I could answer this question saying that it's better, stronger, easier: that would be false. The real reason is that there exists some PDF that use advanced graphics feature of PDF that are simply not correctly implemented in other free readers.

I prefer to use free applications, as much as possible. But technical value is sometimes a strong enough incentive to switch to proprietary software, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader. Of course, I will give examples to support my claims (pictures down there). I may be mistaken, but please feel free to correct me.

Before I start, let me state that I usually use xpdf for daily work: it is fast, it makes things easy, reload is as simple as pressing "r" or changing a page. But sometimes, xpdf does not do what I would like it to do.

Following the security problem on openssl/openssh specific to Debian (apparently, a lack of randomness in the generation of the keys for the whole OpenSSL library), it is time to renew your SSL certificates and SSH keys (a bit of cleaning). Why not turn it into the occasion to test a new certificate with the capability of answering to different names (with only one certificate and IP), as explained here?

Every year, I have to declare my income to the tax services. In the preceding years, I managed it with mostly no problems. This year, my computer being in the amd64 architecture, I feared I would have some troubles and I was right: one hour later, I could not yet do my declaration, and I used only about three minutes under MacOS X.

I started with a small advance: I already had a valid certificate till 2010, recognized at first try. I could then fill my tax form (the certificate is in PKCS 12 format, so I could later use it on the Mac to finish the declaration). The downfall was at the time of the signature: the java applet that was to be used to sign would not work.

Since the last time I installed machine (from scratch), I did not have any webmail back in place. I used to work with horde, a well known webmail framework. It is certainly very powerful, but I use the webmail very sparsely, when I cannot use ssh to access my machine. It is also quite complicated to install.

Last wednesday, or the week before, I found myself cornered in such a situation. The webmail offered at my lab was not enough (I wanted to read a specific mailbox on another server). This morning, I resolved to scratch this itch. I managed to do it in less than 30 minutes, without having read any documentation (I had just browsed the screenshots on the software's website). Congratulations for the good work to Roundcube!

I finally managed to understand how to change dynamically the system beep with pulseaudio. I do not claim it was complex, but it was not instantaneous.

The default sample is referenced (in Debian) in /etc/pulse/default.pa (near line 87) with a line looking like load-sample x11-bell /usr/share/sounds/gtk-events/activate.wav. The default volume is the one set in the X11 properties. Alas, it is not changeable at all in the Gnome preferences, but a simple xset b 100 is sufficient in any startup program (System -> Preferences -> Sessions). If the default level of 50% is enough for you, do not change it.

In this post, I include a script that can generate Self-signed X509 certificates (for use with https for example) with several names for the server. This is required because the certificate exchange is made on a lower level than the protocol exchange. For example, Apache can deliver to different domain names, but only one certificate can be used because it is asked before the domain name negotiation. So aliases must be included in the certificate or warnings are printed to the user.

So here is the script. Just run it with the main name for the server in first place, and the other names after it.

Do not hesitate to change the default values in the auxiliary and mandatory openssl-conf.cnf file.

A new version of Lightning, correcting lots of bugs, just appeared ; this is a followup to other articles of this blog. The 0.7 version replaces the 0.5 version. I recompiled quickly the extension based on a brand new Icedove 2.0.0.6 package. A bit of time was necessary to find the sources because they were moved in the website.

L’un des premiers économiseurs d’écrans que j’ai eu était une sorte d’aquarium virtuel. Bon, des poissons plats passaient de gauche à droite et de droite à gauche devant l’écran.

I use Emacs for a certain number of tasks (mostly LaTeX, Perl and Postscript).

One news had my attention some time ago. Emacs is now capable of using all the system fonts, any size. Following a request from a friend, I finally tested it... and adopted it.

The method was easy at work, in i386 architecture. Ubuntu (or one of its user: Alexandre Vassalotti) has some packages for emacs-snapshot that use the emacs-unicode-2 branche of development. Recompiling was no problem.

I just began working seriously on installing desktop machines in 64 bits at work, and this gave me some insight into the 64 bits transition problems: biggest being commercial applications that work only in 32 bits.

I already told about Lightning in this blog. Since version 0.5 is out to replace version 0.3.1, I recompiled quickly the extension on a clean install of Icedove 2.0.0.4.dfsg1 (but it will work with icedove 2.0.0.3, since I kept a copy around and there is no obvious bug). I recompile because people told me that the pristine binary Lightning 0.5 does not work.

For a number of years, I have been regularly updating kernels for about 80 machines. Among these (mostly Dell-branded machines), some have NVidia graphic cards and I chose to install the NVidia drivers. Since I have to update many machines, I install these drivers through the Debian packaging system.

I had to automate the task. Some will tell me that "there is module-assistant". True enough, but module-assistant does not automatically build for several kernel flavours. Moreover, there is sometimes a need to patch the sources, or even to patch the binaries, like since the mess of kernel 2.6.18-4 (and the paravirt_ops export problems of GPL/non-GPL symbols).

Icedove (connu aussi sous le nom de Thunderbird), le lecteur de courrier de Mozilla, est disponible en version 2.0 sous Debian/sid.

Seahorse est un programme qui remplit trois rôles :

• Gestionnaire de clés (à la fois clés ssh et clés de chiffrement GPG) 
• Agent de cache pour les clés ssh ;
• Agent de cache pour les clés gnupg-agent.

Si l’utilisation de Seahorse dans les deux premiers rôles ne pose aucun problème avec la distribution Debian (sid du 22 mai 2007), il faut faire un peu d’efforts pour la 3e utilisation.

I currently have to maintain an out-of-tree patch for openssh (in Debian, and probably elsewhere).

The rationale for this patch are the two merged bugs (#313317 and #408029) in Debian:
the environment variables sent by AcceptEnv/SendEnv functionalities
should take precedence over PAM variable settings, especially for
locale and terminal related settings (or commands that are
locale-sensitive or terminal sensitive might give incomprehensible
gibberish as output to the user). TERM is already managed in a special
way, but not LANG or LC_* variables.