Pauses Café

I have been using gmail for a while now, and am mostly satisfied with it. The threaded system it is based on has some good points and bad points, but so far nothing that required me to reconsider changing my setup. Things have changed.

I missed an important mail part of a ongoing thread on Thursday. The person who wrote me that mail resent me a mail on Friday. That mail ended up in the same ‘conversation’. When I read that second mail I discovered the previous mail, strangely marked with a read status. I am pretty sure I didn’t read that mail. I am sure I didn’t see that conversation marked as read in my Inbox. I am sure I didn’t click on update this conversation and read that mail afterwards.

Now this is at least the second time this happens to me in the past 2 months. First time, the mail wasn’t that important and I assumed an user error. Now this time I have big doubts.

Could there be a bug in gmail’s mail read status in connection to threaded conversations. Maybe some kind of
timing issue ? Or something that gets the mail marked as read even if it wasn’t displayed properly ?

I doubt it, but nevertheless, twice the same problem in a short period while I’ve never had a problem in years is strange.

Note: around the same time I received that mail, I was in a network that had failures due to(?) a mis-configured WebWasher proxy. That’s too important to leave this out. In particular that proxy caused errors with gmail. E.g. I couldn’t read my mail properly and couldn’t logout. More info below. I wonder if the issue could come from a combination of proxy error and bad update. So could this 2 problems be linked ? Could there be a code path in the gmail Ajax calls that update the mailbox statuses that don’t properly handle failures ?

This type of problem is not new in the world of “web 2.0″ applications. I stopped using BlogLines because they also used to have errors with their read status count. I noticed that google Reader (beta) starts having similar failures (some of them perhaps related to the fact that sometimes my google reader page is opened on multiple PCs ?), and now gmail…

I haven’t contacted Google yet. I still believe it could be a user error. But I will watch out for the third time…

Webwasher failures

I contacted the vendor on Thursday, let’s see if they answer…

For info, the version of Webwasher was 6.0.1 Build 2533

[This post is a work on progress and may be updated]

Linux is great for one thing: it supports multiple language on the desktop. If you plan to offer a kiosk mode supporting many languages, Linux becomes a good choice.

We settle on Ubuntu Edgy as a default distribution for this setup, but any distribution might do. The chosen environment is Gnome.

Worklog

1. install Ubuntu.
   we name the administration account ‘administrator’. Pick a secure password.
2. Add your supported languages (System/Administration/Language Support). I selected English, French and Norwegian. Chose Apply and select your default language
3. add a guest account
   login ‘guest’, password ‘guest’, real name ‘Mediatheque Guest User’
4. if you use the GUI, you can limit the privileges. I selected ‘Access external storage…” “Use audio devices” and “Use CD-ROM devices”
5. change some account options
   • FIXME disable package notifications
   • FIXME restrict menu rights?
6. configure gdm
   • add a theme with user list, language & logo
   • using gdmsetup, select the theme and restrict the list of users to guest only (one can still log in as administrator, it just won’t show up in the list)
   • trim gdm locales list: reduce /etc/gdm/locale.conf
   • pam for guest users. Create a file called /etc/X11/gdm/nopassusers.txt containing the name of the users that do not require to have a password typed, one user name per line. In our case the file will contain guest. Then modify /etc/pam.d/gdm so that the line auth sufficient pam_listfile.so item=user sense=allow file=/etc/X11/gdm/nopassusers.txt onerr=fail follows auth required pam_env.so

   tip: use gdmthemetester to test; which requires you to install xnest package on Edgy

7. autologout of the guest account:
   • enable blank screen saver, 10 minutes
   • custom autologout script added to session

   You might want to use the following scripts (add them to /usr/local/bin):

   forcelogout

   #!/bin/bash   # allow close session without user interaction   gconftool-2 --set /apps/gnome-session/options/logout_prompt --type=bool false   # kill session   gnome-screensaver-command --deactivate   gnome-session-save --kill --silent

   screensaveractive

   #!/bin/bash # return 0 if screensaver actif; 1 otherwise output=`( LANGUAGE=en && gnome-screensaver-command --query )` if [[ $output == "The screensaver is active" ]]; then     exit 0 else     exit 1 fi

   autologout

   #!/bin/bash # This script will perform an autologout of the current user  # from a gnome-session when the screensaver is triggered while [ 1 ]; do     sleep 2     screensaveractive && forcelogout && exit done

8. session
   add firefox, configure home page; change some preferences related to security. Also disable the ‘ask on exit’ element of the session preferences dialog. That will make guest user disconnect easily.
   Also set browser.sessionstore.resume_from_crash to false in about:config as to avoid session restore dialog upon restart (best would be to cleanly shutdown FF in forcelogout, but I don’t know how)
9. potential security improvements?
   • change menus?
   • remove command line?
   • disable services?
10. kiosk advertising/documentation. Print out a help document and let it close to the machine
    • help file
    • offer to distribute Linux
    • sell blank CDs/DVDs ?
11. TODO
12. improvements
• session reset
• localeList widget for gdm ? no flags in gdm to map to a locale (conscious political avoidance decision)…
• auto-logout for gdm?
• generic auto logout for X?
• remove confirm close session?
13. Interesting links:
    • http://www.justlinux.com/nhf/Filesystems/Mounting_smbfs_Shares_Permanently.html