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I welcome thee in my small world



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, TextMate (on the Mac) and RubyMine are by far the best editors I even seen, so I use them.

Since 2023, 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. 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.

PSES 2013

Did a talk on Usenet. It is available as a PDF and as a video.

Development & code

I self-host most of my Git repositories locally, and I have a copy onGithub like many other people. I used to avoid git as much as possible due to its complex (and to be honest crap) 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.

Most of my coding used to be done in Ruby, my language of choice since 2000 for everything script-related. When I need more speed or concurrency, I now use Rust🦀 more and more to replace Go.

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