
(setq org-startup-folded "showall")
(setq org-startup-align-all-tables "align")
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.org$" . org-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.todo$" . org-mode))
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.note$" . org-mode))

* Level 1
** Level 2
*** Level 3

#+TODO: TODO FEEDBACK | DONE CANCELED
#+TYP_TODO: FEEDBACK | DONE CANCELED
#+SEQ_TODO: FEEDBACK | DONE CANCELED

(setq org-todo-keywords
      '((sequence "TODO" "|" "DONE") ;; Classic
        (sequence "REPORT" "BUG" "KNOWNCAUSE" "|" "FIXED")
        (sequence "ALICE" "BOB" "|" "DONE")
))

#+TYP_TODO: ALCE BOB CHARLIE MALLORY TIM | DONE

#+SEQ_TODO: REPORT BUG KNOWNCAUSE | FIXED

* Organize Party [33%]
** TODO Call people [1/2]
*** TODO Peter
*** DONE Sarah
** TODO Buy food
** DONE Talk to neighbor

* TODO Organise Party [/]
  - [-] Call People
   - [ ] Alice
   - [X] Bob
  - [ ] order food

#+TITLE: A Note on Org-Mode for emacs
#+AUTHOR: Jan de Muijnck-Hughes
#+DATE: [2010-10-11 Mon]
#+EMAIL: foobar@nowhere.com
#+DESCRIPTION: Overview on how to use org-mode for working.
#+KEYWORDS: ORG-MODE NOTES TUTORIAL

| Header  | Header 1 | Header 2 |
|---------+----------+----------|
| Content | Content  | Content  |

#+BEGIN_QUOTE
People sometimes ask me if it is a sin in the Church of Emacs to use vi.
Using a free version of vi is not a sin; it is a penance. So happy hacking.
   --- Richard Stallman
#+END_QUOTE

#+BEGIN_EXAMPLE
#+BEGIN_QUOTE
...
#+END_QUOTE
#+END_EXAMPLE

#+BEGIN_SRC <emacs mode>
...
#+END_SRC

1. Assuming you have Mac Ports installed:
   

   $ sudo port install bash-completion

2. Add the following to your ~/.profile file.
   

   if [ -f /opt/local/etc/bash_completion ]; then
. /opt/local/etc/bash_completion
fi


3. Open a new terminal and then enjoy!

Tome

The rationale being that an existing Linux distro is  Tome of knowledge concerning system documentation, programming documentation etc I have yet to commit the code as I have a very busy schedule, a friend of mine is playing in a bar tonight, in less than an hour in fact, with a 20 minute bike ride and food still to do… However, I am still needing to do a lot but I will upload the code tomorrow night, hopefully i can get my head around  launchpad and “proper development procedures” by then. Of note it would be nice  to get some second opinions/help —first proper app you see— for:

• Artwork — i can barely draw a circle in Inkscape
• Internationalisation
• Code tidying
• Parsing the “theList.txt”
• Removing redundant entries
• …

If you want to help drop us a line. I have created a launchpad project and my details should be there and will update it tomorrow night after work!

Also thanks to those behind: Quickly and Acire, I wouldn’t have been able to do something so fast so quickly.

Oh and yeah, here is the obligatory screen shot:

• Quickly
• Ground Control
• Acire / Python Snippets

However one thing that is missing is within this landscape of developer aides is easy to access Developer documentation. That is a single app that presents the opportunistic developer with locally sourced docs that can hopefully help them with their project. To this end I decided to hack together such an application. It is presently called DocView (this is a tentative name) but an offical and proper name will be decided upon once I push the code to launchpad. Currently DocView is a simple python app that uses webkit to view a preselected choice of documentation that exists within the /usr/share/ directories.

Some of you might say:

What about DevHelp!?

DevHelp has pretty much exactly the same goals as my project that is providing developers with access to documentation, however, DevHelp is primarily aimed for GTK and Gnome and works with gtk-doc.  As such it does not include everything that exists within /usr/share , for instance: Doxygen and Java manuals are not included, while Python is. Moreover DevHelp integrates with a few apps such as Anjuta… so there is a bit of overlap. However I wish to keep this project quite simple at the moment.

Currently DocView is less than 2 hours old and is currently looking like this:

There is still a lot of work that still needs to be done on DocView. I still need to iron out several bits and pieces like:

• How I am going to locate this documentation, currently, it is hardcoded as a list. Something which I want to avoid
• How to group the items within the tree menu i.e.\ language, doc type
• How to store the list of docs, CouchDB looks like the way to go.
• And any other features that may be plausible for such a project.

