Peter's Blog

Needed to recover a password from my FileZilla settings. It transpires that this is not very difficult. The passwords are not strongly encoded which some regard as a security flaw but the developers seem to acknowledge that if you want security, don't trust a computer.

   1  #
   2  # Dump filezilla site manager, including account name, host, user and password.
   3  #
   4  import _winreg
   5  
   6  def DecodePassword( strPass):
   7      """Decode a filezilla password"""
   8      strKey = "FILEZILLA1234567890ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ"
   9  
  10      nPassLen = len(strPass) / 3
  11      nOffset = nPassLen % len(strKey)
  12  
  13      strDecodedPass = ""
  14  
  15      for i in range(nPassLen):
  16          c = int(strPass[i * 3:(i * 3) + 3])
  17          c2 = ord(strKey[(i + nOffset) % len(strKey)])
  18          c3 = chr((c ^ c2))
  19  
  20          strDecodedPass += c3
  21  
  22      return strDecodedPass
  23  
  24  #
  25  # Walk through registry, decoding site details.
  26  #
  27  oReg = _winreg.ConnectRegistry( None, _winreg.HKEY_CURRENT_USER)
  28  oLicenceKey = _winreg.OpenKey( oReg, r'SOFTWARE\FileZilla\Site Manager')
  29  
  30  nIndex = 0
  31  while 1:
  32      try:
  33          strSite = _winreg.EnumKey( oLicenceKey, nIndex)
  34      except EnvironmentError:
  35          break
  36  
  37      oSiteKey = _winreg.OpenKey( oLicenceKey, strSite)
  38      strHost = _winreg.QueryValueEx( oSiteKey, u'Host')[0].encode( 'ascii')
  39      strUser = _winreg.QueryValueEx( oSiteKey, u'User')[0].encode( 'ascii')
  40      strPassword = DecodePassword( _winreg.QueryValueEx( oSiteKey, u'Pass')[0].encode( 'ascii'))
  41  
  42      print strSite, strHost, strUser, strPassword
  43  
  44      nIndex += 1

Following my flirtation with mythtv I decided to try a windows based solution again.

Here are the events so far:

• Installed windows and the hauppauge stuff for the Nova-t USB2.
• Tuned it in and it worked, can watch telly.
• Downloaded Yahoo Go but it didn't work because I am not in the US.
• Discovered that the latest version of Nero now supports the Nova-t USB2. Installed that and indeed it does. Had a couple of issues with it though:
  • the EPG that comes with it is reasonably comprehensive but for some reason decided not to list 'The Matrix' which was playing that night. Expect random missing entries in the EPG.
  • when I did record something, the playback was not very good quality: as if it is trying to software encode the recording instead of storing the raw mpeg2 stream that comes out of the nova-t like WinTV2000 does (this is a guess).
• Tried using the Hauggauge 'Scheduler' to make a recording but it didn't work. The scheduler is just a front end for adding entries to the Windows Task Scheduler so I looked at the entry it created to see where it went wrong. Because I wanted a background recording the schedule entry tried to run a program called 'BGRecord.exe' which didn't exist. When I changed the scheduler to make a non-background recording it lauched WinTV2000 to do the recording and was successful on a short test.
• Scheduled recording of 'Matrix Revolutions' and when I went back to see how it went WinTV had locked up, along with most of windows.

Conclusion: get sky+.

Pocketpc news:

• I bought myself a copy of pocketpc mindmap. This is a neat little mindmapping/outlining application. I like mindmapping for brainstorming things and this tool does it well. It's got many features in a small size. Some features:
  • Can flip between a mindmap and a regular tree-like outline. This makes it useful for either or both purposes
  • Useful 'add multiple' mode gives me a text box where I can enter multiple entries in one go, one entry per line. Any indented lines become sub-entries. Much quicker than creating nodes one by one.
  • Can quickly assign icons to nodes
  • Can assign 'scribbles' to nodes: good for displaying my lack of artistic skill
  • Can export maps to pictures:
    
• Bought tengo. Trial period ran out and I was lost without it.
• Battery life seems to have got better: two or three days use between charges. Or am I using it less? Anyway, I don't feel tied to a battery charger.
• Still fed up with applications randomly terminating when I power it up. Windows Mobile is not the most robust OS I've ever used, wouldn't want it on my phone. I read that microsoft have spent $1 billion developing the Windows CE/Mobile line of OS's. Where does that kind of money go?

I'm back on the new beta of Opera version 9. It seems a bit more stable than the alpha version I tried before. It is generally compatible with most sites I have visited, only having problems with some Microsoft sites so far, not a big surprise.

Opera is a nice piece of software, it 'feels' less bloaty than firefox and yet has more features built in (Gestures, email) that don't come with vanilla firefox and you don't have to mess with extensions.

To get Google Desktop to reindex my outlook email rather than Thunderbird I had to uninstall and reinstall it. Following this it decided to reindex everything every day. After two or three days I got tired of the sound of the hard disk being thrashed all the time and uninstalled it.

Back to no desktop search and not really missing it. Searching email in Outlook is painfully slow and I may well look into another desktop search (msn, yahoo etc) just for this.

Bah, just getting back into using Opera and Google go and release Google Notebook a kind of web based notebook that is best used with a Firefox extension, no such extension being available for Opera yet. The extension allows you to select a load of text on a web page and clip it into a web based notebook. You thus create your own scrapbook of snippets from your surfing. You can add your own annotations, subheadings etc and also edit the text in the snippets. Once you've done this I guess you print it out and you have your homework done.

It could be used from Opera for just taking notes down which is kinda useful but not so much fun and plagiarism would involve bothersome copying and pasting. Too much trouble.

Google Notebook is also similar in utility to EverNote. I wonder how long each notebook page can be?

Update: I know what's missing: tagging. All it has is powerful google searching to help you find stuff.

Google personalised home page has got me back into Slashdot. I got bored with slashdot after using an RSS feed that only showed article headlines as teasers to the content. Ironically Google home page only shows headlines.

On a whim I tried logging into my old slashdot account for the first time in what must be four or five years and it remembered me!

I did some metamoderating (moderating the moderators) as it helps while away the time.