- <title>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian?</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/The_new__best__multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Mon, 6 Jun 2016 12:50:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>When I set out a few weeks ago to figure out
-<a href="http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/What_is_the_best_multimedia_player_in_Debian_.html">which
-multimedia player in Debian claimed to support most file formats /
-MIME types</a>, I was a bit surprised how varied the sets of MIME types
-the various players claimed support for. The range was from 55 to 130
-MIME types. I suspect most media formats are supported by all
-players, but this is not really reflected in the MimeTypes values in
-their desktop files. There are probably also some bogus MIME types
-listed, but it is hard to identify which one this is.</p>
-
-<p>Anyway, in the mean time I got in touch with upstream for some of
-the players suggesting to add more MIME types to their desktop files,
-and decided to spend some time myself improving the situation for my
-favorite media player VLC. The fixes for VLC entered Debian unstable
-yesterday. The complete list of MIME types can be seen on the
-<a href="https://wiki.debian.org/DebianMultimedia/PlayerSupport">Multimedia
-player MIME type support status</a> Debian wiki page.</p>
-
-<p>The new "best" multimedia player in Debian? It is VLC, followed by
-totem, parole, kplayer, gnome-mpv, mpv, smplayer, mplayer-gui and
-kmplayer. I am sure some of the other players desktop files support
-several of the formats currently listed as working only with vlc,
-toten and parole.</p>
-
-<p>A sad observation is that only 14 MIME types are listed as
-supported by all the tested multimedia players in Debian in their
-desktop files: audio/mpeg, audio/vnd.rn-realaudio, audio/x-mpegurl,
-audio/x-ms-wma, audio/x-scpls, audio/x-wav, video/mp4, video/mpeg,
-video/quicktime, video/vnd.rn-realvideo, video/x-matroska,
-video/x-ms-asf, video/x-ms-wmv and video/x-msvideo. Personally I find
-it sad that video/ogg and video/webm is not supported by all the media
-players in Debian. As far as I can tell, all of them can handle both
-formats.</p>
-</description>
- </item>
-
- <item>
- <title>A program should be able to open its own files on Linux</title>
- <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html</link>
- <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/A_program_should_be_able_to_open_its_own_files_on_Linux.html</guid>
- <pubDate>Sun, 5 Jun 2016 08:30:00 +0200</pubDate>
- <description><p>Many years ago, when koffice was fresh and with few users, I
-decided to test its presentation tool when making the slides for a
-talk I was giving for NUUG on Japhar, a free Java virtual machine. I
-wrote the first draft of the slides, saved the result and went to bed
-the day before I would give the talk. The next day I took a plane to
-the location where the meeting should take place, and on the plane I
-started up koffice again to polish the talk a bit, only to discover
-that kpresenter refused to load its own data file. I cursed a bit and
-started making the slides again from memory, to have something to
-present when I arrived. I tested that the saved files could be
-loaded, and the day seemed to be rescued. I continued to polish the
-slides until I suddenly discovered that the saved file could no longer
-be loaded into kpresenter. In the end I had to rewrite the slides
-three times, condensing the content until the talk became shorter and
-shorter. After the talk I was able to pinpoint the problem &ndash;
-kpresenter wrote inline images in a way itself could not understand.
-Eventually that bug was fixed and kpresenter ended up being a great
-program to make slides. The point I'm trying to make is that we
-expect a program to be able to load its own data files, and it is
-embarrassing to its developers if it can't.</p>
-
-<p>Did you ever experience a program failing to load its own data
-files from the desktop file browser? It is not a uncommon problem. A
-while back I discovered that the screencast recorder
-gtk-recordmydesktop would save an Ogg Theora video file the KDE file
-browser would refuse to open. No video player claimed to understand
-such file. I tracked down the cause being <tt>file --mime-type</tt>
-returning the application/ogg MIME type, which no video player I had
-installed listed as a MIME type they would understand. I asked for
-<a href="http://bugs.gw.com/view.php?id=382">file to change its
-behavour</a> and use the MIME type video/ogg instead. I also asked
-several video players to add video/ogg to their desktop files, to give
-the file browser an idea what to do about Ogg Theora files. After a
-while, the desktop file browsers in Debian started to handle the
-output from gtk-recordmydesktop properly.</p>
-
-<p>But history repeats itself. A few days ago I tested the music
-system Rosegarden again, and I discovered that the KDE and xfce file
-browsers did not know what to do with the Rosegarden project files
-(*.rg). I've reported <a href="http://bugs.debian.org/825993">the
-rosegarden problem to BTS</a> and a fix is commited to git and will be
-included in the next upload. To increase the chance of me remembering
-how to fix the problem next time some program fail to load its files
-from the file browser, here are some notes on how to fix it.</p>
-
-<p>The file browsers in Debian in general operates on MIME types.
