Tanguy Ortolo

You probably know reCAPTCHA already: for the webmasters and the end user, it is an antispam system which asks you to read distorted words in order to prove that you are a human and not a spamming bot. This service has another end: instead of generating its distorted texts, it takes them from printed books to help digitalizing them.

Read more Do not reCAPTCHA!

Installing an operating system

When you want to install a new operating system, the first thing to do is to get an installer medium, which usually involves two steps: downloading an image, and writing it to a medium. There are two major types of media usable for that purpose: optical discs and USB sticks. There used to be a third one, floppy disks, but it is no longer used, and it was conceptually very similar to USB sticks.

Read more A desktop file managers failure: writing an USB stick image

Mobile devices

A number of people are using small mobile devices to read Web pages. These devices have small screens, which make it hard to read pages designed for a large screen width.

Read more Mobile browsers, you suck (or: RTFM CSS media type)

Phishing is a fraud technique that consists in reproducing the content of a targeted website, directing users to it, and recording their credentials when they log into your website. It is like fishing fish with fake food, only you phish humans with fake websites.

Well, I have a good news for the phishers: people are using more and more smartphones, and mobile browsers are making your job really easy. In fact, many regular smartphone user simply have no way to tell your fake website apart from the real one.

Read more Why phishers must looove smartphones

I had to play a bit with MySQL, saving and restoring databases with mysqldump and mysql. These two tools have one severe discrepancy, which I would like to comment here because I think it is an excellent example of what not to do when designing tools to be used together.

Read more MySQL save/restore: an example of what not to do