JSON License considered harmful
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Grumble, To remember
Summary
The JSON License may seem interesting, but it a bad license, both non-free and ambiguous: do not use it. If you are the author of a piece of software that uses JSMin or its PHP port, consider dropping that non-free part or at least rendering it optional.
Who gave my address to spammers?
For hurried readers: do not give your main email address to Moneybookers or to deviantART, since they may give it (unintentionally, I hope) to spammers.
Opportunistic SSH agent
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, Lazyweb
To use an SSH agent, one usually has to:
- launch the agent;
- add his key to it.
The first step can be automated in the desktop or shell startup script (this is a typical use case for login shell-only startup scripts, by the way), but the second one cannot if your private key is protected by a passphrase.
OpenSSH tip: connection sharing
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
The last versions of OpenSSH brought an interesting feature: sharing multiple sessions over a single connection. When enabled, this is how it works:
- The first time you open an SSH connection to a server (including anything that works on top of SSH, like SCP, SFTP, rsync or Git), it opens a network connection as usual. It also opens a local Unix socket and listens to it for later use.
- The next times you open an SSH connection to that server while the first one is still open, instead of opening a new network connection, it connects to that local Unix socket and lets the first SSH client carry its new session.
Debian with AMD graphic cards
If you install Debian on a computer with an AMD graphic card (an integrated Radeon HD 6310 in my case), you will only get garbage on your screen. Even without X.Org.
This is because these graphic card require a non-free firmware to work, even in 2D with free drivers. So, boot with the kernel option radeon.modeset=0 to get a working console, then install the non-free package linux-firmware-nonfree.
After that, do not forget to complain to AMD, because that really sucks hard. At the beginning there were microwave network cards unusable without non-free firmware, then wired network cards, and they are even invading graphic cards!