Today, the California Health and Human Services convened a summit with an expected three hundred people in the interest of a state HIE (Health Information Exchange). This project has been tasked by volunteers and state groups and led by Jonah Frolich, deputy secretary of California Health and Human Services. The teams formed have met a series of hurdles already in preparation for the next big phase of executing the next generation system and raising an initial seed of $38.8m to move the effort forward.

At stake is at least $3 billion by connecting to these services for doctors and hospitals that qualify by using the HIE as built. This means that doctors can bill for more Medi-Cal and Medicare payments that are expected to be available in coming years from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funds while using HIE services. Additionally, the services being created will need to support applications that engage consumers as they play a role.

We see the opportunity for California's investment to touch many interesting areas of cloud computing, identity management, and mobile - right as it is getting interesting.

Sponsor

Last week, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and California Health and Human Services Agency Secretary Kim Belshé named a new nonprofit entity called Cal eConnect to oversee the development of Health Information Exchange services. One of the first tasks at hand is to finish the CA HIE Operational plan and to finalize details in budget, technical, and engagement plans to execute with the recent first grant by ONC for $38.8m.

Today's meeting and web conference is part of a process kicked off last July and offers monthly reports towards a state plan to direct funding for building a next generation model of HIE.

Leading up to this point, the CHHS efforts were led by Jonah Frohlich and comprised of many organizations and individuals contributing time to the effort to get the funding for the state. In addition to work group updates, the meeting included major parts of the organizations impacted the most, including quick fire discussion with CalPSAB's Bobbie Holm, Medi-Cal's Kim Ortiz, and for Public Health, Linette Scott.

Shown here is the different core services that exist and how they provide links through HIE secure practices. And, how secondary services are build from there. This framework is focused on simplifying the overlay with existing services in a complex environment.

Here are some of the goals for the technical architecture:

• 
  
• Provide a trust infrastructure for the electronic exchange of health information across organizations that have no pre-existing data-sharing arrangements
• 
  
• Provide a directory infrastructure for providers to locate each other and to determine the format(s) that they mutually support for health information exchanges
• 
  
• Assist organizations to match exchanged health information to the correct patient records
• 
  
• Address gaps in the NHIN (Nationwide Health Information Network) specifications with respect to achieving HIE for meaningful use
• 
  

Determining what to offer and model the core services was a major part of the discussions in the technical work group.

One challenge the group faces in how to straddle this difficult issue is that identity and assertions for a person to live at the edge today, they are embedded in each application today in the form of passwords or tokens. Therefore, the CA HIE wants to be pragmatic in approach and have the first phases of architecture mirror the situation today.

At the same time, it was noted in the meeting today that the absence of a citizen registry is absent from the core services may be fatal. In this model, authorization, access, and consent is dealt with in the architectures as being "best effort" to integrate the patient data, but not "guaranteed". This is due to the practical challenge that all the endpoints aren't perfectly aligned in data, nor practices. And, that the HIE itself isn't a panacea for identity on the Internet.

On high level, the question becomes: Is the HIE a services where citizens are registered "agents" and have a requirement to be joined directly to each message about themselves, or is there information about people in the system being exchanged is by agents? We think the more people are engaged the better and solving for this will lead to a citizen registry concept in the future.

Here we show the planned services, networks, registries and directories architecture view.

The CA HIE project aligns with the work at the federal level with NHIN.

We got a briefing from Brian Behlendorf on the recent work from the NHIN Connect project. He gave some context of the base thinking going into the models.

Shown here CA HIE is both a supporter of NHIN and also has several suggestions for modifying the scope to include a tighter link to Provider registries and communication practices, for the practical reasons of insuring end-to-end provider to provider communications.

This seems like a good balance where the state is more focused on the entities doing business and should have a tighter link with these entities and the business they conduct on HIE.

While moving forward with HIE for California, an important question is being raised. Do clouds consist information about citizens, or do they contain user identity services that join and connect individuals?

This is something that is somewhat hard to grasp, but we feel it will play a role in how the experience of HIE is for the person who is coming into the system. We'd like to see third party authorizations and trusted identity federation for citizens evolve and HIE seems liek the right backdrop to get it done. As reported earlier, third party logon can work, with the right incentives.

Jokingly, we ask ourselves will HIE work with RSS for all my provider feeds.

And with a more critical eye, we ask the same question. Shouldn't all the services of HIE be using the best sharing technologies and patterns already in use? If I have a health concern, it seems that it should be as easy as "following" "Mike's ashtma" to get every update from providers in a real time feed. It should be mash it up with other personal data, devices, and social forces.

We hope that the architecture gives extra consideration to the person, so they can do just as much, if not more, "mashing" of their own data streams.

Celebrities, even ones not from California, are people with trials and tribulations too. In fact, in her recent video released today, "Telephone", she addresses the access and issue of too much interruption and the benefits of both glamor and lifestyle.

She was spotted in California recently. The pictures of her hanging out at a SoCal mall reminded us that she is very much human.

Considering Gaga, we have added a few practical questions that the health cloud will need to manage as final food for thought.

• 
  
• Will it work for traveling citizens and non-citizens alike that may have different records, languages, and locations.
• 
  
• How will it enable care providers who manage children or elderly and will sign in and out of systems to pick up medications, for example.
• 
  
• Does it work with mobile communications and social networks?
• 
  
• Can it really offer true privacy for superstars, and everyday citizens with their health information? Is this even the right question?
• 
  

We bet Jonah, the work groups, and the new team at Cal eConnect will be working hard to find answers.

Those answers may us to a next evolution. A health cloud - that powers the Internet at large.

Why does Health Information Exchange seem harder than colonizing Mars?

It’s a tricky thing to pull off, producing a show that can’t be pigeonholed into any one genre, but new indie entry Off-Key has somehow managed to carve out a place for itself in the space between drama, comedy and thriller.

In fact, upon closer inspection, that lack of genre distinction is a key part of the show’s original voice. In the four episodes to air so far (premiering Tuesdays and Thursdays), Jonas (Jonathan Northover), a famous singer-songwriter who’s on the run from agents, reporters and maybe even the mob (though that last one might have been a joke) is hiding out with his old high school friend Norah (Liz Beach) — who’s not too sure what he’s doing there. Meanwhile, the outside world threatens to invade in the form of Anika (Chris Farishon), a tabloid journalist who’s sure she can track him down.