I am also undecided given the substantial overlap with DevHelp if I should continue with this project. But who knows…

• Nowiy god
• Elektronik Supersonik
• Japanese, nuff said
• Something Roma
• Cine esti tu?
• Funny Elderly Asian Women Rock

And as a bonus here are two videos, that I do not know how to describe, but not in the same way as the above:

• Bautura something something
• Prinde-ma, aprinde-ma

However its default colouring scheme could do with some improvements. Currently it looks like so:

When I use emacs, I use Gnome 2 as the ‘theme’, for example:

So the other day I took the plunge and created a Gnome2 ‘inspired’ theme for Komodo Edit. As always it is in perpetual development but at the moment it looks just fine. As you can see in image, below:

I have tweaked some of the colours to improve visibility but on par it makes Komodo Edit look more purdy. One thing to note is that the list of Keywords for Python in Komodo Edit is not as extensive, as that with Emacs . However after a quick search, I found a post that explained how to add keywords. For Python, just locate the koPythonLanguage.py file and add the following code in the constructor of the koPythonLexerLanguageService class:

kwlist.update(['keyword1','keyword2',...])

And fill in the keywords you want. You can find the colour scheme file and keyword code here.

Note: There are a lot of code samples in this post, Facebook removes the style, WordPress does not, Hyves I dunno. So if you want syntax highlighting then goto the wordpress version.

Remove Gray Backgroun Colour in TTY

First thing to do is use the Options menu to set most of your options like: font (mijn is DejaVu Sans Mono at 9) use standard copy and paste commands etc. However this will also set a default background and foreground colour scheme, to fix this open ~/.emacs and remove from (custom-set-faces...: , “:background white :foreground black"

You should have something similar to:

Misc Stuff

This is some misc stuff. The following entry shall set the default tab width, stop the splash screen from occurring, write filename into the titlebar and enable markdown mode if you have installed emacs extras i.e. i.e. emacs-goodies-el in ubuntu.

A coloured Emacs

If you have installed the color-theme package for emacs (i.e. emacs-goodies-el in ubuntu) then you can get some nice themes going. I currently use color-theme-gnome2 for graphical emacs and color-theme-tty-dark when in TTY mode i.e. in a terminal. However gnome2 doesn’t look well when run in the terminal as does tty-dark and vice-versa. The code below ensures that each theme is used when required. A full list of themes can be found be the following command:

M-x color-theme-select

The lisp code is:

References

[1] http://emacs-fu.blogspot.com/2009/03/color-theming.html
[2] http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ColorTheme
[3] http://www.jimbrooks.org/web/tools/emacs/dot_emacs.txt
[4] The Internet

• JAX-WS (v2.1) thus Metro 2.0
• Tomcat 6
• OpenJDK 1.6.0_0 alias IcedTea6

The instructions bellow are to install on Ubuntu 9.04, yes I still need to upgrade to Karmic but that is for another day.

Step 1: Install Java (Optional)

Cannot really remember how I installed OpenJDK, but if I remember its just:

$ sudo apt-get install openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk

Step 2: Tomcat 6

To install Tomcat 6:

$ sudo apt-get install tomcat6-admin tomcat6-common tomcat6-user tomcat6-examples tomcat6-docs

Add:

To you your /etc/tomcat/tomcat-users.xml file and voila that is tomcat up and running and accessible from http://localhost:8080 . If not you may need to do:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/tomcat start

Step 3: Metro 2.0

Obtain Metro 2.0 from here and move the webservices-*.jar files into /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/ . You may also want to add both webservices-api.jar and jsr173_api.jar to /usr/lib/jvm/default-java/jre/lib/endorsed . This will ensure that the default jvm, utilises the latest api and thus is in the default classpath. If not ensure that you classpath at least includes the jars placed in /usr/share/tomcat6/lib/ earlier.

Note: Metro 2.0 does contain a Tomcat6 installer but, I haven’t used it as my steps were developed before it came out.

References Used

[1] http://blogs.sun.com/arungupta/entry/metro_on_tomcat_6_x
[2] http://weblogs.java.net/blog/ramapulavarthi/archive/2007/07/running_jaxws_s.html

Destroying Data

One of the interesting problems that can arise in the Cloud is that of data availability, where data is reliably available on the cloud. Another, related and just as important notion is that of data unavailability, where data is made unrecoverable after a set period. This is important for information that is sensitive and transitory in nature. Recall the messages (or instructions) in the popular television series Inspector Gadget and Mission Impossible:

This message will self destruct in 40 seconds.

