The crazyness of DRM

December 7th, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

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 […]

Using IPv6 by default with wget

October 31st, 2007 by Samuel Tardieu

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 […]

Reading a DVD with VLC or mplayer is now illegal in France

December 30th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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 […]

Collaborative work on deliverables

October 10th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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. […]

Running GNU/Linux on a Fujitsu-Siemens Lifebook S7110

August 24th, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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.

Wiping unused space in a file system

August 23rd, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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 […]

ICFP Ada virtual machine

August 1st, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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.

Writing software as we design hardware

May 22nd, 2006 by Samuel Tardieu

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, […]


Creative Commons License