Tanguy Ortolo

Using address extension

Postfix (and many other mail servers) offers one nice address extension feature: addresses like <user+whaterver@> are implicit aliases to <user@>. This allows users to implement a simple measure to fight spam:

1. when SomeCompany® or whatever asks for your email address, give them <user+somecompany@>;
2. if you start receiving spam at that address, you know who sold or was stolen your address;
3. finally, you will be able to disable that address so messages are simply refused with a permanent error code.

Read more Disable your spammed addresses with Postfix

Web cookies are meant to store user preferences for a website, but they are often misused for evil purposes, such as tracking him, sometimes across distinct websites.

Read more Self-Destructing Cookies for Firefox

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)

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