Told in short, tight increments written and directed by Jaz Garewal, Off-Key episodes manage to give the actors breathing space while planting intriguing developments. But it could use a lot more momentum. While the short length of the episodes does keep scenes from dragging, the series might have worked better if framed around Anika’s attempts to find Jonas, with less time spent hanging out in the woods with Jonas and Norah initially. Mysteries are always less intriguing when you know how they end, after all, and the episodes focusing on Anika are a lot more compelling.

Of course, the actors involved play a part in this. I really enjoyed the tough yet quirky performance of Farishon, but Northover and Beach both felt awkward in their scenes together, struggling for that all-too-elusive chemistry. However, production values are extremely solid, and the show’s visual style, especially the use of graphics on screen, creates a presentation worthy of a show with a much higher budget.

One great touch: The opening shot of each episode is a stylized comic book-esque frame that holds for a second before coming to life. How that ties into the actual themes of the series isn’t quite clear yet, but it still drew me in as a viewer.

I wouldn’t necessarily consider Off-Key a show for everyone, though web series fans will definitely appreciate the quality of production and brevity of the storytelling. There’s talent here, is what I mean. And that’s always something to encourage.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (subscription required):

By the Numbers: Budget Analysis of a Web Series

One of the more solid and genuinely useful Internet startups out there, travel fare aggregator Kayak, was dissected in a report released today by NeXt Up Research for SharesPost. NeXt Up thinks that with a heavy advertising spend, Kayak should have a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18 percent from 2009 to 2012. Based on estimated revenue and comparison to competitors, the report estimates Kayak’s market cap at between $705 and $771 million.

Is Kayak a promising IPO candidate? You decide. Here are some of the relevant assessments:

• Meta search engines like Kayak accounted for less than 8 percent of online travel booked in 2009, due mostly to low awareness.

• Kayak is spending heavily to make itself better known — NeXt Up estimates an advertising budget of $50 million a year, but Kayak has said itself it plans to spend $100 million on marketing.

• The travel industry should recover from the recession and see a CAGR of 4 percent from 2009 to 2013, with online travel agents growing with a 7 percent CAGR.

• Promising Kayak initiatives include its iPhone apps (see our story) and Travelpost, its TripAdvisor competitor.

• Kayak is projected to have revenue of $180 million in 2010, growing to $305 million in 2014 with EBITDA margins of 30-35 percent.

• Kayak has raised about $224 million in venture funding and debt from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners, Oak Investment Partners, Tenaya Capital, Trident Capital, Gold Hill Capital, Norwest Venture Partners, Silicon Valley Bank and AOL.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

What Twitter Airfare Sales Tell Us About Real-Time E-Commerce

Table ronde sur le thème de l'adaptation littéraire au cinéma

Description : Qui ne sait pas que L'Arroseur arrosé, ou plus précisément Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle, fait partie du programme de la première séance du cinématographe des frères Lumière au Grand Café, à Paris, le 28 décembre 1895 ? Mais on sait moins qu'il s'agit là de la première adaptation littéraire de l'histoire mondiale du cinéma (...).

Intervenants :

- Claude Miller (cinéaste)
- Gilles Taurand (scénariste)
- Patrice Hoffmann (directeur littéraire et des droits audiovisuels aux éditions Flammarion)
- François Samuelson (agent littéraire)
- Philippe Grimbert (psychanalyste, écrivain)
- Alain Absire (président de la Société des gens de lettres, écrivain)

Table ronde sur le thème de l'adaptation littéraire au cinéma

Description : Qui ne sait pas que L'Arroseur arrosé, ou plus précisément Le Jardinier et le petit espiègle, fait partie du programme de la première séance du cinématographe des frères Lumière au Grand Café, à Paris, le 28 décembre 1895 ? Mais on sait moins qu'il s'agit là de la première adaptation littéraire de l'histoire mondiale du cinéma (...).

Intervenants :

- Claude Miller (cinéaste)
- Gilles Taurand (scénariste)
- Patrice Hoffmann (directeur littéraire et des droits audiovisuels aux éditions Flammarion)
- François Samuelson (agent littéraire)
- Philippe Grimbert (psychanalyste, écrivain)
- Alain Absire (président de la Société des gens de lettres, écrivain)

Spirolide and gymnodimine macrocyclic imine phycotoxins belong to an emerging class of chemical agents associated with marine algal blooms and...

For years the entertainment industry has been lobbying for tougher measures against online piracy. In France this has resulted in the implementation of a ‘three strikes and you’re offline’ regime and many other countries are considering similar measures.

Thus far the United States Government has kept relatively quiet on this issue, but that doesn’t mean that such plans are not being discussed behind close doors.

According to Ari Emanuel, a famous Hollywood talent agent and the model for the character Ari Gold in the hit series Entourage, Hollywood lobbyists are working hard to convince President Obama and others to ram through similar legislation in the United States.

“We are in the midst of talking to the president and some attorney generals and [we are] trying to implement a three strikes and you’re out rule,” Emanuel said, while adding that this issue would most likely result in a “fight with ISPs”.

At this point it is impossible to assess the exact nature of these talks, but since Ari Emanuel is the brother of White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, there is no doubt that these talks are taken seriously. President Obama, who vouched to decrease the power of lobbyists in Washington, is not turning a deaf ear to this one for now.

Before even considering the implementation of a three-strikes model, United States lawmakers might want to take a good look at what’s happening in France. Unlike earlier projections that up to 95% of the file-sharers could stop downloading copyrighted content, the piracy rate has actually increased in the face of the new law.

The entertainment industry, nevertheless, continues to push legislation as the solution to online piracy, while ignoring their own role in the creation of the problem.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

When comparing operating systems people tend to roll out the same old reasons every time. I think those of us who use Ubuntu are already aware that we have less viruses than Windows, less malware, it’s free of cost and so on. I’m sure we’ve pointed out plenty of times that you’re legally entitled to copy the CD and even create your own remix.

However I wanted to look at some of the things I’ve done recently on Ubuntu that under Windows would be costly, difficult or impossible. So without further ado here’s my:-

Snappy title huh?

Hardware support is better than you think

In the last year I have added the following hardware devices to my system and they were all fully supported out of the box with zero driver installations, no reboots, no 3rd party downloads. Truly plug and play.

