catalyst

Back in the days when the Unix world was more trusting, we had a command called finger. This command was used to find out information about a user. The output would look something like this:

Login: andrew         			Name: Andrew Ruthven

Directory: /home/andrew             	Shell: /bin/bash

On since Wed Jun 25 09:18 (NZST) on pts/0 from chimaera.etc.gen.nz

   1 second idle

Plan:

This is my .plan!  Surprise, surpise, surpise!

And if you ran finger against a host it would return a list of the users logged in. But the finger daemon that was queried had a few issues. Early versions had gaping security holes, and as more bad guys started appearing it became a useful way to find out what accounts existed on a host. This was useful to know who to target.

Because of these reasons the use of finger has declined, quite drastically.

One thing of interest though is the "Plan" section, this displays whatever is in the .plan file in the users home directory. This used to be used to indicate what someone was up to, or their plan.

Last year some of the folks at Catalyst started creating themselves Wiki pages called .plan or ToDo in their own namespace. In a moment of insanity I decided to create a finger daemon that would return those wiki pages. I also hooked it up to our internal staff directory. So it would return something like:

Name : Andrew Ruthven                         Extn: 7231

Email: andrew.ruthven@catalyst.net.nz         DDI : +64 4 xxx yyyyy

Nick : puck                                   Cell: +64 27 xxx yyyyy



Plan:

                              Andrew Ruthven/.plan



                                   Priorities



Do more work.

This was easy to do with our original wiki software - MoinMoin - because it had an output mode for plain text. But we've changed to MediaWiki, and Mediawiki doesn't have support for spitting out pages in plain text.

Yesterday I decided enough was enough and wrote a filter to support this. It grabs the Printable version of the page and strips out the toolboxes and headers and footers, then passes it to the text based web browser links before printing out the plain text version.

Perfect.

If you are interested in this filter, you can grab it from its git repo or you can just grab the script from here.