Pensées

 I have been accessing, using the internet since probably around 1991, using my dad's academic account and then schools and then home. I've used the internet before the web existed, sending emails, downloading freeware and sharewares from "huge" ftp repository. Sharing ftp site, using Usenet to find more and share more. This was a time you had to buy Ethernet NuBus card and install both Ethernet drivers and TCP/IP ones. Then one day something called NCSA Mosaic came into the picture - this changed the way I consumed 'the network'. After a while some friends showed me Netscape, and mosaic faded away. I've used Netscape on Mac, Windows 3.11, NT, on workstations running Unix (hello Dec Alpha). At the time my gig was either running OS/2, and Linux Slackware on my Pentium machine. I then got into the Beos world, and that was one OS that Netscape didn't ship binaries for. Microsoft had started pushing Internet explorer (IE). I was starting to work and *had...

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SPARCstation_5#SPARCstation_4 This year I was lucky again and was able to attend FOSDEM. This turned out to be more of a social conference than a technical one for me this year. I mean:  I had a bunch of really great conversations, with peers and users of Firefox. I was there to man the Mozilla booth . The idea was to engage people and have them fill up a bingo, in exchange they might go back home with a T-shirt a baseball cap or a pair of socks. Most people that I saw on Saturday afternoon and Sunday morning. Some people complained about AI, but not as many as I was expecting. Explaining why and that https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/02/firefox-will-soon-let-you-block-all-of-its-generative-ai-features/ would soon be available made them all understand and think that they could keep Firefox as their main browser. Our sticker stock melts like snow under the sun. The people from mozilla.ai had some pretty interesting discussions with some users that ...

To answer that question, we first need to understand how complex, writing or maintaining a web browser is.  A "modern" web browser is : a network stack, and html+[1] parser,  and image+[2] decoder, a javascript[3] interpreter compiler, a User's interface, integration with the underlying OS[4], And all the other things I'm currently forgetting.   Of course, all the above point are interacting with one another in different ways. In order for "the web" to work, standards are developed and then implemented in the different browsers, rendering engines. In order to "make" the browser, you need engineers to write and maintain the code, which is probably around 30 Million lines of code[5] for Firefox. Once the code is written, it needs to be compiled [6] and tested [6]. This requires machines that run the operating system the browser ships to (As of this day, mozilla officially ships on Linux, Microslop Windows and MacOS X - community builds for *BSD do ex...

In the last few years, we all saw funding issues with FOSS. I've taken the habit to donate ~ 20 euros per month to diverse projects based on how interesting I find them or how I would like to show my support. The company, I currently work for, uses benevity  to double some of my donations, depending on whom I'm giving to. I started recording this in the middle of the year in order to share with the rest of the world. Here's what/when/how with or without comments : 29/04/2025 - 20 € - Dotclear - a blogging platform I use. 02/06/2025 - 20 € - Tor - because privacy matters 27/06/2025 - 20 € - Fosdem - the best OSS conference in Europe. 28/07/2025 - 20 € - Apache Software Foundation - We need servers side projects 01/09/2025 - 20 € - Internet Archive - We need to preserve our digital world 02/12/2025 - 05 € - NetBSD - because it runs on almost everything and diversity is good 02/12/2025 - 20 € - Signal - because privacy matters 02/12/2025 - 20 € - Wikipedia - because sharin...

I've been working since 2009 full remote. I've changed jobs twice, I've moved from one country to another one while being full remote. Here are some thoughts, tips and tricks to make your life easier if you end up working remotely.  During this time I have lived in four places, and worked differently in these places I'll start be describing each of them and how I managed to work, what was good, bad and ugly. My apartment - I had a room with a desk, but I was living alone. I could organize my workspace the way I wanted without impeding on other people potentially living with me.  As I started working remote, setting limits and boundaries was hard. Not working was easy but made my guilt go high, so I would end catching up. I remember one Friday not working and then guilt making me work for the whole weekend. In order to manage my new way of life, I created a schedule. At 7, I would get up, by 7:30 I would have breakfast and so on. Issue was stopping in the evening. I was ...

