My keychain Tool

I wrote a little script in ruby which manages passwords. It is a strictly command line tool and allows you to store keys, retrieve them, and even generate more or less pronounceable passwords of arbitrary length using a Markov chain. All the data is stored in a blowfish-encrypted file and should therefore be somewhat safe.

Since the script depends on two other ruby gems (namely crypt and highline), I've uploaded it to rubyforge. You can now simply install the script with

  gem install keychain

The interface is quite easy, you can either pass the command as first argument, or invoke keychain which then enters an interactive mode. Simple try

   keychain help

to see a list of commands.

Needless to say, I cannot guarantee that this tool will not one day forget all your valuable passwords, but at least I can assure you that I'm personally trusting my code. :)

Tool of the week (web edition): gotapi.com

This weeks tool of the week (well, not that every week actually gets a tool of the week, but anyway) is not actually a tool, but a website: gotapi.com. It basically provides searchable indices for a large number of API documentation from other websites. It includes C/C++, Java, Python, Ruby, HTML, Javascript, CSS and many others. The interface has some nice AJAX in there and is very usable and fast. Go and check it out!

Tool of the Week (Ruby Edition): fastri

If you have ever consider programming in ruby, you should definitely have a look at fastri. It is a replacement for the standard ri and it is much faster and has some nice additional features. If you're fed up waiting for seconds just to learn that your query was ambiguous, this is the way to go. It comes as a server and a client, but also has a standalone verions qri which is only slightly slower.

Tool of the Week - Part II: sshfs

Recently I stumbled upon sshfs. And this is really the best thing since sliced bread. sshfs allows you to mount a directory over sftp (of course, under Linux). Since it relies on sftp, you can mount remote directories as soon as you have an ssh access, without the need to set up further servers or using vpn or anything.

Being able to access remote files like normal files means that you can use any program to modify these files. For example, I have a small personal webspace which allows access only via sftp. This made updating quite ugly, because I couldn't just rsync everything to the server. But with sshfs you just mount your webspace and do a "local" rsync between two directories - and you're done. Amazing!

Tool of the Week: baobab

I'm amazed at what useful things you can find within gnome. I accidentally discovered this one, when I installed ubuntu on my old laptop the other week. baobab is a tool which summarizes and visualized filesystem usage. So when you're wondering where all those gigabytes have gone, try this tool. It seems that baobab has migrated into gnome-utils, although I find the current gnome-utils homepage less informative than the (obsolete) original one.

Shell Tool of the week: rlwrap

This week's "shell tool of the week" (and as such first of it's kind) is rlwrap. rlwrap calls another interactive program but channels all of the input through the readline library (the notorious piece of software which refuses to become L-GPL, for a reason), giving you extensive command-line editing capabilities even for programs which are just getting their input via gets (for example, ftp).

If it hadn't been done, I would've done it!

Addendum: I just found out that rlwrap actually stores different histories for each program it is used with!