UPDATE - 071010 - after further testing I found a couple of errors in my original webapp file. So, I’ve updated the icon and a couple other things and reposted. Enjoy!

Over at Lifehacker they’ve posted about the standalone Mozilla based WebRunner. WebRunner is, well I’ve pretty much been over that already. The point is, you can launch a webapp from a standalone program, allowing you to do things without getting distracted by all that… extra web. I really like this concept, I now have links for Gmail, Google Reader, and all those other nifty web 2.0 apps I like.

I wanted to give this a try myself, so I’ve made a standalone Wikipedia launcher. Get it here. It’s a launcher for the Wikipedia’s English main page.

Make your own! It’s dead simple! All you do is install the WebRunner software, create an ini file for your app, create icons and zip these files together. Rename the zip file to your.webapp and your good to go!

There’s a couple of worrying things about the webapp files - from a security standpoint. The biggest of these is that you can include a js file with javascript that runs at an application level. In other words it has access to everything that the application has access to, like - oh I don’t know - the file system?! (in my best Church Lady voice - oh crap am I revealing my age!). Another is the fact that you’re using a zip format to distribute the rest of your files. Which of course can have it’s own security problems when used with other programs. You also don’t really have the ability to get at a lot of the standard Mozilla settings that WebRunner shares. So you can’t make adjustments to settings for cookies, passwords and the like.

At any rate, it’s still a relatively young application, so I’m sure they’ll get the security issues addressed, but for now, make sure you inspect those files before you run them!

Links:
WebRunner
Lifehacker post
My Wikipedia launcher

Disclaimer

Keep in mind while running these webapps with WebRunner, that WebRunner itself is still a in pre-release/beta stages. Which means that the webapps found on this site, while working to view sites and what not, are not intended to be a replacement for your standard browser. The websites you’ll be viewing were not designed to be used with WebRunner, and therefore not all features on these sites may be compatible with it. I claim no responsibility for any malfunctions related to WebRunner. I’m providing files that allow you to access some websites, nothing more. Feel free to use the webapp files found on this site, but keep in mind you’re using them at your own risk - and without warranty!

A covert channel is a means of communication that is non-standard. In other words, messages sent by other than normal means (more here). One method (vector) used as a covert channel is steganography. Steganography is a means to hide messages, usually within images like JPEGs, as opposed to cryptography where messages are encrypted. Over at Daily Cup of Tech (great site by the way, worth a good dig through the articles) they’ve posted a video which details how to use a compression tool and a built in Windows command line utility (FINALLY, a real use for cmd and it should work with GNU/Linux tools too) actually embed files into JPEG or other image files. While not strictly speaking steganography (which only deals with messages, not entire files), this is just too cool! Can’t wait to try this one out on my own!!!

link

Ever see something, some piece of cool, some bit of technology that makes your jaw drop? I had that happen twice this week. First have a look at David Kellogg’s website and his Plain Old Webserver (pow).

Plain Old Webserver (POW)

POW is either a really cool Firefox extension that turns Firefox into a web server or a lightweight xulRunner web server. Either way it serves up web pages using server side javascripting. Sweat! I still have to play with this a bit to get a feel for it because I’ve never used javascript on a server before, but considering this is portable to any system that xulRunner or Firefox will run on, it makes it a very versatile package right out of the box. While the fact that it doesn’t have a php module means I can’t do local development of my website on it (yet), POW does offer sqllite as a database. You can also download some extras for it like a Firefox database management or directory file listing.

You can also use the xulRunner “portably”. I quoted that because, while the POWUSB package includes both Windows and MAC xulrunner versions (no Linux yet either!), it isn’t exactly portable in the way that say, FirefoxPoratable is. In other words, if you run the included xulRunner on Windows, it will still leave files on your local file system. To make this truly portable, you’d need to refrain from leaving footprints on the system you’re using, therefore this really doesn’t qualify as a portableapp quite yet…

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I thought I knew a thing ‘er two about javascript (I taught myself javascript, and after HTML it was the first interpreted language I learned, and so far I’ve had no formal training in with ECMA specific code), then I saw Dean Edwards website. This guy (and his commenters) must live on planet ECMAscript for crying out loud (if you don’t believe me take a stroll through Mr. Edwards’ website and take a look at his projects and comments on his work, just freakin’ fantastic - from a programming point of view). Anyway, what I really geeked out about was his MiniWeb application. MiniWeb

What can I say, other than - freakin’ sweat! Contained in just 14 files is a (partial) javascript based blog, file management (will kind of, read on), and a *nix-like terminal (again, kind of). The reason for all those caveats is this; pretty much the fact that is is a work in progress AND, the fact that nearly the entirety of the system is contained in the one file: miniweb.html. Any new blog posts, files (which can be text or I think some form of executable - through some javascript magic), etc. are all stored in the miniweb.html file.

As I mentioned, it’s a work in progress, so nothing is complete, the terminal, the blog, pretty much everything but file viewing and management is incomplete. At this point I’m still just toying with it, so it pretty much takes on the Arthur C. Clark idiom of being so far beyond my understanding that it appears to be magic. To wield some of this magic Dean appears to use a home grown javascript compressor. Just… wow…

To check out MiniWeb click here. To download it and play with it on your own, click here. When you open up the file or depending on what you click on in what ever browser you’re using, you’ll probably have to get passed some of your browser’s security to fully use the software. In IE I think you need to allow the software to function on the bar that appears at the top of the browser window, in Firefox, depending on what you’re trying to do you may have to allow the script to complete some actions (don’t forget that “remember this decision” checkbox). Too much fun to pass up…