The random ramblings of a French programmer living in Norway...
2024
  Keyboard handling (2)
Sun 18th February 2024   

Arrows and space bar are sufficient for most games, but sometimes you need to access the complete keyboard.

In this article we expand on the earlier project by adding support for the entire keyboard while keeping the possibility to check multiple simultaneous key-presses.

2023
  Second life
Sun 5th November 2023   
This is the final episode of this adventure: The vehicle has been sold and is now living happily in France.

Let's rewind and explain all that!

  Flood Fill
Sat 4th November 2023   
Today we will see how to convert a complicated algorithm from BASIC to C, then to 6502 assembler, and the optimization process involved.

It all started when Goyo asked in September 2021 if anyone had a fast floodfill routine to share.

  Encounter and unfinished projects
Mon 14th August 2023   
When I started working on the Encounter upgrade project, I received equal parts of interest and also deep interrogations. With this article I hope giving some context and make my motivations clearer!

  Time Commando - The Saturn version
Tue 7th March 2023   
When Time Commando is mentioned, the PC and PlayStation versions are the first that comes to mind. These two were built internally at Adeline Software and where released around the same time.

But this is not the only version: There is a Saturn version of the game, published by Acclaim for the Japanese market.

2022
  Efficient rasterization
Wed 2nd February 2022   
I was writing an article about how to create an efficient Flood Fill routine on the Oric, but then I realized that many of the optimizations were generic and could be part of a dedicated article about how to write efficient rasterization code.

  The Oak and the Reed
Sat 1st January 2022   
This year 2022 marks the beginning of another year prolongating the Covid pandemic that many optimistic people thought would just last a few months.

I've been living in Norway since 2005, and after 16ish years, it's quite easy to see how different people, with different cultures and different ways to approach people deal with this type of crisis.


2021
  ACF and XCF
Tue 5th October 2021   

Now that I've given some information about how the way levels were designed and scripted, time to talk about the Xtra 3D Motion!

  Retrospective thoughts
Thu 30th September 2021   
This text was originally published on my Facebook page, but apparently it resonated well with some of the readers, so I decided to share it on the blog as well.

  Internal Structures
Fri 10th September 2021   

What about some internal implementation details?

  High Quality Resources
Sun 8th August 2021   

Time to get our sleeves up and dig into the nitty gritty dirty details about how all that worked together.

  Timeco Trivia Time
Tue 3rd August 2021   

Modern games tend to follow a rigorous top-down design approach, where a lead designer comes up with the core elements of the game, and is in charge of validating how these are actually implemented.

At Adeline, the process was a lot more organic, and a lot of things happened just because somebody thought about it, which resulted in games having many easter eggs, weird references, insider jokes, etc...


  Level creation workflow
Thu 29th July 2021   

When the work started on Time Commando, the most common type of CD-ROM drives were 2x models, barely able to load 300 Kilobytes of data per second.

What that mean is that we better had to be smart if we really wanted to use full motion video!

  Adeline's LibMenu
Fri 21st May 2021   

At Adeline Software it was easy to jump from one project to another, start helping, or even take over a tool because things were standardized.

  Starting at Adeline Software
Fri 14th May 2021   
Adeline Software was my first video game employer: I guess I could have started in a much worse place!

  Pitching Riders
Tue 11th May 2021   
After years of working on racing games, some people at Eden Studios wanted to do something "more creative", so some designers and artists worked on some pitchs for new games.

  Time Commando Marketing
Sat 1st May 2021   
Time Commando was released in July 1996, and since my old Time Commando web page only had small resolution pictures, I decided to make some new scans on fan's requests on my Youtube channel, a bit in advanced for the 25 years anniversary of the game release.

  Joysticks
Sat 2nd January 2021   
Many of the 80ies micro computers had dedicated connectors for joystick controllers, but unfortunately the Oric were not one of these.

As a result, joystick interfaces appeared on the market as accessories you could buy, but unfortunately they had all to be programmed differently, and as a result most games don't support any joystick interface, or only some very specific models.

2020
  Shifter Distortions
Sun 18th October 2020   
A few days ago, I saw on Twitter an interesting link to an article from Mark Wrobel explaining how the classic horizontal distortion effect was done on the Amiga computer using the copper, complete with some source code and pictures to explain it all.

  Keyboard handling (1)
Sat 22nd August 2020   

When people decide to make a game on the Oric, on of the first issue they stumble upon is how to deal with keyboard input.

There are many different ways, some are simple but only allow to check for one key at a time, while some other allow to test for multiple key presses.


  Mind Bender
Sat 15th August 2020   
Size coding is an interesting challenge: After spending a day at work using a computer that counts memory in gigabytes and storage in terabytes, it's refreshing to go back to basics.

Back in the days, people HAD to write compact and efficient code, simply because the hardware would not allow for anything else.

These days it's more like an intellectual puzzle game, which I find deeply satisfying.

