Why “www.”?
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, To remember
Many websites have addresses that use a www.-
prefix. Some people are encouraging this
practice, other are advising against
it.
I, for one, think this prefix makes sense and is really useful, so here is an explanation of my opinion. In a nutshell: the Wold Wide Web is one Internet service among many other such as domain name, mail, mailboxes or instant messenging; using a dedicated prefix allows to distribute all these services to specific servers in a convenient way.
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.
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.
Startup scripts of Bash and Zsh
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
Both Bash and Zsh use several startup scripts: profile, bashrc, zlogin, zshrc, etc.
The existence of several startup scripts exists to allow you to apply specific actions for interactive or login shells. For instance, you may want to set up a fancy colour prompt or to enable a powerful completion system for interactive shells only, as it would be pointless to apply it to non-interactive shells (that is, for shell scripts). Or you may want to display a joke and the weather forecast at login, but not each time you spawn a shell by other means.
Repacking ZIP-based containers
Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, To remember
Several modern complex file formats are based on a ZIP container: this is at least the case of OpenDocument and EPUB. However, they are not simply a bunch of files joined into an archive, but they follow some rules in order to be easily recognized by tools such as file. As I had to unpack, modify and repack such a container, here is a recipe to do that.