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I welcome thee in my small world
BTW if you are a fascist / right-wing / anti-LGBTQ+ person and variations thereof, just go the fuck away, you are not welcome here. I should not have to write this, but nowadays, it seems unfortunately necessary.
NEWS
03-01-2026: both site and blog are now running Zola.
12-09-2014: Hell has frozen over, it seems I have a blog now… Le blog de 22h43.
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 or editing stuff, TextMate (on the Mac) and Jetbrains are by far the best editors I even seen, so I use them.
Since 2022, I have become a Rustacean 🦀 after I started to learn the Rust language, so I switch to RustRover. I still use TextMate, but Zed is becoming more and more my thing.
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.
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. From 7/1998 until 2022, I was in charge of the technical handling of all creation & removal of groups in the french-speaking fr.* hierarchy. See Usenet-fr for details.
Did a talk on Usenet. It is available as a PDF and as a video.
Cryptography
I became interested in cryptography back in 1980, even before computers if you can believe that :) Both technical and historical aspects of it. BTW, I mean cryptography as in “is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of adversarial behavior.”, not crypto-currencies, or all these scams 1.
More on the Cryptography topic.
Books
Did I mentioned books? No? My bad, I have been an avid reader since my teens, and it is not going away. I read between 30 and 70 books a year, mostly SFF, some historical stuff and comics. I have a Goodreads profile here. You can find more stuff on my Blog.
Development & code
I self-host most of my Git repositories locally, and I have a copy on Codeberg and Github like many other people. I used to avoid git as much as possible due to its complex (and to be honest crappy) UI/UX, but with Jujutsu, I can now enjoy a proper VCS while keeping the compatibility with git.
I used to be a big Mercurial user, but for good or bad (my take), git won the VCS war More on the VCS topic.
Most of my coding used to be done in Ruby, my language of choice since 2000 for everything script-related 2. When I need more speed or concurrency, I now use Rust 🦀 more and more to replace Go, which was my language of choice between 2016 and 2021.
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).
You can also find me on StackOverflow (and on some of the other StackExchange sites like SuperUser and Cryptography).
Photography
After being in the Pentax world for more than 8 years with different cameras (K10D…K-3), I have now switched to an hybrid camera from Fujifilm, the awesome X-T2. I’m also trying to discover new ways of taking pictures as I have no zoom at all in the Fuji world. Anyway, 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).
Blog post is here (FR) in case you missed it.
After one month of playing, here is another blog post (FR) with pictures.
More in the Photography topic.
Pictures
Flickr: Ollivier Robert