  Dungeon Master intro
Wed 20th May 2020   
In 1996 I released a small prototype of what could be Dungeon Master on the Oric.

People being people, they kept bugging me about when I would finish it, so 24 years later I decided to take a look at it.

  Optimizing Buggy Boy (2)
Wed 13th May 2020   
Now that the final scroller is finally running at an acceptable speed, the second most pressing issue is the Mandelbrot fractal part.

Optimizing a scroller is just a matter of finding a fast way to copy things around, but optimizing a fractal is much more complicated due to the limitations of the 6502 processor regarding doing mathematics.

  Overlay Memory
Sun 10th May 2020   
A commonly misunderstood element of Oric computers is the actual memory layout and amount: Does the Oric has 48KB or RAM, as the Atmos label says, or 64KB as claims the Oric Nova 64?

The actual truth is somewhat in-between!

  Croissants!
Sat 14th March 2020   
As an expatriate, you may be perfectly happy in your adoptive country, but there are things you never quite forget.

For me, as a French person living in Norway, Croissants are one of these thing!

  Freeboot revisited
Sat 18th January 2020   
Once upon a time I had to sell my Oric to buy an Atari ST.

Unfortunately I barely managed to get enough money to get myself a Singled Sided floppy drive model, which quickly proved to be an issue since most people were swapping around double sided floppy disks.

To solve the issue, I bought an external Double Sided Cumana floppy drive, which allowed me to access all these floppies... but not boot on them!


Enters the FreeBoot!

  Half a Life in Video Games
Sat 4th January 2020   
Time flies.

We just entered 2020, and since I started working at Adeline Software in January 1995, it means I've been working in the Video Game Industry for 25 years, without a single interruption... and since I'll be celebrating my 50th birthday this year, it also means I've spent half of my life doing it.

2019
  The Oriclopedia
Tue 3rd December 2019   
This is now December, and I decided to take a break with the Oriclopedia videos, so this is a small summary of what was published this year.

  Fixing a Brionvega Algol BV1
Tue 26th November 2019   
The problem with vintage equipment is that it has a limited shelf life, and some specific parts are now either difficult or impossible to find.

For my Oric activities, I've been using a 36cm Sony Trinitron found in the storage area of Funcom when we moved to a new office, and it's been faithfully working for years... but recently it has started making some humming noise and sometimes have a faded picture, which is generally not a good sign.

  The Oric Tape Nightmare
Sat 23rd November 2019   
Let's talk about tapes, more specifically "Oric Computer Programs Stored on Tapes".

If you follow my Youtube channel, you know that I do have a significant amount of original Oric software on tapes, and that I've been buying tape players.

  Shadow of the Beast
Sat 12th October 2019   
Now and then somebody speaks of the "game" Shadow of the Beast and uses it as an example of something the Amiga range of computers could do but the Atari ST could never dream to achieve.

This is totally true: Even with all the time and talent of the universe, there is no way a standard Atari 520 ST could compete, in what is after all mostly a technical demo designed to exploit every single feature the Amiga had.

The actual point of contention is regarding if the Atari ST port of Shadow of the Beast was as good as it could possibly have been considering the usual constraints of time, budget, etc...

  Fixing the SHV33 back cover
Sat 31st August 2019   
When my Nokia 700 became unusable as a daily phone, I searched for an equivalent high-end compact mobile.

Unfortunately, all I could find (under 5" size) on the European market was either the iPhone SE, or ultra low spec mobiles running obsolete versions of Android.

Then I took a look at the Asian market and saw that they had plenty of mobiles that would match my requirement, except of course they were not available on the European market, which mean I had to import one.

  Burning Out
Sat 3rd August 2019   
About two years ago I had to switch gear and "take it easy".

After years not missing any of the Solskogen demo parties, I skipped it for two years in a row, and that year I also stayed in Oslo for the summer holidays instead of going back to France.

Apparently I got hit by a partial burnout.

  Modern Retro Software
Sat 29th June 2019   
If you visit the Oric.org software page, you will quickly notice that the top 10 is mostly filled by software written after the commercial life of the Oric company.

Unfortunately, these high quality pieces of software have never been released in physical form - they only existed as digital files usable on emulators -, something I really was not happy about.

  Power Brexit
Sun 6th January 2019   
A few months ago, when I started collecting Oric software, I realized that my old tape deck was starting to be very tired and unreliable. Then I spotted an auction for a "Binatone Data Recorder", which apparently had been recently serviced with new belts and power cable.

The form factor also seemed ideal to fit on my desk without taking too much room... the only problem was that it had one of the annoying UK plugs that require an adapter to fit in EU mains.

Time to fix that.

2018
  Optimizing Buggy Boy (1)
Thu 15th November 2018   
On the weekend of 2-3 November 2018 the Demosplash party was held at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

There are not many demo parties in the USA, and even less of these showing Oric demos running on the actual Oric hardware specially with a Cumulus device!

