Tanguy Ortolo

No man pages, but almost

The AWS Command Line Interface, which is available in Debian, provides no man page. Instead, that tool has an integrated help system, which allows you to run commands such as aws rds help, that, for what I have seen, generates some reStructuredText, then converts it to a man page in troff format, then calls troff to convert it to text with basic formatting, and eventually passes it to a pager. Since this is close to what man does, the result looks like a degraded man page, with some features missing such as the adaptation to the terminal width.

Well, this is better than nothing, and better than what many under-documented tools can offer, but for several reasons, it still sucks: most importantly, it does not respect administrators' habits and it does not integrate with the system man database. You it does not allow you to use commands such as apropos, and you will get no man page name auto-completion from your shell since there is no man page.

Read more Generate man pages for awscli

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

One problem with PGP, at least with GnuPG, is that it does not interact with the web. There used to be a Firefox addon for that, called FirePGP, but its development was stopped.

So, good news, a new addon has come to fill the gap it left: WebPG, an addons for Firefox and Chrome. I am using it since a while, and it seems to work fine, being able to encrypt, sign, decrypt and check text blocks. Of course, it cannot handle PGP/MIME unless explicitly adapted to the webmail you use, but there seem to be some experimental support for GMail.

Quand on publie un site Web constitué de fichiers statiques avec le Serveur HTTP Apache, on peut réduire le débit utilisé pour servir ces fichiers en activant la compression à la volée, avec le mod_deflate. Ainsi, si le client annonce qu'il prend cela en charge, Apache compressera les fichiers avant de les lui envoyer, et le client les décompressera à la réception.

Read more Pré-compresser des fichiers statiques avec le Serveur HTTP Apache

Mobile devices

A number of people are using small mobile devices to read Web pages. These devices have small screens, which make it hard to read pages designed for a large screen width.

Read more Mobile browsers, you suck (or: RTFM CSS media type)