Hackweek ended over a week ago. It was a lot of fun. I hope that some of you enjoyed it at least as much as I did. Unfortunately (or luckily? :-D), right after the Hackweek I was traveling to attend two conferences (firstly Znalosti 2011 in Slovakia and then FOSDEM (will blog about FOSDEM later)). Because of that I didn’t wanted to deploy what I was working on and I delayed the blogpost as well.
So what was I working on? On our precious pastebin. My original idea was to make connection between openSUSE Paste and openSUSE Connect. It ended a little bit differently.

When I was looking into technologies that could make such connection possible I decided to go for OpenID. It is in our (Boosters) long term backlog, to get rid of iChain and convert to OpenID. So I decided that OpenID is the right way to go 😉
First obvious feature that I implemented is that you can now log in using your OpenID. Why should you do that? Because logged users are not considered spammers regardless of how many links they are trying to paste. Some people already hit my quick hack to prevent spam robots from pasting too much. But that’s not all yet. You’ll also have your own personal list consisting of all your pastes. And you can even delete them! You can also create a key that applications will use to authenticate in openSUSE Paste to paste as you! Applications still need to be updated though.
Other thing that I wanted to create was OpenID provider integrated into openSUSE Connect. I investigated few OpenID servers, but in the end I didn’t succeeded in time. Maybe next Hackweek.

As all of you know already, Hackweek number 6 started yesterday. What I’ll be doing? Last Hackweek I started with project to run pastebin for openSUSE. Thanks to you I received quite some feedback. Mostly positive. The rest that wasn’t entirely positive contained some feature requests 😀 I guess it can count also as positive feedback in the end. One big feature was already implemented. Our pastebin support image pastes as well as code one. This was done mainly to help Sirko and our artwork team. Although user interface wasn’t really intuitive, it worked (UI is much better now in git repo, will be deployed in the end of the week). Other feature people asked for was ability to log in. So they’ll have their own history, control over their pastes and they’ll be able to skip spam checker (some people really need to paste something that looks like spam). So I decided that this Hackweek I’ll be working on this feature. Currently I got OpenID working for authenticating users. But there is still many features missing and I’ll need to find a way how to make it work within our openSUSE infrastructure. So far I didn’t succeeded in getting OpenID from our servers. So first two days are over and I made some progress, but there is still long way to go.

Usually I inform you here about MySQL related news in openSUSE. This time it will be a little bit different. But it will be still database related. You probably know that not so long ago (maybe still valid today), NoSQL databases were the cool thing to try. I think it has settled a bit now and it is no more about being cool, but more about your actual needs. So you may actually need some of these. And I can happily inform you, that thanks to the efforts of gladiac, we’ve got some of these in server:database repository now! Namely we’ve got MongoDB there and also Redis. Hurray! They don’t build for all distributions, but if you’ve got recent openSUSE, you can find a package for you there 😉
Although some of us might like the idea of playing around with new technologies, there are already some applications that can use these databases.
One of them, that I was told about is Diaspora (I admit that I wouldn’t be aware of it’s existence without gladiac telling me about it). This social networking thing has interesting concept. It is totally decentralized and gives you ability to have control over you own data! And it requires these two databases. So thanks to gladiac efforts, you can now build your own Diaspora server on openSUSE! Anyone going to create Diaspora appliance using SUSE Studio? 😉

MySQL 5.5 is GA for more then a month already. If you are reading some news, you probably already heard, that it is great, million times faster, has trillion new features that you desperately need and much more. Of course, I’m exaggerating a little bit. But anyway, MySQL 5.5 is new version everybody talks about. So now when do you get it? It is already lying around for some time in server:database:UNSTABLE repository. It was there since beta, but took me some time to get final version ready. Just add it to your repositories for example by:

This post will be really quick. As you may know, openSUSE Paste already supports pasting images. But I found out, that some people don’t use it because they’ve got some other pastebin nicelly integrated. So to help them out, I created simple script that can help them. It is currently available in openSUSE:Contrib repository. You can install it, package name is susepaste-screenshot. When you run it, it will let you click on any window and then it will paste image of that window. It will also show you the link for your paste (in new X window) and copy it to you clipboard. I know that it is not prettiest thing you ever seen, but it works. For nicer GUI, ask for openSUSE Paste support upstream of your favourite pasting tool 😉
btw. If you prefer not to install it manually, you can get it from gitorious, but that way, you’ll have to deal with dependencies by yourself 😉

As you probably know, I’m the one responsible for openSUSE Paste. So I’m receiving some requests for adding features and fixing thing and such. One of the request I received quite some time ago was from Sirko. He’s artist and he’s doing nice artwork. Sometimes he needs to quickly post what he has drawn somewhere to show it to the others and receive some feedback. He is currently using his own site, he could use some image pasting site, but he is our community member and he likes promoting openSUSE wherever he is, whatever he is doing. So I started working on image pasting support for our openSUSE Paste quite some time ago and this weekend I finally finished it.

This is just a small update regarding openSUSE Paste. Some time ago Gertjan Lettink from openSUSE Forums team asked me, whether it would be possible to add possibility to keep pastes forever on openSUSE Paste. I wasn’t really fan of that saying that 3 years is almost forever… But I asked Jaromír Červenka who is providing hosting for this service and he said that he don’t mind. So I promissed that I will look at it later (as I was quite overloaded with other things at that time)… And quite some time later I received another e-mail asking about the progress. And it’s done now. So from now on, you can use openSUSE Paste to store pastes forever. I also set one week as a default expiration time on the web. I’m sorry that it took so long, I admit, that I almost forgot about that. But what you can learn from this story is not to be afraid to remind people about things that you are waiting for 😉