-There are two sources for the MIME type of a given file. The output from
-<tt>file --mime-type</tt> mentioned above, and the content of the
-shared MIME type registry (under /usr/share/mime/). The file MIME
-type is mapped to programs supporting the MIME type, and this
-information is collected from
-<a href="https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/desktop-entry-spec/">the
-desktop files</a> available in /usr/share/applications/. If there is
-one desktop file claiming support for the MIME type of the file, it is
-activated when asking to open a given file. If there are more, one
-can normally select which one to use by right-clicking on the file and
-selecting the wanted one using 'Open with' or similar. In general
-this work well. But it depend on each program picking a good MIME
-type (preferably
-<a href="http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml">a
-MIME type registered with IANA</a>), file and/or the shared MIME
-registry recognizing the file and the desktop file to list the MIME
-type in its list of supported MIME types.</p>
-
-<p>The <tt>/usr/share/mime/packages/rosegarden.xml</tt> entry for
-<a href="http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Specifications/shared-mime-info-spec">the
-Shared MIME database</a> look like this:</p>
+ <title>Idea for storing trusted timestamps in a Noark 5 archive</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Idea_for_storing_trusted_timestamps_in_a_Noark_5_archive.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Wed, 7 Jun 2017 21:40:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p><em>This is a copy of
+<a href="https://lists.nuug.no/pipermail/nikita-noark/2017-June/000297.html">an
+email I posted to the nikita-noark mailing list</a>. Please follow up
+there if you would like to discuss this topic. The background is that
+we are making a free software archive system based on the Norwegian
+<a href="https://www.arkivverket.no/forvaltning-og-utvikling/regelverk-og-standarder/noark-standarden">Noark
+5 standard</a> for government archives.</em></p>
+
+<p>I've been wondering a bit lately how trusted timestamps could be
+stored in Noark 5.
+<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_timestamping">Trusted
+timestamps</a> can be used to verify that some information
+(document/file/checksum/metadata) have not been changed since a
+specific time in the past. This is useful to verify the integrity of
+the documents in the archive.</p>
+
+<p>Then it occured to me, perhaps the trusted timestamps could be
+stored as dokument variants (ie dokumentobjekt referered to from
+dokumentbeskrivelse) with the filename set to the hash it is
+stamping?</p>
+
+<p>Given a "dokumentbeskrivelse" with an associated "dokumentobjekt",
+a new dokumentobjekt is associated with "dokumentbeskrivelse" with the
+same attributes as the stamped dokumentobjekt except these
+attributes:</p>
+
+<ul>
+
+<li>format -> "RFC3161"
+<li>mimeType -> "application/timestamp-reply"
+<li>formatDetaljer -> "&lt;source URL for timestamp service&gt;"
+<li>filenavn -> "&lt;sjekksum&gt;.tsr"
+
+</ul>
+
+<p>This assume a service following
+<a href="https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3161">IETF RFC 3161</a> is
+used, which specifiy the given MIME type for replies and the .tsr file
+ending for the content of such trusted timestamp. As far as I can
+tell from the Noark 5 specifications, it is OK to have several
+variants/renderings of a dokument attached to a given
+dokumentbeskrivelse objekt. It might be stretching it a bit to make
+some of these variants represent crypto-signatures useful for
+verifying the document integrity instead of representing the dokument
+itself.</p>
+
+<p>Using the source of the service in formatDetaljer allow several
+timestamping services to be used. This is useful to spread the risk
+of key compromise over several organisations. It would only be a
+problem to trust the timestamps if all of the organisations are
+compromised.</p>
+
+<p>The following oneliner on Linux can be used to generate the tsr
+file. $input is the path to the file to checksum, and $sha256 is the
+SHA-256 checksum of the file (ie the "<sjekksum>.tsr" value mentioned
+above).</p>