The OVH-Google XMPP mess

November 20th, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

Beware: trying to move your Jabber (XMPP) server from one host to another may result in your users not being able to reliably talk to users using Google Talk or Gmail chat. It looks like one way or the other Google caches the SRV records of your Jabber server and do not consult the DNS [...]

Silent death of a LG Flatron monitor

September 21st, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

My LG Flatron L1915S monitor decided that it was tired of working so hard: the backlight now turns off after a fraction of second. Of course, it happened right after the warranty period expired, so it is unlikely that I can get it fixed. A fair number of users seem to have the same problem, [...]

20 years later, I’m proud of myself

August 6th, 2008 by Samuel Tardieu

Back in 9th grade. My science teacher was explaining to the class why carbon monoxide (CO) inhalation was dangerous: carbon monoxide molecules attach themselves to the hemoglobin, preventing dioxygen molecules (O2) to do so. The carbone monoxide doesn’t dissociate from hemoglobin under normal pressure, making it a long-term problem (ok, this was a simplification, but [...]

The crazyness of DRM

December 7th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

First I hoped I had misread the web page. Then I realized I had not.
Networked disks are very useful. At home, they allow you to access your data from any computer on your local network without needing to keep a machine acting as a file server turned on all the time. But wait! You could [...]

Using IPv6 by default with wget

October 31st, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

I was surprised to see that wget chose to use IPv4 over IPv6 when downloading a file. It looks like it is on purpose (I would call it a bad design choice). You can tell wget to prefer IPv6 over IPv4 by putting the following line
prefer-family = IPv6

in either /etc/wgetrc (system wide) or $HOME/.wgetrc (user [...]

I am in search for the perfect non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker system. Many people send me email which require me to do some things before I can either answer them or provide them with a definite solution. Right now, I put those emails in a “avoir” (”to see” in French) folder which grows continously [...]

Some days ago, I was trying to get in touch with a friend of mine. I checked my instant messaging client and noted that he was online. I sent him a “Hi” and immediately received an offer to download a large .zip file with a business-related name.
The explanation? He was doing a drag-n-drop operation on [...]

Reading a DVD with VLC or mplayer is now illegal in France

December 30th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

Starting tomorrow December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with a software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. Today’s Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that [...]

Collaborative work on deliverables

October 10th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

In my job, I often participate to multi-partners projects which get public (European or national) funding. In those projects, we are required to produce deliverables that show the progress of our work.
The final deliverable is edited by an editor (how surprising) who is in charge of coordinating inputs from various partners and make them consistent. [...]

Running GNU/Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7110

August 24th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

I just setup a page explaining what works under Gentoo GNU/Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7110 laptop. Please let comments here for questions, remarks or enhancements.


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