• HP Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax – everything worked including the memory card slots and network auto discovery.
• Logitech USB headset – microphone and headphones worked with pulseaudio, and even enabled me to switch music playback dynamically from speakers to headset with the ‘pavucontrol’ utility.
• Bluetooth dongles – never had a single one fail, and I’ve bought some really dirt-cheap devices here, where ordinarily I’d be wary about hardware support.
• Ortek infrared remote control – again, I just plugged in the USB infrared receiver and it was working before I’d put batteries in the remote control.
• 3G dongle – this was surprising but again, plug in the USB dongle and network manager on Ubuntu spotted it and let me use it for internet access. The same happened with my Android based cellphone – the list goes on.
• USB Apple Ethernet adapter – amusingly on the bag it comes in it says “Only compatible with Macbook Air”. This runs the internal half of my firewall
• Nintendo Wii USB Ethernet adapter

Of course it’s not perfect, there are still some hardware manufacturers who fail to support Ubuntu, but the point stands, it’s better than most people think. Your mileage may vary, I don’t doubt that, but this is my blog outlining my experience.

Access more than 4GiB RAM on a 32-bit install out of the box

Many 32-bit operating systems including Windows XP, Vista and 7 support a maximum of around 3GiB RAM. With Ubuntu 9.10 the 32-bit install detects how much RAM the machine has and if it’s more than 3GiB you should get a ‘PAE-enabled’ Linux kernel. With no additional work required on your part, you get access to all the RAM in your PC. So you don’t have to switch to 64-bit Ubuntu if you don’t want to, and still access all your RAM. If you’re already running Ubuntu and you upgrade your RAM you can just manually install the above named kernel to get access to all that lovely memory. Om nom nom.

Easily create a bootable, functional operating system on a USB stick

Ubuntu ships with “USB Live USB Creator” which takes an ISO image and creates a bootable USB stick from it. Simply download an Ubuntu ISO image from http://ubuntu.com/download and start the USB creator application on Ubuntu from System -> Administration -> USB Creator.

Tell USB creator where the ISO image is, and it can prepare and write the contents of the ISO image a USB stick of at least 1GB in size. If you have a CD already and not an ISO image then you can use mkisofs to make an ISO image, and then make a USB stick from that, which will save a 700MiB download.

Find out where each file comes from

The typical desktop PC has many thousands of files on the boot disk. Much of this will be your own data in your home directory, but there’s a lot that’s required by the system to boot up and function. Sometimes you might want to know where a file came from.

It may be that you’re a curious user, wanting to know how things got onto your machine, or perhaps you’re diagnosing a problem with an Ubuntu installation. Either way it’s trivially easy to find out where files came from – if you stick to installing packages either from repositories or manually downloaded .deb files.

Lets say for example I am diagnosing a problem with my system – maybe a program is eating CPU and I want to know where it came from. Knowing the package the process lives in is a good way to find out why you have it (because the name and package documentation may describe it well enough). Also if I wanted to file a bug against that program, I’d need to know what package it’s in. Lets say for this example that my system is sluggish. I might use the System Monitor to identify the process eating up CPU time.

Note: In the above screenshot Skype happens to be idle, but this is how I might discover the process name if it was chewing up my CPU.

I can use the command line to discover where that file is located on the file system using the which command:-

$ which skype
/usr/bin/skype

I can then use the dpkg command to find out which package installed this program:-

$ dpkg -S /usr/bin/skype
skype: /usr/bin/skype

We can even combine the two commands:-

$ dpkg -S `which skype`
skype: /usr/bin/skype

So this tells us that the ’skype’ package installed the ‘/usr/bin/skype’ program. Not surprising really, but you get the idea. Also worth knowing is dpkg -L which lists all files installed by a package.

Email me when system updates are available

I have an Ubuntu PC behind my TV which I use to watch streamed video via Boxee. More often than not the TV is switched off, and when it’s on it’s showing the Boxee user interface and not the Ubuntu desktop. So I don’t tend to see any update notifications – in fact I don’t want to see them – especially if I’m watching telly.

I’d like to know when there are updates pending on that system, so I have configured it to send me an email when there are updates available. Installing a package called apticron. Just edit /etc/apticron/apticron.conf and maintain the “EMAIL” setting, placing your own email address in the quotes, and remove the # from the start of the line:-

EMAIL="alan@example.com"

Then wait. Each day apticron will run and you’ll get an email telling you what packages need updating.

root@revo1 to me
show details 9 Mar (2 days ago)
apticron report [Tue, 09 Mar 2010 21:12:09 +0000]
========================================================================

apticron has detected that some packages need upgrading on:

revo1
[ 127.0.0.1 127.0.1.1 10.10.10.124 ]

The following packages are currently pending an upgrade:

gnome-screensaver 2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5
micromiser-beta 2.1.2-0karmic1

========================================================================

Package Details:

Reading changelogs...
--- Changes for gnome-screensaver ---
gnome-screensaver (2.28.0-0ubuntu3.5) karmic-security; urgency=low

* SECURITY UPDATE: information disclosure via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/11_CVE-2010-0285.patch: make sure to show windows that
are added in src/gs-manager.c.
- CVE-2010-0285
* SECURITY UPDATE: locked screen bypass via monitor hot-plugging
- debian/patches/12_CVE-2010-0422.patch: improve window handling logic
in src/{gs-grab-x11.c,gs-manager.c,gs-window-x11.c}.
- CVE-2010-0422

-- Marc Deslauriers Tue, 02 Mar 2010 16:48:56 -0500

--- Changes for micromiser-beta ---
micromiser-beta (2.1.2-0karmic1) unstable; urgency=low

* Initial release

-- btbuilder Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:18:06 -0500
========================================================================

You can perform the upgrade by issuing the command:

aptitude full-upgrade

as root on revo1

--
apticron

Note: You may need to some basic configuration of the mail system on the machine sending the mail. The default mail transfer agent is ‘postfix’ and it can be configured with:-

sudo dpkg-reconfigure postfix

Once that is done you can look forward to receiving mail whenever your system needs to be updated with details of the updates required.

Go from blank disk to fully installed in under an hour

On most moderate hardware these days a standard installation of Ubuntu takes around half an hour. Getting all the apps you need for daily use might take a little longer. However if you take note of what apps you use regularly the additional applications can be installed pretty quickly, and in one big hit.

