Announcment: personal update sites

[dscho]

Dear all,

one of Fiji's most important contributions to the ImageJ community is
probably the updater. It makes it easy to stay up-to-date with 3rdparty
plugins, and it makes it easy for anybody to make their plugins, scripts
and macros available to every ImageJ user. See the list here (and extend
it if you see something missing):

        http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites

All that is required to offer an update site is some webserver.

To make that easier -- to take away the requirement of having a webserver
-- a couple of weeks ago, I suggested to use Dropbox to serve one's own
site: http://fiji.sc/How_to_set_up_and_populate_an_update_site#Dropbox;
Unfortunately, I can no longer recommend using Dropbox to offer an update
site due to a recent change in Dropbox' service.

So after some brainstorming with the good LOCI people, in particular Kevin
Eliceiri and Curtis Rueden, we decided that we can do much better than
to rely on Dropbox: we now offer personal update sites for everyone.

For security reasons, you need an account on the Fiji Wiki [*1*] and after
that, you can direct your web browser to

        http://fiji.sc/Special:ChangeUploadPassword

and initialize your personal update site which will be hosted at
http://sites.imagej.net/<username>/ (where <username> is your name on the
Fiji Wiki). When you do so, please do not forget to add your site to
http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites.

Over the course of the next weeks, we will work on making this easier from
within the updater, both for initializing your own personal update site as
well as following any update site listed on the page
http://fiji.sc/List_of_update_sites.

Have fun, and add a ton of update sites,
Johannes & the rest of LOCI

Footnote *1*: It is hard to imagine what an amount of maintenance a simple
Wiki requires (and so will the personal update sites). We still want to
offer that service to the ImageJ community because of the benefits, of
course. To strike a balance between ease-of-use and maintenance cost, we
currently require new accounts to be verified via emails, but not more
(i.e. we no longer require new accounts to be added by someone with an
existing account). Of course, we are always open to suggestions how to
improve things!

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[Adrian Daerr-2]

Hello Johannes,

> So after some brainstorming with the good LOCI people, in particular Kevin
> Eliceiri and Curtis Rueden, we decided that we can do much better than
> to rely on Dropbox: we now offer personal update sites for everyone.

That is great news, thanks!

I followed all the indications, changed my upload password, updated
Fiji, added the update site to the advanced update manager as indicated
on the web page returned by Special:ChangeUploadPassword, changed the
status of some local-only plugin.jar to 'upload' and then attempted to
"upload to server". After I enter the upload password however, a second
dialog pops up that asks for proxy credentials ("Proxy Authentication",
with zero-width text fields to the right of both User: and Password:).
If I click "Cancel" the updater pops up an error
"http://sites.imagej.net/Daerr/ does not exist yet". If I restart the
Updater (with or without restarting Fiji itself), the status of
plugin.jar is reset to "Local-Only".

I have a direct internet connection. Normal updating of fiji works just
fine. No proxy is set in "Edit->Options->Proxy settings..." (neither is
there anything in the (Debian-linux) system settings, but telling imagej
to "use system proxy settings" doesn't work any better in the case above).

Any idea?

greetings from Paris,
Adrian

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[ctrueden]

Hi Adrian,

> After I enter the upload password however, a second dialog pops up
> that asks for proxy credentials ("Proxy Authentication", with
> zero-width text fields to the right of both User: and Password:).

I noticed that bug yesterday, which happens if you type an incorrect
password. (I'm not saying you necessarily did, only that if you *do* make a
typo in the password, you will get that strange dialog box.) So I think the
"proxy" direction is a red herring... probably the issue is unrelated to
proxies.

I will talk to Dscho about it today and we'll reply back with further
information and/or bugfixes.

Thanks for your patience,
Curtis


On Wed, May 15, 2013 at 5:32 AM, Adrian Daerr <
[hidden email]> wrote:

> Hello Johannes,
>
>
>  So after some brainstorming with the good LOCI people, in particular Kevin
>> Eliceiri and Curtis Rueden, we decided that we can do much better than
>> to rely on Dropbox: we now offer personal update sites for everyone.
>>
>
> That is great news, thanks!
>
> I followed all the indications, changed my upload password, updated Fiji,
> added the update site to the advanced update manager as indicated on the
> web page returned by Special:ChangeUploadPassword, changed the status of
> some local-only plugin.jar to 'upload' and then attempted to "upload to
> server". After I enter the upload password however, a second dialog pops up
> that asks for proxy credentials ("Proxy Authentication", with zero-width
> text fields to the right of both User: and Password:). If I click "Cancel"
> the updater pops up an error "http://sites.imagej.net/**Daerr/<http://sites.imagej.net/Daerr/>does not exist yet". If I restart the Updater (with or without restarting
> Fiji itself), the status of plugin.jar is reset to "Local-Only".
>
> I have a direct internet connection. Normal updating of fiji works just
> fine. No proxy is set in "Edit->Options->Proxy settings..." (neither is
> there anything in the (Debian-linux) system settings, but telling imagej to
> "use system proxy settings" doesn't work any better in the case above).
>
> Any idea?
>
> greetings from Paris,
> Adrian
>
> --
> ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.**html<http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html>
>

