Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde

First I hoped I had misread the web page. Then I realized I had not.
Networked disks are very useful. At home, they allow you to access your data from any computer on your local network without needing to keep a machine acting as a file server turned on all the time. But wait! You could […]

I was surprised to see that wget chose to use IPv4 over IPv6 when downloading a file. It looks like it is on purpose (I would call it a bad design choice). You can tell wget to prefer IPv6 over IPv4 by putting the following line
prefer-family = IPv6

in either /etc/wgetrc (system wide) or $HOME/.wgetrc (user […]

I am in search for the perfect non-intrusive personal email ticket tracker system. Many people send me email which require me to do some things before I can either answer them or provide them with a definite solution. Right now, I put those emails in a “avoir” (”to see” in French) folder which grows continously […]

Some days ago, I was trying to get in touch with a friend of mine. I checked my instant messaging client and noted that he was online. I sent him a “Hi” and immediately received an offer to download a large .zip file with a business-related name.
The explanation? He was doing a drag-n-drop operation on […]

Starting tomorrow December 31st 2006, reading a DVD protected with CSS (as most DVD are) is illegal in France when it is done with a software allowing to circumvent the protection, such as VLC or mplayer which can both use the libdvdcss library. Today’s Journal Officiel (where laws and executive orders are published) says that […]

In my job, I often participate to multi-partners projects which get public (European or national) funding. In those projects, we are required to produce deliverables that show the progress of our work.
The final deliverable is edited by an editor (how surprising) who is in charge of coordinating inputs from various partners and make them consistent. […]

I just setup a page explaining what works under Gentoo GNU/Linux on the Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7110 laptop. Please let comments here for questions, remarks or enhancements.

A perverse hacker friend of mine has written a clever yet scaring Windows utility. Each time a USB key is inserted into his computer, the whole content of the key is silently dumped and stored on the machine. It doesn’t copy the existing files; it makes an image of the key.
After that, when the unsuspecting […]

The ICFP contest of this year starts with the implementation of a virtual machine. While I didn’t participate to the contest itself, I wrote one in Python and rewrote another one in Ada for performance reasons. Here is its code, released in the public domain.

As a low-level software guy, I often have to work with electrical engineers to build custom hardware and software systems. I am constantly amazed by the tricks necessary to make the hardware part work and the experience needed to build reliable electrical components. I decided to apply the same techniques to my software.
First of all, […]