Whenever I’m installing Ubuntu 9.10 whether for myself or friends, there’s a set of things I tend to do post-install that rarely changes from one machine to another. This usually consists of installing audio/video codecs, fonts, updated video driver, flash, java and a few other bits and pieces. Some of that comes from the standard Ubuntu repositories, and some from 3rd party repositories or PPAs. Once the installation of Ubuntu is complete and all updates have been installed there’s just a few lines to paste in and then I leave it to run for a while.

# Add repo for Lifesaver screensaver
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cmsj/lifesaver
# Add repo for chromium daily build
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa
# Update local package lists
sudo apt-get update
# Install all the stuff!
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras # Installs flash, codecs, java, fonts
chromium-browser # Installs daily build of Chromium
lifesaver # Install lifesaver screensaver
gtk-recordmydesktop # Install app for recording screencasts
gnome-do # Install Gnome-Do
vlc # Install VLC media player
openssh-server # Install SSH server for remote access
smbfs # Install samba client for accessing Windows shares
gwibber # Install microblogging client

Building a list like this can significantly reduce the amount of time taken to get up and running with Ubuntu. What’s especially cool about this is there is no need to visit any third party websites or download external installers. Those applications listed above are the ones I use regularly, you will have your own set of “must have” packages. What are they?

Move a hard disk

Ubuntu has no direct equivalent to “Windows Genuine Advantage” fortunately. This is the tool that seeks to reinforce the Microsoft End User License Agreement for Windows users by causing havoc when system hardware changes. Windows also has quite a fit when you move a hard disk from one system to another as it detects and installs new drivers for all the newly found devices.

Ubuntu does most of its hardware detection automatically at each and every boot-up with no user interaction. As a result you can take a hard disk containing a standard install of Ubuntu from one system and put it in another and expect it to work without much effort. The only time I have had an issue is when I have made some manual configuration changes for the specific hardware in the computer.

For example if you have installed and enabled the nVidia binary driver and configured it in /etc/X11/xorg.conf and the target computer doesn’t have an nVidia graphics card then it might fail to start the graphical environment due to it being forced to load the ‘wrong’ driver. In this instance probably the easiest thing to do is backup and remove the /etc/X11/xorg.conf and restart the machine. At that point it will automatically detect the video hardware and should work much the same as a standard install.

Compiling and packaging applications for older OS releases

With the 6-month release cycle some people can feel left behind if they don’t upgrade to the next release promptly. Ubuntu has a Long Term Support (LTS) release every two years to cater for many users who wish to stay with one stable release. Ubuntu 6.06, 8.04 and the upcoming 10.04 are all LTS releases, with all other releases being non-LTS.

There will always be some users who are not on an LTS release, but have still chosen to stick with their currently working system rather than upgrade. There is nothing wrong with this approach, but it can lead to users wanting a newer version of a package to be ‘backported’ to their release of Ubuntu, whilst the rest of the development community have moved on. There are developers who backport applications from newer releases to older ones, but they don’t backport everything, and there is a finite resource of developers available to do this task. The good news is that with a little time and effort, you can do this yourself.

I recently had a friend who was using Ubuntu 9.04 with an nVidia graphics card using the driver supplied, but he wanted to try the newer driver from Ubuntu 9.10. It’s generally not recommended to take a package built for one version of Ubuntu and just install it on an older release. It may work, but there’s no guarantee, and it can break the system in unpredictable and catastrophic ways.

So I took the ’source’ code from Ubuntu 9.10 and used the tools provided in Ubuntu to rebuild the driver for 9.04. This was a trivial thing to do. The really cool thing is that I’m running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit and was able to build the driver for Ubuntu 9.04 64-bit on my local PC. Once I was confident that it worked I uploaded it to my launchpad Personal Package Archive (PPA) where it was built for Ubuntu 9.04 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.

So not only was I able to backport a driver to an older release, but I also built it for an architecture that I don’t even run myself. The observant among you may have noticed that the package I built is not open source – the nVidia driver is proprietary code. Yet I was still able to take the packagable parts and in only a matter of minutes have it rebuilt for another release.

All the commands I used (dch, debuild, pbuilder-dist, dput) are well documented tools for managing, building and uploading Debian packages (.debs) and their contents, and of course, they’re all freely available in the Ubuntu repositories. The Ubuntu Masters of The Universe (MOTU) are a helpful bunch and their pages can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MOTU and on irc in #ubuntu-motu.

Fixing a bug

Whilst it’s easy to dismiss this as an advantage only if you’re a coder, let me first say that I’m not a developer at all. I can just about read someone elses very simple code with some help and google, but I don’t really ever write anything myself. So if I can fix a bug, anyone can!

I recently discovered a very simple bug in the ifdata command which I filed in launchpad – the Ubuntu bug tracker . With a little help from some of the Ubuntu developers – who were keen to help me – I was able to create a patch, test it and submit it to Ubuntu and upstream to Debian. The critical step that really made me consider even trying to look at this bug was that the source was available and easily installable. I was able to identify the package containing the buggy command:-

$ dpkg -S `which ifdata`
moreutils: /usr/bin/ifdata

Once I knew the package name I could download and unpack the source code for that package very easily with one simple command:-

$ apt-get source moreutils
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
NOTICE: 'moreutils' packaging is maintained in the 'Git' version control system at:
git://git.kitenet.net/moreutils
Need to get 37.8kB of source archives.
Get: 1 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (dsc) [822B]
Get: 2 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com karmic/universe moreutils 0.35 (tar) [37.0kB]
Fetched 37.8kB in 0s (191kB/s)
gpgv: Signature made Tue 05 May 2009 20:19:33 BST using DSA key ID 788A3F4C
gpgv: Can't check signature: public key not found
dpkg-source: warning: failed to verify signature on ./moreutils_0.35.dsc
dpkg-source: info: extracting moreutils in moreutils-0.35
dpkg-source: info: unpacking moreutils_0.35.tar.gz

The tricky part for me is then actually finding the incorrect code in the program. With a lot of help from a good friend and after asking on-line I was able to create a patch. I tested my patch and submitted it to the developers for review. That process is all well documented and I was supported through the process by Ubuntu developers.

