New finger plugin

[terminus]

I've written a plugin for Statz that allows it to update a user's
finger information. Grab it from http://www.malcolm.id.au/files/software/mac/statz-finger.zip.
Extract it into ~/Library/Application Support/Statz/Plug-Ins and
restart Statz.

In the days pre-Web 2.0 (pre-Web 1.0 for that matter), finger was a
bit like a social networking site, providing basic contact information
for the user, a description of their current projects, and whether
they were logged in and/or had unread mail. Even if you haven't heard
of it, it still works fine, so try it out: type "finger
Jer...@Malcolm.id.au" in Terminal.app to get my finger details.

All the plugin does is to update the .project file on a specified unix
login account of the user. The .project and .plan files are plain
text files that the finger server simply prints out when receiving a
finger request for that user. The file is updated using SSH (secure
shell).

The main thing you need to do to get this working is to configure your
account on the finger server so that you can connect to it using SSH
without a password. For information on how to do this see
http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/152 (written for Debian
Linux, but will work for any unix including Darwin).

After you have installed the plugin it will prompt you for the name or
IP address of the finger server, and the username to be used to log
into it. A shortcoming of the current release is that after you have
entered these values, Statz may appear to hang while the plugin tests
that the server is accessible (I haven't figured out a way to show the
spinning ball mouse pointer with AppleScript).

I'd be interested to receive any bug reports or feature requests.
(For example, does anyone plan to use this with a finger server
running on their Mac desktop? If so, we could bypass the need for SSH
to update the .project file on the local machine.)

Enjoy!

--- and on a completely different matter ---

Following up on the previous thread about Facebook, MoodBlast (http://
blog.circlesixdesign.com/download/moodswing) is an alternative to
Statz that already supports Facebook updating.

If you prefer to use Statz, then here is a workaround: the Twitter app
on Facebook will update your Facebook status with anything you tweet;
you just need to enable "Application may update my Facebook status
without notifying me" in the app's settings.

Still no support for LinkedIn in either Statz or Moodblast though; can
I add that as another feature request?