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I welcome thee in my small world

You may notice that the site (and some of its URLs) has changed. After my main machine crashed (failed power supply), I’m getting some things back online.

Programs I use or develop

There are quite a few programs (open-source or not) that I regularly use, please see the list on the sidebar. While I am mostly using open-source tools, sometimes commercial systems are better and I try to be practical about that. For example, when coding Ruby, TextMate (on the Mac) and RubyMine are by far the best editors I even seen, so I use them.

The FreeBSD Project

I have been a BSD user for a long time, starting in 1988 when I arrived at the University and played with a Gould Encore computer running 4.2BSD UNIX. After following 386BSD for a while on Usenet in various groups and posting on the mailing lists, I choose to run FreeBSD back in 1993 as my main server operating system.

More in the FreeBSD topic.

Right now at BSDCan 2013, see pictures there.

Open-source, Internet, Usenet and all that

I have been on the Internet for a long time, even before it got popular and its evolution is dear to me. Even before that, when I was in the University, I used various mailing-lists and fora on the Internet and BITnet and ended up using Usenet a lot. Since 7/1998, I’m in charge of the technical handling of all creation & removal of groups in the french-speaking fr.* hierarchy. See Usenet-fr for details.

Recently, there is a movement in France involving politicians and ISP/technicians together, trying to explain to the former how the Internet is organized and working. This is called OVEI (see the FR link on the left side).

Development & code

Most of my code is hosted in various Mercurial repositories, either on self-hosting through my Chiliproject-based site (CURRENTLY OFFLINE) or on Bitbucket.

I am also on Github like many other people but I try to avoid Git as much as I can, too low-level and complex for my usage. Most of the time, I only use Github to contribute to some other project (like Savon recently).

You can also find me on StackOverflow (and on some of the other StackExchange sites like SuperUser and Cryptography).

Most of my coding these days is done in Ruby, my language of choice since 2000. In the past I made contributions to various well-known software projects such as Perl5, PGP, INN, Mutt, XFree86 and SSH (before it was transformed into a commercial entity and re-born as OpenSSH).

Photography

I own a Pentax K-5 digital camera with some nice lenses and trying to get myself better in that area, mostly concentrating on some conferences I go and macros or animals (like in big parcs like Beauval).

More in the Photography topic.

Pictures

500px: Ollivier Robert
Flickr: Ollivier Robert