All in all it took me a few hours to get this done, spread over a week or so. Not a massive investment of time, and I’ll certainly be quicker next time, now I have learned how to handle bugs like this. Plus I now have a better understanding of the packaging system which helps me with other great things.

Re-install the OS and Applications without losing your data

A default installation of Ubuntu wil place all the operating system files and user data in one partition on the disk called the ‘root partition’ or /, and a second partition for swap. Many users like separating their OS/apps from their user data, so they create a separate partition for /home. This is useful for a number of reasons including allowing you to reinstall the OS on the root partition without touching your data in the /home partition. One little-known feature of the installer on the Live Ubuntu CD is that you can do this – reinstall the OS and not wipe your data – even if you dont have separate partitions for / and /home.

Ok, so you want to reinstall the OS but keep your data in /home. Perhaps you want to upgrade but prefer a clean install, or maybe you’ve played with the system a bit too much and it’s become damaged, and you’d like to quickly ‘reset’ everything with a reinstall. Simply boot from the Live CD and run the installer. When you get to the partitioning step, choose ‘manual partitioning’ which takes you to the more advanced partitioning tool. Select your root partition for installation but don’t tick the “format” checkbox. Continue with the installer as normal.

The installer will recursively delete all files (except those in /home) before copying the new install files onto the disk. Create the same first username during the installer and it will re-use the /home/username folder as your home directory, with all your files intact.

Note: Some user data files (such as mysql databases which are in /var) may be stored in other folders than /home, so you will probably want to back the system up before hand in case there are any files you need to recover.

So those are 10 things I do with Ubuntu that I’d have a hard time doing on Windows. It’s arguable whether you’d need to be able to do some of this stuff, and that I accept.

I realise that there are Windows-based tools that can replicate/emulate some of these tasks, or maybe Windows Vista or 7 can do some of the above tasks. I kinda stopped bothering with Windows after XP, so my knowledge may be lacking. Feel free to correct me in the comments, or suggest what you can’t live without.

by Robert Jones, Jr.

I. Love Is the Message

Wonder Woman is love, baby; all love and nothing but love, so help her Aphrodite. Or so Geoff Johns insists. Then again, Johns approaches Wonder Woman from a perspective not all “Wonder Woman” readers can appreciate. In his stories, she is the usually the one hero guaranteed to be aimless, nonplussed, diffident, undiscerning, and yet sanctimonious. For this reason, “Wonder Woman” readers were alarmed when they learned that she would play a significant role in DC’s latest big event miniseries, “Blackest Night,” penned by Johns; and they were apprehensive when the spin-off miniseries, “Blackest Night: Wonder Woman,” was announced.

“Blackest Night” is actually a “Green Lantern” storyline. The plot revolves around the idea that every color in the rainbow represents a different emotional power that can be harnessed and channeled through a power ring much like the one worn by the Green Lantern. Black (not really a color) represents evil and death (*eye roll*) and it is up to the other colors (red/rage, orange/avarice, yellow/fear, green/will, blue/hope, indigo/compassion, and violet/love) to join forces and defeat the zombie agents of death, the Black Lanterns. Despite its preschool-esque, Crayola-wars premise, the series does manage to entertain; and the fact that the brilliant Ivan Reis deftly handles the art chores does not hurt one bit.

Wonder Woman did not play a huge role in the series until issues #5 and 6, when well-known DC characters were deputized as Lanterns and given ring assignments based on how closely they embodied each emotion. Green Lantern kept his green ring, of course; the Flash got a blue ring; and the Atom got an indigo one. In a previous interview, Johns indicated that the remaining ring colors represented the more extreme and irrational emotions on the spectrum. The recipients of those rings included: Mera (red), the Scarecrow (yellow), Lex Luthor (orange), and Wonder Woman (violet).

As an aside, not a single man possesses a violet ring. Johns explained that while anyone could join the violet corps, most men were unworthy. (Really? Most men? What about Superman?) That sounds like chivalrous reasoning, but it is actually specious. How could it be that most men in the DC Universe are incapable of representing love? Is that not a defect? Does that not say something very unnerving about the men who populate this fictional place? Could Johns really be that cynical? Or did he simply find a delicate, self-effacing, and completely disingenuous way to say, “Ain’t no way we’re putting one of our guys in some revealing, sissy, pink outfit! So it’s gotta be a girl. And what girl embodies love better than the most beautiful girl in the world?” Does Wonder Woman fit the bill? Whether or not she does, Johns made her a member of the all-female violet corps. It is not as bad as it seems considering the color Johns could have assigned her (yellow might have been more apropos given what some creators and readers actually feel about her).

As questionable as his approach to Wonder Woman may seem to admirers of the character, Johns’s widespread, mainstream appeal is no mystery. He has a great deal in common with the majority of his following, including a penchant for spoon-fed exposition, an almost pathological reverence for a peculiar type of alpha-male hero, and a desire to boil every character down to a one-sentence, or, as with “Blackest Night,” a one-word description. (Perhaps this explains his approach to Wonder Woman, and why that approach is so at odds with her fans’ vision: In many ways, Wonder Woman is a character that defies simplification.) Add to this a knack for returning characters to forms most recognizable to the thirty- and forty-something-year-olds who are currently the majority of comic readers and collectors. In plain terms, Johns’s success can be attributed to the notion that what he writes is essentially fan-fiction. His readers feel, on some level, that if they had the opportunity to write comics, they would write them just like Geoff Johns does. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing, but it’s certainly not a good thing, either—unless “good” is defined in commercial terms rather than artistic ones.

Whatever incompatibility exists between Johns’s writing style and Wonder Woman’s character, Johns did give some “Wonder Woman” readers a gift: He announced, after much speculation, that critically acclaimed, former, and controversial “Wonder Woman” writer Greg Rucka would be writing “Blackest Night: Wonder Woman.” The gesture suggests that there are really no hard feelings between Johns and the Amazon Princess; just a profound misunderstanding.

II. Where Is the Love?

Greg Rucka is undaunted. He wrote “Wonder Woman” with great imagination, wit, seriousness, and aplomb. Legend has it that he was set to explore Wonder Woman’s bisexuality during his run before DC’s parent company, Time-Warner, nixed the idea. It was he who wrote the story in which Wonder Woman was forced to kill Maxwell Lord in order to save Superman and the world; a story that changed (some say damaged) Wonder Woman forever. Rucka was removed from the book just before it was rebooted. He never had the opportunity to explore the consequences of Wonder Woman’s actions—that is, until Geoff Johns asked him to write the “Blackest Night” tie-in.

