Frequently Asked Questions

This page is meant to address certain questions or problems that various users have had so far. You should expect this list to grow as more questions are asked with each new version of RoboJournal.

Question: Why doesn't RoboJournal offer higher security?

Will Kraft's answer:

As the "Current Limitations" section explains, RoboJournal was not originally designed to be a high-security program. RoboJournal's purpose is to allow users to create and maintain an electronic diary or journal on a remote server. By its very design, RoboJournal is already more secure than a traditional handwritten diary (which offers no security at all since anyone can pick it up and read it). RoboJournal is not entirely insecure since the MySQL server requires a username and password for each login. Even so, you need to ask yourself how much protection your journal really requires. A basic login requirement is probably enough to thwart casual unauthorized access attempts unless the attacker has root-level access to your MySQL installation (in which case you have far greater problems than having your secrets exposed).

That said, there are plans in the works to harden RoboJournal against unauthorized access attempts even from the MySQL root account. In future versions, RoboJournal is going to support interaction with the GNU Privacy Guard public-key encryption program. This new functionality will secure your journal content by encrypting it with your public key. Once encrypted, your private key (and the password that goes with it) is the only thing that can decrypt the content. If someone were to read your encrypted journal without having the private key needed to decrypt it, all the intruder would see is ASCII-armored encrypted text.

Question: Why doesn't the spell check in RoboJournal 0.4 and 0.4.1 work on Ubuntu "Quantal" and Linux Mint?

Will Kraft's answer:

Sadly, this has nothing to do with RoboJournal so there is no real way for me to fix it (and I assure you that it's not from a lack of trying). Through extensive debugging, it appears the problem lies somewhere in the Qt 4.8.3 libraries or in the core C++ libraries in the Quantal repositories. As such, this bug affects all distros that draw from the Quantal repositories, including Ubuntu, its variants (Kubuntu, Xubuntu, et al.), and Linux Mint. The problem also affects Debian "Wheezy".

In all instances, the bug manifests as a segmentation fault/buffer overflow error that causes RoboJournal to suddenly crash whenever the user tries to activate the Editor (as demonstrated in "Writing a New Entry" or "Modifying an Existing Entry") while spell check is enabled in RoboJournal Preferences. Even more strangely, it is impossible to debug this error properly because the bug only affects release builds compiled against these libraries (debug builds work properly and do not crash). Since debuggers like GDB do not work correctly with release builds, there is no way for me to investigate this problem further. Running GDB against a debug build is futile because the crash never occurs (so there is nothing to debug).

The exact same code runs on Windows without producing this error so the problem lies somewhere in those specific Linux Qt libraries. Furthermore, I have extensively tested RoboJournal with a custom-compiled Qt 4.8.4 environment on Linux and everything works fine under those conditions (apparently whatever caused this bug was fixed between version 4.8.3 and 4.8.4). I hope this bug will simply resolve itself when the Debian package maintainers replace the affected Qt 4.8.3 libraries with a new version. In the meantime, possible solutions include:

Simply run RoboJournal with spell check disabled (easiest solution).
Compile a "debug" build of RoboJournal for use on Linux. The debug build is much larger in file size because of the debug headers it contains but these can probably be stripped out with no ill effects (though I haven't tested this). Either way, everything should work fine since debug builds seem to be immune to this crashing bug.
Build your own custom Qt from source and compile RoboJournal against that (hardest solution).

Question: Why does the whitespace removal feature sometimes add lots of empty lines to a new entry?

Will Kraft's answer:

This is on my list of things to fix in RoboJournal 0.5.

The bug is most often triggered whenever you paste content from an external source (like a website) into a new entry and then save it. Once saved, the new entry shows lots of unnecessary whitespace in the Entry Output Pane. Whenever this problem occurs, it can be easily remedied by editing the affected entry (consult "Modifying an Existing Entry" if necessary) and then saving it again without making any changes. The whitespace removal function should work correctly the second time.

Question: Why isn't there a version of RoboJournal for Mac OS X?

Will Kraft's answer:

I have actually been planning to release RoboJournal 0.4.1 on Mac OS X as soon as I can. The reason why I haven't done it for earlier versions is because I don't have a Mac of my own; under the circumstances there was no way for me to build or actively maintain a Mac version. Fortunately, I have found someone who might be able to help; if so, you can expect a Mac version very soon.

Question: RoboJournal has been useful to me. Is there anything I can do to help out?

Will Kraft's answer:

What I need the most right now are more beta testers and translators who are able to volunteer some of their time.

Beta testers help me test new experimental versions of RoboJournal prior to release (usually the current "experimental" branch on GitHub) on a wide variety of operating systems and notify me of any new bugs they find. Beta testers also suggest new features and other ways to improve RoboJournal. As a beta tester, you must have enough development experience and skill to compile the experimental code yourself because I simply don't have the time to package and distribute custom builds on a regular basis.

Translators would help me make RoboJournal available in other languages besides English. I'm only fluent in English so my ability to do this myself is extremely limited. I would definitely appreciate having several people who are willing to gradually translate all text in the program (and perhaps in this documentation as well) into Spanish, French, German, Chinese, or any other world language in which they have proficiency.

If you are interested in either of these roles, please contact me at pwizard[at]gmail[dot]com.