A recap of the strategies I've used for personal backups based on the time and machine I used.  80s  At the time, the only machine I have access to is the great Apple ][e . I don't have a backup strategy, because I use it as a gaming machine and the little development I make sits on a floppy. I can't even remember a floppy dying - so no fear of loosing data. It's been a while, so if I had a backup strategy, it was to copy the floppies to newer ones. Dataloss : Bard Tale's III original floppies, one of the few games we had purchased, when I tried to crack it. 90s During the 90s I used a bunch of machines from the Macintosh LC , Atari Falcon 030 , BeBox , Pentium with Adaptec SCSI card. Strategy: No backups, because I'm dumb. In the end, we had a Zip drive , so I did save stuff on these. I also burned CDrom with data that I actually backed up. I never did try restoring, I'm not even sure where this Zip disk and CDs ended up (probably in a trash at some point...

 I currently run Fedora 42 as my main work and private machine. Desktop software:  Firefox for work because that's the only viable alternative Firefox nightly because testing releases is important and a very easy way to contribute Thunderbird, so I can read four email accounts at the same time and get notifications NewsFlash because I *need* an RSS feed reader. Hexchat - because I still use IRC (three different networks)  Papers because I like the idea of a Rust based PDF viewer Google chrome because I need to access teams meetings once in a while Chromium so I can play TTRPG with foundryvtt   Command line tools: Podman I'm trying not to use docker to see if it's viable on my new work machine  jq, awk, cat , less and normal unix tools. lnav for log reading atuin for shell history management fish as my default shell   

because it's a social move, not a real technical one. In my social circle, I use the following text exchanging technologies when it comes to small messages :  SMS WhatsApp Signal Email These make up probably more than 90% of all my communications. For more geekier ones, like open source contributions and professional ones, add slack, matrix and IRC. I don't use any other protocols. Most of my personal communications are done over WhatsApp : Family group, Sports for the kids groups. One group I'm not part of still uses FB messenger. Over the years, I've tried hard to move off WhatsApp. The issue is that Signal doesn't offer anything besides privacy that would make people move from WhatsApp. You can create groups, send images etc. People do not understand or care about the privacy implications of using WA. The recent addition of the AI circle in WA didn't change a thing. WA is everywhere, everyone has it. Signal is not installed by default, people will need to ins...

This week there was a company event, that I could not attend. I was part of the team "holding the fort" while others were lucky enough to meet and socialize together. I wasn't the only one "Holding the fort", I wanted to celebrate that and ask the colleague if he was interested in us meeting at a coworking nearby. As he was ok, we agreed on a date and booked each a day using our company's tool for that. I've been working remotely since 2009. I've moved from one country to another one while working remote. Not only that, but I've change jobs twice, staying *full* remote. The only time I needed to use a coworking space was when I was waiting for my ISP to install fiber, or when my second son got born, and I needed to focus. So here we go, I need to pack my laptop - good for me that I never have used external keyboards or mice, nor do I use an external monitor. I take the power strip. I buy my train ticket and off I'm walking to the train statio...

 My main domain is going for renewal in January. I'm having a few projects in mind that will required some new domains. I've been using gandi as a registrar for the last 20+ years. I'm happy about the service I got. Not happy about their email change policy form last year, so looking to change registrar. What I'm looking for : A registrar that has 2FA a registrar that can do .net and .fr A registrar that does DNS hosting Said DNS hosting supports DNSSEC Preferably based in Europe   What do you recommend and why?