“Blackest Night: Wonder Woman” serves two purposes: First, it fleshes out ideas, situations, and scenarios that could not be fully explored in Johns’s main miniseries; and second, it allows Rucka to, in some small way, revisit points that he might have left unfinished from his previous run. Both are very tight restraints to place on a three-issue series. The former requires Rucka to stretch scenes that literally last one panel in the main book to twenty-two pages and still keep things interesting. The latter challenges him to make the point without being didactic. Additionally, he must work with the limitation imposed upon Wonder Woman by Johns: She is love—period, the end; make it work like Tim Gunn. Given the parameters, Rucka works wonders. He writes the Amazon Princess with such ease and expertise that it is not only as if he never left, but it is as if he never stopped thinking about her.

The three issues work as a trio of vignettes: 1. Wonder Woman must once again do battle with Maxwell Lord, who has risen from the dead thanks to the power of the Black Lanterns; 2. Wonder Woman must free herself from Black Lantern control before she kills Mera; 3. Wonder Woman understands herself as love and helps to heal Mera. Even in this context, Rucka does not shy away from controversy: The first battle takes place at Arlington National Cemetery and Wonder Woman must fight the reanimated soldiers. Rucka also does his best to distance Wonder Woman from the sillier aspects of the “Blackest Night” premise. “Life is much more,” she says to Lord, “than seven simple colors.”

However, there is one aspect of “Blackest Night: Wonder Woman” that rings incredibly false. According to the series, Wonder Woman is secretly, quietly in love with the Batman. It is this love—not the love she has for her mother or her sisters—that frees her from the black ring’s influence. It ties back to an idea in the main miniseries that suggests Batman is the emotional tether for all of the DC heroes. Okay, understandable. Nevertheless, the revelation is still odd because this love has not ever made itself apparent. There had been some flirting, a stolen kiss or two, but never any indication whatsoever of a deep, abiding love between them. It is even weirder when her romance with Tom Tresser in her own book is taken into consideration.

If ever there was a situation where characters were forced to service a plot, this is it. The scene is clunky, inorganic, and strained. Admittedly, it is better to have Wonder Woman’s sexuality explored than ignored completely. But this is the expressed danger of the oversimplification of “Wonder Woman is love” as Johns has imagined it: Suddenly, she becomes the long-suffering Damsel of Furtive Sighs who yearns for the love of someone who is at once unavailable and incapable of returning it. Only someone who did not understand Wonder Woman in the least could believe such an arrangement to be natural. Only eyes that perceive love as irrational could observe that scenario and suppose it to be true. Turn, O William Moulton Marston, creator of Wonder Woman; in your grave, turn.

At least Rucka proves that he has a grasp for Marston’s Wonder Woman texts better than just about everyone else. The common perception is that Marston was a pervert who was into sadomasochism and bondage and Wonder Woman was simply a product of his perversion. To what degree that is accurate is subject to debate, but what is clear to anyone who can move beyond the surface is that what lies beneath is commentary about freedom, sexual and otherwise. Rucka dug deep. Maxwell Lord says to Wonder Woman, “I think I know the answer to this question given what you normally wear, but are you into bondage?” “No,” Wonder Woman replies. “Liberation.” Precisely, Greg. Precisely. So there should be no pining away after dead billionaire playboys; for what is that if not bondage?

III. Redefining the Message

Other than the Batman gaffe, Wonder Woman is confident and effective in this tie-in, which is a wildly unpopular way to portray her. Because Wonder Woman has a reputation for being too perfect, there is a strong desire to knock her down a peg or two. This speaks to a larger phenomenon in the industry. Many of today’s comic book producers and readers have very specific demands of their “superheroes.” Rather than aspire to heights set by hopeful, “perfect” characters like Wonder Woman (and Superman, for that matter), many would prefer a hero of lower standards. Some desire a character that more closely reflects their own failings, fears, and flaws, not a character that merely overcomes obstacles and triumphs in the end. In other words, superheroes who are not super at all, but are Average Joes and Janes (not too average a Jane, though; she must be buxom enough to make even circus freaks raise an eyebrow). It is all quite unimaginative; and the glut of books about psychotic orphans with rodent fetishes, cigar-smoking serial killers in superhero drag, and alien women with breasts the size of Legion Time-Bubbles cluttering the stands makes that all too apparent.

Looking at the stunning artwork in “Blackest Night: Wonder Woman” makes it hard as hell to be so critical. As exciting as it is to have Rucka writing Wonder Woman again, if just briefly, the true draw is the artist, Nicola Scott. Quite frankly, Scott illustrates with a sensibility not seen very often in mainstream comics. There is something very pristine and feminine about the line work, something very considered in the panel placement and splash pages, something very sophisticated about the action. Aesthetically, her designs evoke both the darkness and whimsy of the best childhood fairytales. In short, her work is genius and her rendition of Wonder Woman should be the model for every artist who illustrates the character. Scott’s Diana is stunning in every conceivable way, from her luscious, curly hair, to her gleaming tiara. If there is any real love in this series at all, it is in Scott’s work.

Nevertheless, the “Wonder Woman as Love” paradigm continues to grate. That is, unless it is placed in a context that makes her larger, freer, better respected. Here is one suggestion: Often, Superman is invoked as DC’s resident Christ figure. It is a designation that demands veneration and Superman has held the title ably all these years. However, with Johns’s insistence that Wonder Woman is the DC answer to love, a strong case can be made that the Christ title, and the accompanying reverence, rightfully belongs to her. Think about it: Jesus’ birth was immaculate and so was Wonder Woman’s; Jesus has divine heritage and so does Wonder Woman; Jesus was sent forth to save the world from itself and so was Wonder Woman; Jesus was a rabble-rouser that challenged patriarchal institutions and so is Wonder Woman; Jesus had long, gorgeous, flowing hair and (thanks to Nicola Scott) so does Wonder Woman; Jesus was resurrected from the dead and so was Wonder Woman; Jesus ascended to the heavens and so did Wonder Woman; Jesus is love (at least, according to some Christians) and now, thanks to Johns, so is Wonder Woman.

For Athena so loved the world, she gave her only begotten daughter and all that....

