Jamie McClelland: Posting to identi.ca via the command line
I set aside 15 minutes to find a tool that would allow me to easily post to my identi.ca account via the command line. I'm two hours in and I finally sent my first remote post. Hopefully nobody else will have to spend this much time!
There are a lot of tools to help you interact with Twitter via the command line and identi.ca supports the twitter API, however, convincing these tools to use identi.ca was harder than I expected and is woefully under-documented. This hardship is largely self-inflicted since I chose to authenticate via oauth, however, it's not clear to me if identi.ca supports basic auth and if so for how much longer. In any event, oauth seems like a much preferable authetication approach because I don't have to store my identi.ca password in plain text.
I decided to use tweepy since it's packaged for Debian and it's written in python.
If you are not familiar with OAuth, it's worth reading up on. In short:
- register your application via identi.ca web interface
- retrieve consumer token and consumer secret from identi.ca (via the web)
- using this token and secret, request from identi.ca an application key and secret (you must provide your identi.ca user login credentials before you get these strings)
- and now, configure your application to use the applicaiton key and secret everytime it connects
#!/usr/bin/python
"""
This script should be used once to initialize your desktop/command line
application with a oauth access key and access secret.
Your first step is to login, via the web, to your identi.ca account
and authorize your application. Click Edit next to your username
to edit your profile settings. Then click Connections on the left
side bar. Then, in the right sidebar, click
"Register an OAuth client application".
When you are done, you will see a page listing your token and secret.
Fill in the consumer_token and consumer_secret variables below with those
values.
"""
""" Fill in these values with values provided in the identi.ca web app when you register your app! """
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
import tweepy
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
redirect_url = auth.get_authorization_url()
except tweepy.TweepError:
print 'Error! Failed to get request token.'
quit()
req_key = auth.request_token.key
req_secret = auth.request_token.secret
print "you don't need these values... just fyi..."
print "auth request key is: " + req_key
print "auth request secret is: " + req_secret
print "Go to this URL for verify code: " + redirect_url
print "enter the verify code from the URL above"
verifier = raw_input('Verify code: ')
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.set_request_token(req_key, req_secret)
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
try:
auth.get_access_token(verifier)
except tweepy.TweepError:
print 'Error! Failed to get access token.'
print "Store these values in your application. You will re-use them"
print "auth access key is: " + auth.access_token.key
print "auth access secret is: " + auth.access_token.secret
print "done with initialization"
#!/usr/bin/python
import tweepy
post = "I microblog from bash"
consumer_token = ""
consumer_secret = ""
access_key = ""
access_secret = ""
host = 'identi.ca'
api_root = '/api/'
oauth_root = api_root + 'oauth/'
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_token, consumer_secret, 'oob')
auth.OAUTH_HOST = host
auth.OAUTH_ROOT = oauth_root
auth.secure = True
auth.set_access_token(access_key, access_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth, host = host, api_root = api_root)
api.update_status(post)
I'm honored and pleased to be the person who gets to complete 
Check out his interview to learn more about some of the numerous ways one can get involved in Debian, managing its infrastructure and without having to be a packager.
Raphael: Who are you?
J rg: My name is J rg Jaspert and I m 35 years old working for a small company
doing system administration and consulting work for our customers.
I m married for a little while now and sometime soon a little Ganneff
will be crawling out of my wife. (Whoever didn t think of the movie
Alien now is just boring).
Raphael: How did you start contributing to Debian?
J rg: I started using Debian somewhere around 2000, 2001. Before that I had
the misfortune to try SuSE and RedHat, both with a user experience that
let me fully understand why people think Linux is unusable. (Due to my
work I m in the unfortunate situation to have to use RedHat on two
machines. Funny how they are still utter crap and worse than bad toys).
And all of this lets get a Linux running here came up because I was
trying to find a replacement for my beloved OS/2 installation, which I
had for some years.
So after I got Debian installed, good old Potato, I got myself active on
our mailing lists, starting with the German user one.
A bit later I replied to a question if someone can help as staff for a
Debian booth somewhere. It was the most boring event I ever visited
(very nice orga, unfortunately no visitors), but I got a few important
things there:
This weekend, I launched an extremely ambitious effort to collect
evidence of extremely ambitious efforts. The result was a short
program that 
Date: Mon, 18 Mar 2002 18:22:10 +0000
Dpkg and multiarch
The month started with a 
I ve been running an IPv6 tunnel for a long time, but occasionally I ve been seeing traffic hang on it. It looks like it was the MTU, defaulting at 1500 bytes, causing issues when large amounts of data were being shuffled OUT from my Linux box, back to the net .
The fix is easy: 
thanks to the 