Back in 2006 after visiting Fosdem and seeing Alexander Fritze demoing Zap (a voiceover ip phone using Mozilla technology developed by 8x8). I tried to make it work on Mac OS X which was at the time my OS of choice (it was way less in use by developers than it is today). I was affected by personal issues, so didn't really do anything about that until the end of June of that year. Finally, on a Friday night, I managed to add the proper ld flag to have audio in and posted something on the zap mailing list.       I got an answer from the project manager at 8x8 giving me FTP write access, so I could upload my build. I don't remember if I send a patch too. Furthermore, I got another interesting email from Alex telling me he had forgotten to tell me something at FOSDEM , but could not really tell me more. To which I replied, give me a NDA and I'll sign it. Two hours later, I had an NDA to sign, that was very vague. The next day, a Sunday, I was having a very noisy conversatio...

 Today I got a nice USB key, that does both USB-A and USB-C connectivity. So I followed the instructions on the download page . Tried to download from the London based mirror, but that led to a 404. Looked at the contact page and got all pumped up because they are present on libera.chat, just a `join` away. Unfortunately, the channel is empty, but *registered*. So my options are either mailing list or forum. I went for the thing that works email. Email sent. I downloaded from anothe mirror and dded the image to the usb stick.  Rebooted and chose boot from usdb to get the following screen: And here you go for a second email on the mailing list. I think I might try booting in bios, not uefi mode, but would like to see if people on the project are active. Edit: Mirror issue is fixed and affected New York as well. I tried to boot on another machine and got similar results. Switching to legacy boot didn't work either.

I'm too lazy to look for it, but the key servers that made the sks pool are all gone.  $ dig pool.sks-keyservers.net A ; <<>> DiG 9.18.21 <<>> pool.sks-keyservers.net A ;; global options: +cmd ;; Got answer: ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 58853 ;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 1 ;; OPT PSEUDOSECTION: ; EDNS: version: 0, flags:; udp: 1232 ;; QUESTION SECTION: ;pool.sks-keyservers.net.    IN    A ;; Query time: 1255 msec ;; SERVER: 127.0.0.1#53(127.0.0.1) (UDP) ;; WHEN: Sun Feb 11 15:34:10 CET 2024 ;; MSG SIZE  rcvd: 52 So all the tools that used to default to this won't work out of the box. For some reason, pgp.mit.edu is still up. I have not used it in ages, so I don't know if it is still worth something. There is no more a pool but one server as far as I can tell : https://keys.openpgp.org/ .  I spend a quick 20 minutes updating tools I found on Githu...

 I started the day by attending Bogo 's talk about think that matter to your inner self. Things that make you happy, things that make you smile. For the first talk in Jansen on a Sunday, it was quite attended - bogo lost 5€ because of that. Plenty of nice music too - which was good for waking up. Next on my list was one in the webperf devroom. Unfortunately, it was too crowded, and many people were lining up, so I decided to skip. I moved my ass to building K. Supported the Fosdem by gifting myself with a hoody :). I then ran the KSP (Key signing party). I'm glad 13 people showed up. The party was quick and was probably the smallest KSP happening during a fosdem. I'm really happy that people showed up. Picture of people forming a circle in front of K building @ ULB to do a KSP Next was Florian 's talk . If there's a talk you want to watch after this FOSDEM edition this is the one, it explains how Mozilla tooled Firefox and the Firefox profiler in order to reduce th...

Today marked the first FOSDEM day. The official tag for social networks is #fosdem. The intro was nice because the presenter took some picture from my mastodon feed of yesterday. The auditorium was full and a lot of people raised their hand when asked if it was their first Fosdem. A full auditorium, Jansen I then listened to a few talks, the one from Ryan of the thunderbird project explaining how an Open Source project to think about sustainability. I learned there that the team was now 32 people - that's way way more than mozillamessaging never had. That was nice news. And then I started meeting people, that was a blast. Many old mozilla contributor, people from Thunderbird from the momo days. All in all 21 people. And I have not met everyone yet. I need to make group pictures. The talk about the 10 years of NetBSD was interesting, but more for the 2BSD news and the DPD-11 clone. The talk on I2P DNS was interesting, I learned a lot about I2P, but was disappointed that it wasn...