• At March 10, 2010, E. Wilson wrote:

  "Black (not really a color) represents evil and death (*eye roll*) and it is up to the other colors (red/rage, ...

• At March 10, 2010, T. wrote:

  As an aside, not a single man possesses a violet ring. Johns explained that while anyone could join the violet ...

• At March 10, 2010, BrianHouston wrote:

  I tend to agree with Johns on the Violet Corps. Men and Women are different emotionally.(IMO)

• At March 10, 2010, Dex wrote:

  The article sort of loses credence when the writer misses the target completely on what the Immaculate Conception was. ...

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The European Parliament today overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution compelling participants in multi-national negotiations over the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to report on the status and substance of those negotiations, first to Parliament and eventually to the general public. This after a groundswell of public concern arose in the wake of documents purporting to be official ACTA material, the latest leaked by Wired last November (PDF available here from Wired), spoke of US negotiators' requests to include terms in the final Agreement that would force Internet service providers to police the content trafficked over their pipelines, or else face penalties.

A statement issued from Parliament this afternoon records the final vote as 633-13-16 in favor of the resolution, the motion for which (DOC available here) was drafted just yesterday on behalf of six of the continent's political parties and alliances, including Greens/EFA. That motion referred to the leaked documents by name, effectively confirming their legitimacy.

The motion warned that those documents referred to the institution of measures among ACTA members, including the EU, of criminal penalties for those accused of violating, or assisting in the violation of, intellectual property rights. The leaked Wired document, dated August 30, 2009, entitled simply "ACTA negotiations," indicated that US negotiators were not in a position to discuss even among other trade negotiators the substance of consultations with "a number of private stakeholders (bound to strict confidentiality clauses)" -- a group which presumably includes publishing and recording associations.

Rather than provide colleagues with written documents, the August 30 document stated, US representatives were free to give an oral summary of their requested proposal, which would be an abbreviated version of the existing US-Korea Free Trade Agreement. Clauses of the ACTA as US representatives proposed would narrow the legal definition of "safe harbor" as it pertains to ISPs, which today are protected from liability for IP violations under laws recognized as high up the chain as the Supreme Court. The ACTA, as discussed at the time, would only provide safe harbor to ISPs that instituted policies and installed technologies to deter IP violations, including the illicit trading of unauthorized files.

Later clauses would clearly classify the stripping of rights management provisions from any software as an IP violation, punishable with both civil and criminal penalties. And in a telling bit of legalese whose economy of phraseology speaks volumes as to its intent, the leaked August 30 document included this provision: "'Fair use' will not be circumscribed."

Last year, in an effort to diffuse growing public criticism (before legislators caught wind of it), the Office of the US Trade Representative issued a brief (PDF available here) discussing what it said could be discussed in public about ACTA negotiations. As to the matter of publicly revealing little things about, say, overriding the Supreme Court, the Office diplomatically gave credence to objections, while at the same time attempting to place them in a little box over to the side somewhere.

"A variety of groups have shown their interest in getting more information on the substance of the negotiations and have requested that the draft text be disclosed," the USTR document reads, referring indirectly to groups including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge. "However, it is accepted practice during trade negotiations among sovereign states to not share negotiating texts with the public at large, particularly at earlier stages of the negotiation. This allows delegations to exchange views in confidence facilitating the negotiation and compromise that are necessary in order to reach agreement on complex issues. At this point in time, ACTA delegations are still discussing various proposals for the different elements that may ultimately be included in the agreement. A comprehensive set of proposals for the text of the agreement does not yet exist."

The USTR paper went on to mention the need to empower judges to impose stricter penalties for IP violations, though by its authors' own admission, it leaves a gaping hole with respect to the broadening of the definition of what an IP violation is. Trade negotiations throughout history have been, by definition, confidential, and their secrecy has been mutually observed for centuries. However, the EP took issue today with the whole notion not only that certain elements of the negotiation should be kept secret from lawmakers, but that negotiators should continue -- as the leaked August 30 document and the USTR brief indicate -- to keep certain elements secret from themselves.

According to this morning's EP statement, the resolution as adopted takes a strong stand specifically against the adoption of "three strikes" rules against IP violators, such as those being tested now in France; and also against the enablement, perhaps through deliberate imprecision (see "circumscribed"), of restrictions on access to media. Parliament now says the final ACTA "should not affect global access to legitimate, affordable and safe medicinal products, including innovative and generic products," according to the resolution.

The USTR brief also refers to negotiations for a clause that would empower customs agents patrolling borders to seize any material believed to infringe upon intellectual property. Without being specific, "any material" could include a hard disk drive...or the computer or MP3 player containing a hard disk drive.

The EP resolution took a stand against that as well, calling upon trade negotiators to provide "full clarification of any clauses that would allow for warrantless searches and confiscation of information storage devices such as laptops, cell phones, and MP3 players by border and customs authorities."

The problem with today's resolution is that it may not be legally binding. While it takes a very public stand, trade negotiators may very well continue to argue that it's their duty to continue to safeguard the intellectual property of the private stakeholders who developed that IP...to protect the IP of the private stakeholders. While the resolution reminds European representatives of their duty to uphold the terms of the Lisbon Treaty, which include keeping Parliament abreast of negotiations, that treaty was only fully enforced last December 1. Since the ACTA negotiations began earlier, participants could argue that they've been "grandfathered in," for reasons which, to borrow a phrase, may not be circumscribed.

De nos jours, l'accent est souvent mis sur la performance des sites et les économies de bande passante. Les temps d'accès et de téléchargement se mesurent (très précisément avec de nombreux outils) en millisecondes. De nombreuses recommandations provenant de Google et Yahoo font mention de la compression des pages avant leur transit sur le réseau.

• Le serveur compresse les données (code HTML, CSS...)
• Les fichiers transitent par le réseau via HTTP
• Le navigateur décompresse les données avant de les interpréter
• 

Ce qui représentait une charge supplémentaire pour les serveurs web à l'époque où leur puissance était moindre, peut désormais devenir négligeable en regard des améliorations apportées, notamment pour les navigateurs mobiles. Si la compression impose une charge trop importante à votre serveur, il est possible de pré-compresser les contenus, les placer en cache et les délivrer directement.

