My Various Activities

Internet

• Above all, I'm coordinating the TUNES project, which strives to design and implement (yet another) computing system based upon a paradigm of total computing freedom
  Actually, TUNES means Tunes is a Useful, Nevertheless Expedient, System, which name refers to J.S. Mill's Utilitarianism.
  TUNES is a "project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethough Computing System, based on a correctness-proof-secure higher-order reflective self-extensible fine-grained distributed persistent fault-tolerant version-aware decentralized (no-kernel) object system."
  It's an ambitious project, so any kind of help, advice, or collaboration is welcome !

  
  

• Being a free software activist up to the point of having written a Manifesto for Free Information (including a half-translated english version).

  
  

• Maintaining various web sites:
  • fare.tunes.org
  • TUNES.org
  • Bastiat.org
  • Bastiat.net
  • this meta-novel
  • Dang-Vu.org
  • CIEV.bespin.org

  
  

• Writing the LPR2 program that allows printing any postscript document on both sides of a sheet of paper on standard (non-duplex) postscript printers (now version 1.2m).

  Help save the world's forests - Do use such a program when printing.
  It more generally allows to print any selected subset of pages in any postscript document.

  LPR2 has got much fewer features than other packages I know (mpage, psutils); but it's the only program that has a 100% success rate with no loss in quality: mpage and psutils fail most of the time in some way or another (e.g. complete fail, printing with erroneous font, printing upside-down, etc) particularly when there's any postscript embedded inside another document. Of course, do try mpage and psutils first in case they work, for they have n-up capability et al, that save even more resources, which capabilities lpr2 will never have unless you add them yourself. Also, if you have access to the original document or an intermediate description file (.doc, .tex, .dvi, etc), you should try to work it out directly, instead of transforming the postscript output...

  LPR2 is typically the kind of utility that shouldn't be needed, if only computer systems were better designed.

  
  

• Writing the vn-console package that allows interaction in vietnamese (VISCII format) on the Linux console, as well as sorting and conversion of vietnamese text. (now version 0.13).

  
  

• Maintaining a few articles of the Linux Documentation Project: The Assembly HOWTO (now taken over) and the Firewall Piercing mini-HOWTO.

  I'd be happy to give away the maintenance of the remaining (latter) document -- any taker ?

Real Life

• Being a member of the Rideau and Dang-Vu families.

  
  

• I've begun this october a thesis about Semantics of Reflective Systems in Jean-Bernard Stefani's team at FT R&D in Issy-les-Moulineaux, under the academic guidance of Elie Najm at ENST, as a sequel to my studies in computer science and mathematical logic at the ENS and the ESSI (Université de Nice). Its subject.

  
  

• Developing ideas about Ethics and Liberty.
  • My TUNES project heavily relies on them.
  • J'écris un Manifeste de la Libre Information.
  • I wrote a few articles on related subjects.

  
  

• Having internetworked activities (see above).

  
  

• Being treasurer of the CIEV.

  
  

• Listening to Classical Music, particularly french impressionist and russian romantic composers, but I like almost everything. Try play some Kreisler on any good system with

  shorten -x pugnani1.ul.shn - > /dev/audio"
  

  (Hey, this page was originally written in prehistorical times when MP3 didn't even exist! MP3 is horribly patent-encumbered, anyway)

  
  

• Reading books about moral and social sciences.

  
  

• Writing sci-fi scenarios for novels or role-playing-games.

  
  

• Managing my i386 PCs networked under Linux.

  
  

• Dreaming...