In such messages the aim is to reduce number of copies that can be made and also stop access to that data after a set period of time has elapsed.

The obvious solution is to use encryption in which the data is encrypted and the keys used are deleted after a certain period of time. Note normal erasure methods i.e. deletion and repeated rewrites of the data on disk, are not enough as the data can still be recovered via special techniques, obfuscation of the data is needed. The crux of the problem regarding any cryptographic system is that of key management. Recently I have read the Sun Micro-systems technical report SMLI TR-2005-140 in which Radia Perlman introduced the idea of the Ephemeriser as a means to provide self-destructing data. This has been part of recent reading for a course I am undertaking.

In this post I shall introduce the idea of the Ephemeriser , subsequent posts shall look at a variant of the Ephemeriser called Timed-Ephemeriser and other data destroying methods such as Vanish.

The Ephemeriser

In the Ephemeriser System there are three entities:

1. Alice — the data generator
2. Bob — the data consumer, who can also be Alice herself, and
3. Eve — the Ephemeriser that provides key management

The aim of the Eve (an external server) is to create and advertise a series of Public Key and expiration time pairs. These keys shall be used to encrypt the ephemeral (transitory) data and that after the expiration time the Secret Key is then destroyed. Once Alice has selected and encrypted her data using the key, she then sends the message to Bob. In order for Bob to access the data he collaborates with Eve.

The message passing can be summarised as follows:

In order to ensure the proper destruction of data and also the unwanted copying of the data, Perlman assumes that the software involved (especially in relation to Bob) does not have the ability to copy the decrypted data or hold it in stable storage for use later on.

In the tech. report Perlman provides two implementations of Ephemeriser, one using Triple Encryption using Public Key Encryption and another more efficient implementation that uses blind encryption. In this posting only the Triple Encryption variant shall be described.

Implementation Using Triple Encryption

Each entity has their own long term encryption and encryption key pairs. Eve will advertise a triple that consists of a public key, Key ID and expiration time. The Key ID is used to identify the corresponding secret key that is stored by Eve.

Please note that the notation used to denote asymmetric encryption goes against the grain of the standard, but this is the notation used in the report itself.

Encryption

In order to encrypt the message m, Alice:

1. Encrypts M using a secret per message key S
2. Chooses an ephemeral secret T, that will act as an integrity check
   and link between the message encryption key and the ephemeral key.
3. Selects an expiration date, thus obtains a suitable ephemeral key from Eve.
4. The key S shall be triply encrypted using the Public Key of Bob,
   the Ephemeral Key and finally the ephemeral secret T
5. Produces a message authentication code of the message encryption key S that has been double encrypted using the public key of bob and the ephemeral key, that has been concatenated to the ephemeral key using a keyed hash function using the ephemeral secret T as the key.

Finally Alice sends to Bob the following:

which is the encrypted ephemeral secret T, the protected per-message key S, the encrypted message M, the Key ID of the ephemeral key, the ephemeral key and the message authentication code.

Decryption

The decryption itself consists of three stages the initial decryption of the data by Bob, the use of Eve to remove the ephemeral protection and finally the actual access to the data by Bob.

Bob’s First Task

On receipt of Alice’s message Bob will:

1. Obtains the ephemeral secret T.
2. Obtain the protected per-message key using T.
3. Verifies the produced per-message key through calculation of a message authentication code and comparison against the sent one.
4. Then Bob chooses a per-message key J to secure communication between himself and Eve.
5. Encrypts this key with the ephemeral key sent by Alice.
6. Encrypts the protected per-message key using J.

Finally Bob sends to Eve the following:

which is the key id, the protected per-message key J and the protected per-message key S.

Eve’s Task

On receipt of Bob’s message Eve:

1. Selects the decryption key corresponding to the ephemeral key ID sent.
2. Obtains the per-message key J.
3. Using J obtains the protected per-message key S used.
4. Decrypts the protected per-message key S using the secret ephemeral key, so that it is now only protected by Bob’s public key.

Finally Eve re-encrypts the protected per-message key S using J and sends this back to Bob, hence the final message is:

Bob’s Second Task

Thus on receipt of Eve’s message, Bob:

1. Decrypts the protected per-message key S using J.
2. Obtains S by decrypting the previous result using his secret key.

Once Bob has obtained S he can then obtain the message M.