Ces techniques qui sont prévues depuis HTTP/1.1 (1999) peuvent tout à fait être mises en Å“uvre pour les documents HTML mais aussi CSS, XML ou JavaScript. Il est inutile de s'en servir pour les fichiers binaires (images, vidéos, PDF...). Elles ne vous dispensent pas de réduire initialement la taille des fichiers HTML ou CSS (les "minifier") en appliquant d'autres critères tels que la suppression des espaces excédentaires ou des commentaires inutiles.

La première interrogation - dans le monde impitoyable de la création web et des guerres entre navigateurs modernes et antiques - concerne le support de cette fonctionnalité. Or, ici, bonne nouvelle : on peut considérer que la totalité des navigateurs supportent la décompression des pages avec HTTP/1.1 :

• Netscape depuis 4.06
• Microsoft Internet Explorer depuis 4.0*
• Opera depuis 5.12
• Firefox toutes versions
• Google Chrome toutes versions
• Safari toutes versions

* avec quelques petits bugs jusqu'aux versions 5.0 et 6.0 comprises

De plus, il incombe aux navigateurs d'envoyer un en-tête HTTP indiquant les types de pages compressées supportées . Si cet en-tête ne figure pas dans ceux reçus par le serveur, il lui suffit de ne pas activer la compression.

Le serveur répond alors de la même manière, grâce à Content-Encoding, et en faisant suivre par le contenu compressé de la page.

Deux formats coexistent :

• Deflate, algorithme qui couple LZ77 et le codage de Huffman.
• Gzip, évolution de Deflate, un peu plus performant, mieux supporté, plus répandu.

Attention : les indications suivantes doivent être ajustées selon votre configuration et vos besoins.

Apache est équipé du module officiel mod_deflate depuis sa version 2.0 qui utilise zlib, et de mod_gzip ou mod_deflate pour sa version 1.3. Ces modules sont désactivés par défaut, mais peuvent être activés dans la configuration générale du serveur si vous y avez accès. Par défaut mod_deflate permet de spécifier les types de fichiers à compresser à la volée grâce à la directive AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE. Une fois ces modules disponibles vous pouvez également exploiter les fichiers .htaccess dans chaque répertoire pour plus de souplesse (voir au point suivant).

En ligne de commande avec les droits root pour activer les modules nécessaires :

Éventuellement en ajoutant aussi un fichier dans mods-available/deflate.load et un lien symbolique vers celui-ci dans mods-enabled/, ou une ligne dans httpd.conf :

Sous Windows, il faudra indiquer le chemin du fichier .dll éponyme. Attention : si un lien symbolique vers mod_deflate.conf est déjà présent dans mods-enabled avec une directive de configuration générale, il est possible que tous vos fichiers soient déjà délivrés compressés. Faites un test avant tout - voir en fin d'article.

Puis il faut ajouter des directives à la configuration (par exemple dans un fichier situé dans /etc/apache2/conf.d/) pour compresser des types de fichiers bien spécifiques, dans un répertoire spécifique lui aussi. Ceci est recommandé lorsque l'on place toutes les feuilles de style dans un répertoire indépendant, ainsi que les JavaScripts, car le but n'est pas de (re)compresser tous les fichiers hébergés sur le serveur web mais de se focaliser sur l'essentiel. Il est donc possible d'indiquer <Location /css> pour n'appliquer ces règles que sur ce répertoire (on considère ici l'URL) et ses descendants, ou d'utiliser <Directory /chemin/absolu/vers/css> si l'on se réfère au système de fichiers.

N'oubliez pas de redémarrer (restart) ou recharger (reload) Apache après chaque modification de la configuration.

Activation du module dans httpd.conf :

Puis configuration, semblable à celle mentionnée auparavant :

N'oubliez pas de recharger Apache après chaque modification de la configuration.

Les options sont relativement parlantes (pour les anglophones), elles ne seront pas détaillées dans cet article.

IIS supporte la compression depuis la version 4, mais celle-ci est victime de bugs. Dans la version 5, les efforts de Microsoft n'ont pas porté leurs fruits puisque celle-ci est toujours instable. C'est enfin dans la version 6 que la compression HTTP a été finalisée. Cependant elle nécessite quelques manipulations (voir documentation Microsoft : Using HTTP Compression for Faster Downloads (IIS 6.0) et tutoriel en français pour activer la compression GZip dans IIS6.

Les autres serveurs restent marginaux. Lighttpd est équipé du module bien nommé mod_compress.

Les fichiers .htaccess sont des fichiers placés à la base d'un répertoire et modifiant le comportement du serveur pour les fichiers qu'il contient. On peut y placer les instructions de configuration mentionnées ci-dessus (sans la directive Location ou Directory).

Voici des exemples testés et exploités sur Alsacreations.com. Si vous obtenez des erreurs HTTP 500 après la mise en place du fichier .htaccess, vérifiez sa syntaxe, l'adéquation avec votre type de serveur et la disponibilité des modules. Vous pouvez également combiner le tout avec des options de cache (mod_expires dans l'exemple pour Apache 1.3) pour éviter de servir plusieurs fois le même contenu aux visiteurs et sa compression par le serveur - ceci relève d'un autre article.

Contenu du fichier .htaccess, dans le répertoire contenant les fichiers CSS et JavaScript.

La fonction ob_gzhandler et l'ensemble des fonctions de type ob_* disponibles depuis PHP4 permettent la gestion du tampon de sortie, c'est à dire des données qui seront envoyées au navigateur. Il est alors possible de générer le contenu complet de la page et de le compresser avec Gzip avant envoi. On active le tampon en début de script avec ob_start, et on le vide à la fin avec ob_end_flush.

La fonction ob_gzhandler a le mérite de vérifier les types de compressions supportés par le navigateur (gzip, deflate ou aucun) avant de retourner le contenu du tampon de manière appropriée. Si le navigateur ne supporte pas les pages compressées, cette fonction retournera false.

Bien sûr, ceci est à adapter en fonction de la structure de votre site. Il ne suffit pas toujours de placer ces instructions en début et en fin de script PHP car de nombreux CMS utilisent déjà leur propre système de buffer (tampon) interne.

Vous pourrez aisément vérifier le bon déroulement du transfert et de la décompression en vérifiant les propriétés de la page dans le navigateur (dans Firefox : clic bouton droit, Informations sur la page, onglet Général, Taille). Comparez la taille du fichier original et la taille lue (à l'octet près).