Tanguy Ortolo

Thanks to a corporate reward program, I just got a Pure Sensia digital and Internet radio receiver: basically, it is a device able to play streams from FM, DAB, HTTP and USB sticks. In overall, it works fine, and it has a remote controller, so it makes a nice addition to my home equipment, but it has what I consider a major flaw, which I suspect to have been designed on purpose.

Read more Pure Sensia digital and Internet radio receiver: good idea, bad design

This is one thing I have wanted to do for a long time: configure Mutt to encrypt all messages sent to addresses for which I have a valid public key. Well, here is an awk-based script to generate that configuration.

(Yes, I know, a similar script was already written. But I did not see it at first, and I find mine more readable. :-) )

Read more Mutt: encrypt all messages sent to known PGP users

If you are using Wine under Debian testing with PulseAudio, you probably noticed that you cannot get sound playback any more. This is because:

1. Wine uses ALSA, which uses a plugin to play through PulseAudio;
2. Wine being in 32 bits, all that has to be installed in i386 versions;
3. recent versions of libasound2-plugins depend on libavcodec54 which depends on libopus0 which is not multiarch-capable and thus cannot be installed in both i386 and amd64 versions;
4. libopus0:amd64 cannot be reasonably removed to install only libopus0:i386 because many multimedia software depend on it (in other words: try that and you will end removing VLC and everything similar too).

No need to despair though, as there are several ways to work around that problem until the maintainer of libasound2-plugins has converted it to multiarch.

Read more Using Wine with sound under Debian testing (Jessie)

Spam trap

Dear lazyweb, I am considering to implement spam traps and evaluate their efficiency. The idea as rather simple:

1. publish some real-looking email addresses on websites, in ways that no human would use them to send legitimate mail, for instance in hidden texts, or in texts clearly stating they should not be used;
2. when my mail server receives a message for one of these address, blacklist the originating server for some time so it cannot spam real recipients.

Read more How to implement a Postfix spam trap?

A strange problem

Yesterday, I was reported a funny problem with the dokuwiki Debian package's postinst script, which contains a piece of shell script similar to that:

# Check the destination does not already exist
if [ ! -e /the/destination ]
then
    ln -s /some/file /the/destination
fi

It was failing with that message: ln: failed to create symbolic link '/the/destination': File exists. Even though I had just tested it did not exist!

Read more Beware of symlinks when testing a file existence