pysshsftp: proof-of-concept SFTP client for Unix which uses the OpenSSH ssh(1) command-line tool

This blog post is an announcement for pysshsftp, a proof-of-concept, educational SFTP client for Unix, which uses the OpenSSH ssh(1) command-line tool (for establishing the secure connection), but it doesn't use the sftp(1) command-line tool (so it can e.g. upload files without truncating them first).

Only very little part of the SFTP protocol has been implemented so far (initialization, uploading, and stat()ting files). The SFTP protocol was reverse-engineered from sftp-client.c in the OpenSSH 5.1 source code.

The motivation behind writing pysshsftp was to have an SFTP client which

• supports uploading files without truncating them (the OpenSSH sftp(1) always truncates the file before uplading data bytes);
• can be easily scripted from Python;
• uses the OpenSSH(1) command-line tool for establishing the secure connection (other Python libraries like pysftp and paramiko can't use the user's public key configuration properly by default: they don't support passphrase reading for passphrase-protected keys, they don't support reading keys from ssh-agent, and they don't support reading ~/.ssh/id_rsa and ~/.ssh/id_dsa exactly the same way as OpenSSH uses them).

Multilingual programs in Haskell, Prolog, Perl and Python

This blog posts shows program source codes that work in multiple languages (including Haskell, Prolog, Perl, Perl and Python).

Here is a program which works in Haskell, Prolog and Perl:

$ cat >m1.prg <<'END'
foo( {-1/*_} ) if!'*/%'; print "Hello, Perl!\n" if<<'-- */'
}). :- write('Hello, Prolog!'), nl, halt.
/* -} x) = x
main = putStrLn "Hello, Haskell!"
-- */
END
$ perl m1.prg
Hello, Perl!
$ swipl -f m1.prg
Hello, Prolog!
$ cp m1.prg m1.hs
$ ghc m1.hs -o m1
$ ./m1
Hello, Haskell!

Here is a program which works in Haskell, Prolog and Python:

$ cat >m2.prg <<'END'
len( {-1%2:3} ); print "Hello, Python!"; """
}). :- write('Hello, Prolog!'), nl, halt.
/* -} x) = x
main = putStrLn "Hello, Haskell!"
-- """ # */
END
$ python m2.prg
Hello, Python!
$ swipl -f m2.prg
Hello, Prolog!
$ cp m2.prg m2.hs
$ ghc m2.hs -o m2
$ ./m2
Hello, Haskell!

It's possible to have polyglots of 8, 10 and even 22 programming languages, see them here.

How to upload a video to Picasa from Linux, Mac OS X and Windows

This blog post explains how to upload a video to Google Picasa from Linux, Mac OS X and Windows.

It is not possible to upload a video to Picasa Web Albums from your web browser. (However, it is possible to upload images this way.)

Please note that the video you upload will be transcoded, most probably to lower quality than the original, and the original video file won't be available for download or watching on Picasa Web Albums.

On Windows, use the latest Picasa desktop application ([download]). Version 3.8 or newer works. Alternatively, you can use GoogleCL ([project page]).

On Mac OS X, use the Picasa Web Albums Uploader. ([download])

On Linux, use the Google command line tools (GoogleCL). [project page] Example command to upload photos and videos:

$ google picasa create --title album_name
$ google picasa post   --title album_name ~/Photos_and_videos/*

It might take a few minutes for the video to become transcoded and made available. In the meanwhile, you'll see this image on picasaweb instead:

On Linux, you may have to install the newest googlecl (0.9.11 works) and the newest python-gdata (2.0.12 or newer works), and remove your

~/.googlecl

directory to make it work.

Installation instructions for Ubuntu Lucid, before you can run the

google

command above:

$ sudo apt-get install python-setuptools
$ sudo easy_install gdata
$ sudo easy_install http://googlecl.googlecode.com/files/googlecl-0.9.11.tar.gz
$ mv -f ~/.googlecl ~/.googlecl.old