17 04 | 2012

Camera with a standard USB cable?

Written by Tanguy

Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Miscellaneous, Lazyweb

Digital camera icon

Since some years, there has been a movement towards standardization: mobile devices are now using Micro-USB for data transfer and charging, and SD or Micro-SD for storage extension (except Apple of course).

One piece is lacking to this perfection, however; as far as I know, digital camera producers did realize that SD won for storage, but they do not seem to have acknowledged the Micro-USB standard yet.

Now, since manufacturers and resellers do not indicate the connector type, I have no way to be sure that this is still the case. So, dear lazyweb, do you know if, by chance, there exists a compact digital camera that would use SD cards and a Micro-USB connector for data transfer and integrated charging?

16 04 | 2012

“Everything is a file” rocks

Written by Tanguy

Classified in : Homepage, Debian, Command line, Miscellaneous

Licence plate with “UNIX” written, subtitle “live free or die”

Unix rocks, or at least one of its design feature does: everything is a file.

Here is one funny use of that feature. I consider that programs that manipulate text should basically take it on their standard input, and write it to their standard output, while specifying the name of an input or output file should be an optional refinement.

Well, at least one program was designed the other way: when used to import a foreign key, ssh-keygen -i has no option to read it on its standard input. No problem, this can be worked around:

# ssh-keygen -if /dev/stdin
[paste the foreign key here]

Unfortunately, that does not work with every action of ssh-keygen since not all of them were written to be able to handle streams, which cannot be rewound.

12 04 | 2012

Why “www.”?

Written by Tanguy

Classified in : Homepage, Debian, To remember

Three big “W”s in shades of green

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.

Read more Why “www.”?

09 03 | 2012

JSON License considered harmful

Written by Tanguy

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.

Read more JSON License considered harmful

23 02 | 2012

Who gave my address to spammers?

Written by Tanguy

Classified in : Homepage, Debian

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.

Read more Who gave my address to spammers?

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