 I've been attending FOSDEM since 2004; I gave talks (in the Mozilla room) ; I helped with the Key Signing Party ; I ran the key signing party ; I bitched against the network, when data roaming in Europe was not a thing ; I have help organize a room. And once I had registered to volunteer cleaning up on the Sunday evening - which was pretty quick, I don't remember it being a Fuss. So for all the FOSDEM I attended, things were smooth - very smooth. But I didn't realize how much work being smooth meant. Now I know :-p I've spent a good time of my Friday, preparing building H, the historical FOSDEM building. Protecting the walls This started by easy tasks, setting up tables and tables clothes. Then adding chairs, banks, trashes and building the InfoDesk in building H. Once all this was done the idea was to make everything ULB related disappear. Here comes me and a few volunteers, tapping brow paper over all the billboards. And there are many of these in the smallish cor...

I'm organizing a GnuPG key signing party in order to bolster our web of trust , since there is no official ksp this year. I have organized a few in the past using tools like biglumber (website is gone, if someone know of a replacement or where the source code of site is, I might end up running one again) and others tools . I've also run once the KSP at FOSDEM and helped running it a few other times.    === Details below === When, Where   We'll meet in front of the infodesk stand in building K around 12:00 Sunday Feb 4th 2024. I'll have a sing of some sort with KSP and or Key Signing Party . Once enough participants show up we will move outside to proceed with the party. What to Bring Warm cloths as the party will happen outside this year, like in the good old days. I hope it won't rain, but it might. Piece of papers with your fingerprint written on them. Each piece should look like below:  $ gpg --fingerprint 34246C61F792FBCC1F23BFF296BD1F38FEA32B4D pub ...

 I've booked both my plane ticket (was easier to get some funding that way than by rail) and my hotel. I'll be attending Fosdem again this year. This year I'm not organizing anything (no KSP , but there are no KSP @ fosdem this year, nothing in the Mozilla room either). I have volunteered to help set up and cleanup, though. I had already done the cleanup one year, and it was fun, so as I had the time. This time I'll be cabling the network and cleanup again. Things that changed since the last fosdem I attended : As said above no KSP. No BSD devroom, no OpenBSD booth No Geo related dev room No Linux LPI/BSD exams That's a lot of changes, because I was looking forward to participating on these subjects. On the other hand, there is a nice and interesting email devroom . And I have long time friends talking in jansen. I still remember a big company back in 2010 saying they' move off email in the year to come. I laugh everytime I think about this. Florian will be ta...

  I clearly remember, but can't date it. I was working for Mozilla messaging at the time ( momo ), being the QA lead for Thunderbird. It was at the end of one of the Mozilla All-hands, maybe in 2011 or 2012. At one of the ending keynotes, we were introduced to Boot 2 Gecko. A hack that would let US - Mozilla own the platform to run a mobile browser on. At the time, the iPhone was going strong and Google was trying to catch up with Android. MeeGo had been in development at Nokia for a while but was going nowhere even when Intel tried to help. Blackberry was slowly starting to die. In the Silicon Valley everything was about mobile, mobile, mobile and the emerging South Easter Asian market, where people would skip computers and use smartphones to join the internet revolution. We were struggling with Chrome and the massive investment by Google to take market share. Our Firefox port on Android was having loads of issues. We were denied by Apple's policies to be present on iPhones....

 I'm just finishing a work week. It's been a while, my last one was one employer ago and in 2019. I'm coming out all energized and with a clear vision of where the team I work with is going.  Things are going to be rough for a few more months and then should start to smooth out. I've managed to meet un bunch of people I work with on a daily basis. Had fun around Madrid, mapping and visiting a bit. I of course collected a few pieces of swag. I took the opportunity to evangelize mozilla nightly by distributing stickers. A few of the laptop from my colleagues based all over the world will be nicely decorated. I hope this will trigger a higher nightly usage amongst these coworkers.