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[dscho]

Hi Adrian,

On Wed, 15 May 2013, Adrian Daerr wrote:

> I followed all the indications, changed my upload password, updated
> Fiji, added the update site to the advanced update manager as indicated
> on the web page returned by Special:ChangeUploadPassword, changed the
> status of some local-only plugin.jar to 'upload' and then attempted to
> "upload to server".  After I enter the upload password however, a second
> dialog pops up that asks for proxy credentials ("Proxy Authentication",
> with zero-width text fields to the right of both User: and Password:).
> If I click "Cancel" the updater pops up an error
> "http://sites.imagej.net/Daerr/ does not exist yet". If I restart the
> Updater (with or without restarting Fiji itself), the status of
> plugin.jar is reset to "Local-Only".

The proxy dialog is shown by mistake when an incorrect password was
entered. I will work on fixing both the showing of said dialog and the
proxy dialog's 0-width text fields.

From the logs, it seems that an incorrect password was entered. (Oh, and
you really want to keep using that Internet Explorer 8 rather than
Internet Explorer 6...).

Ciao,
Johannes

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[Adrian Daerr-2]

Dear Johannes, dear Curtis,

Thanks a lot for taking a look at this. Curtis was right, the Proxy
dialog was a red herring. The thing was, there was an accented letter
(specifically: "ü") in my password, typed on a keyboard with dead
combining accents (i.e. keys <">+<u>). I did type the password several
times, and very carefully, so I was reasonably sure there was no typo.

Switching to an ASCII-only password works very well now!

I temporarily switched back to a password with an accented letter, and I
confirm that this reproducibly breaks the possiblity to upload.

I believe I have no way of knowing where things went wrong, in the
browser* when changing the upload password, or in Fiji's dialog when
entering said password (in both cases exactly one single dot is shown
after the two keys <">+<u> have been pressed, so they seem to have been
combined; also I can enter the letter ü just fine into normal
textfields, both in Firefox and in Fiji), but somehow the passwords do
not match in the end. Different encodings ? If you want me do to
anything to investigate this let me know. Otherwise I'm just fine with
remembering that accented letters are to be avoided.

Thanks again for this great new feature,
Adrian



*Johannes wrote:
 > Oh, and you really want to keep using that Internet Explorer 8
 > rather than Internet Explorer 6...

but my Iceweasel 20.0 AFAIK identifies as useragent:

"Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:20.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/20.0
Iceweasel/20.0"

Did I miss a joke somewhere ?


On 15.05.2013 18:34, Johannes Schindelin wrote:

> Hi Adrian,
>
> On Wed, 15 May 2013, Adrian Daerr wrote:
>
>> I followed all the indications, changed my upload password, updated
>> Fiji, added the update site to the advanced update manager as indicated
>> on the web page returned by Special:ChangeUploadPassword, changed the
>> status of some local-only plugin.jar to 'upload' and then attempted to
>> "upload to server".  After I enter the upload password however, a second
>> dialog pops up that asks for proxy credentials ("Proxy Authentication",
>> with zero-width text fields to the right of both User: and Password:).
>> If I click "Cancel" the updater pops up an error
>> "http://sites.imagej.net/Daerr/ does not exist yet". If I restart the
>> Updater (with or without restarting Fiji itself), the status of
>> plugin.jar is reset to "Local-Only".
>
> The proxy dialog is shown by mistake when an incorrect password was
> entered. I will work on fixing both the showing of said dialog and the
> proxy dialog's 0-width text fields.
>
>> From the logs, it seems that an incorrect password was entered. (Oh, and
> you really want to keep using that Internet Explorer 8 rather than
> Internet Explorer 6...).
>
> Ciao,
> Johannes
>
> --
> ImageJ mailing list: http://imagej.nih.gov/ij/list.html
>

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[dscho]

Hi Adrian,

On Wed, 15 May 2013, Adrian Daerr wrote:

> Switching to an ASCII-only password works very well now!

I uploaded a new version of the updater to the ImageJ update site and
personal update sites should now accept umlauts in the passwords, too!

Ciao,
Johannes

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