In July of 2001, I was introduced to a little editing tool many of us now know fondly, the wiki. I was travelling to New Zealand looking for work. During my month’s stay, the fellow I traveled with showed me his wiki-wiki. He explained how collaboration could work and the simplicity of the system made it even great for a one person quick web page. Immediately, I was hooked. When I returned from New Zealand and enrolled in school, my mind quickly went back to this funky wiki-editor thing I’d seen. Being a geek even back then, I promptly installed one.

Fast-forward almost 7 years. We’ve seen the wiki evolve from a little app that could be used to make an entire website of information so grand that even the largest collectors of physical data can’t compete. We’ve seen tools like DocuWiki – the documentation wiki, MediaWiki – which needs no introduction and Tomboy – the little desktop wiki. Many other wiki’s emerged to help people collaborate all around the world. How great a time it was…

This article isn’t about wiki’s, rather it is about collaboration. This article is about a different type of collaboration, one that’s more real-time than a wiki can be. In some ways its more limiting and in others, much less. The feature I’m referring to is real-time collaboration. And the tool that enables this, gobby, and its closely related cousins, sobby and obby.

INTRODUCING GOBBY

Gobby is a collaborative text editor, with a bunch of cool features. While gobby is still young and not quite feature-full, its quite amazing what it can do out of the box. The collaboration abilities of gobby come straight out of the box. One can choose to create a session on the local network, or create a server version, with sobby, where everyone can connect to a centralized server to collaborate. I’d like to also point out this application can also run in Windows according to the authors’ website, though I’ve heard rumors that it doesn’t work as I’ve not personally tried.

To get started with gobby, its easily installed:

# yum install gobby
.. snip ...

Once its installed, gobby will easily load from Applications -> Internet -> Gobby Collaborative Editor. Up pops the window we showed you above, albeit a little more bare. The toolbar is the most important piece here.

There are two distinct features here, plus the ability of a regular text editor. On the left, are the connection buttons, one can join or create a session. On the right hand side, are user and document lists, and a chat button. The left hand side controls how to connect, the right controls once you are connected. Of course, the middle does have tools of a normal editor.

Clicking the Create session button provides this dialog, allowing for a local session to be created and maintained.

This session can be just one person, but is definitely better with at least two. Notice that you’ll need to pick a colour. This feature is what makes it easy to tell who’s edited what parts of every document in gobby.

The other option is to join a session. Joining a session also lists any local sessions currently available.

Once the session is created and/or joined, its just a matter of using gobby like an editor. The fun part about gobby though, is when the collaboration begins. When working on a document, others can work on it as well, at the same time. Which can be confusing, and troublesome the first time you play with this tool. Give it some time and you’ll be hooked.

In addition to creating an obby session with the gobby application, its also possible to create a persistent connection with the sobby server. Unfortunately, sobby doesn’t have features that let it run as a SYSV service, but it is possible to get a server up and running quite easily even still. The organization I run, UTOSF, has one currently up and running at gobby.utos.org. If you want to join up, please let me know and we’ll get you connected.

Take the time to get to know this awesome collaboration tool, and start working with your friends who code, or document or even just for simple brainstorming sessions.  The possibilities are endless.

Cheers,

Herlo

Along comes gpg with another option for me to try. I’ve spent a fair amount of time digitally signing my documents with my gpg key. I’ve distributed my public key and kept my private key safe as well for when I do need to decrypt something important.

Today in my travels around the interweb, I came across a bit about gpg encryption and thought that it might be able to accommodate my request of a simple encryption utility for my passwords file. So lets have a look at it and see the results.

The simplest thing to do is to take my unencrypted passwords file and encrypt it with gpg:

$ gpg -c passwords
Enter passphrase: my pass phrase
Repeat passphrase: my pass phrase
$ ls passwords*
passwords passwords.gpg

Well, there’s my problem, right there. Did you see it? I did! The problem is that I now have two files, one encrypted and one not. I don’t want the unencrypted one anymore now that I have the encrypted one. Except, what if the encrypted one didn’t work? What if I lose the encrypted file, what if it’s on a bad block? Well, there’s my dilemma. And I am still waiting for a better solution, ho hum, I guess I’ll keep looking.

Meanwhile, back at the gpg ranch, I’ll show you how to decrypt the file so you can read it again.

$ gpg passwords.gpg
gpg: CAST5 encrypted data
Enter passphrase: my pass phrase
gpg: encrypted with 1 passphrase

And my file is restored to its original state. This is good for sure, but I think it isn’t quite what I am looking for… Thank you for trying gpg, I’ll keep looking. vim encryption seems appropriate for now.

Cheers,

Herlo

My main problem was that I wanted to save all of the non-browser passwords and accounts that I’ve been collecting over the past year or so, having them in one central location. This would make it easy to quickly obtain my usernames and passwords to my accounts on several boxen I maintain. Many of which have several passwords for my login, mysql and other services I regularly use.

vim provides this encryption feature in two ways. One is with the -x option, the other is within vim command mode using ‘:X’. vim does not go out of it’s way to make sure protect .swp temporary backup files or text in memory, so this isn’t perfect.

I am still looking for a packaged solution where I can have my passwords stored in an application where I can quickly obtain them by providing a simple pass phrase, either on a usb key, or the physical hard drive in one of my machines. I’d also like to be able to use my gpg and ssh keys as well with this method. A couple of tools that provide similar functionality would be KeePass (for Windows) and Password Safe (for Windows and Linux Source Only).

Comments are welcome, please tell me about all the cool tools I could use. Tell me how to use gnome-keyring too, and make suggestions with usage if you can.

Cheers,

Herlo

Most of these commands involve command mode. If you are unclear what command mode is, you can find the documentation at http://www.vim.org/. Anyway, here’s the command I like to use:

• :cd /path/to/where/my/files/reside – the :cd command allows you to change directory to somewhere more useful than where you currently are in the file tree. I find this useful when I am working on one project, then need to move away from that project to another one. I simply :cd /to/the/new/project/dir and then open the file from there.
• :e filename – this command will simply open the requested file (if it exists) right into vim. If you need to abandon unsaved changes on the previous file, use :e!.
• :pwd – this one may seem obvious to some, but did you know you can print your current vim working directory? Pretty neat I say.

These are some simple command to help you move about in vim. I am sure there are plenty more that you use, why not share them?

Cheers,

Clint