  Performance Profiling
Sun 11th November 2018   
A few weeks ago NekoNoNiaow asked on the Defence Force forums if there was any profiling tools available for Oric programs "aside from the reliable but quite basic OSDK clock() function".

I had already worked on the topic, but no actual official release came out of it: Time to fix that!

  Tape Storage Hacking
Thu 1st November 2018   
I recently started collecting some specific pieces of Oric software for some future projects of mine, and obviously when you have to pay the "eBay Collector Premium Tax"(tm) you would rather not have all your tapes get crushed, broken, or fade out because of the sun.

The solution is simply to invest in some adequate storage systems, which ideally would also pass the "partner test".

  A Beginner's Guide To The Oric Atmos
Sat 13th October 2018   
Sometimes you buy stuff on eBay and you get disappointed (broken or incomplete things, ...) but sometimes you discover some little gems you did not even know existed.

A few weeks ago I bought some Oric games, and on a whim asked the seller if he had some other Oric related stuff around. All he had was the Oric Special Autumn 1984 issue of Personal Software, but that seemed interesting enough for me to buy it as well.

  Job Application
Mon 10th September 2018   
When I moved to Norway in 2005, I kept some of my most precious Oric and Atari hardware, but I left the rest to some of the Oric and Atari people I trusted to put them to good use.

Some of our unreleased demos have since appeared in various compilations after they were found in the old stack of floppies, but now and then they have found some old forgotten treasures.

  The hidden cost of making videos
Tue 4th September 2018   
Earlier this year, I was told that it would be "kind of cool" if I did some videos to show how I developed my Oric and Atari projects, instead of just writing blog posts and forum updates.

The first real test was in February when I did a few hours of live streaming during the Global Game Jam 2018.

  Not an artist
Sat 24th March 2018   
We live in a world where the common practice is to put people in neatly defined categories, like "artist", "train driver", "programmer", "race driver", etc...

In reality, if you examine any random person, you will find out that they are much more than that.

In my case, I'm a programmer, but I also dabbled in the art department (as well as many other things).


  Global Game Jam 2018
Tue 6th February 2018   
Like in 2015 and 2016, I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 8600 games have been worked on by more than 42000 persons across 108 countries.



2017
  Everyday Preppers
Sun 5th November 2017   
Did you know that your ancestors were preppers?

I'm not talking of Doomsday Preppers, no. I'm talking of common sense people who did not have access to a 24/7 open Super Market or a 30 minutes guarantee Pizza Delivery Service.


  Upgradable hardware
Sat 12th August 2017   
These days it looks like more and more people think that maybe we should be a bit more conscious regarding how we treat our environment.

This is good.

Unfortunately, there are still people buying things that cannot be repaired or upgraded.

This is not good.


  Refactoring
Wed 17th May 2017   
There are quite many similarities between writing software and building hardware.

In both case you cannot really do a good job at it until you actually get to know most of the requirements, which is why we generally use plans, models or prototypes: They help us understand what has to be done.

In this particular case, the issue was the way we built the storage containers at the back of the car.

  Creature Comfort
Sun 23rd April 2017   
In a camper van, comfort is important.

A comfortable bed, air circulation and blinds are definitely important, but it's often the small things that makes the difference.

  20 years of Defence Force
Sat 15th April 2017   
I discovered Internet in 1995 when I joined Adeline Software.

We did not have internet at the university so it was with great interest I started poking at the Windows 3.1 machine running NCSA Mozaic in the company meeting room.

We only had one email address for the entire company, one of these long numerical ones@compuserve.com.


  Oric graphics in details
Sat 8th April 2017   

This article was first written in July 2002 as a 'how to' for the artists working on our first big Defence-Force demo, was translated to english in 2005, but was never really officially published until today.

2016
  Meet the Carputer
Sun 25th September 2016   
If during your childhood you dreamt of having a car that could talk like in Knight Rider, you may soon be satisfied.

Considering how fast the technology improves, fully autonomous cars are not far ahead, but that's not going to magically transform a 50 years old car into a talkative friend!

  Høytorp meeting
Tue 16th August 2016   
The Rakkestad meeting was interesting, but there was unfortunately not many people present.

Fortunatelly this Høytorp Treffet 2016 was a totally different beast: Nice weather, a large assortment of diverse vehicles, a lot of people, and all in all a very entertaining experience!

  Custom Shaders
Thu 21st July 2016   
One of the important things in a recreational vehicle is comfort.

Many things impact comfort, such as the quality of the driving experience, the sitting, the noise, but when you want to sleep in a vehicle what really matters is to be adequately shielded from the sun and be able to breathe!

  Reverse engineering
Tue 17th May 2016   
Thanks to a correct alignment of planets I ended up with a four days long weekend.

I had plenty of things to do, but I decided instead to spend the time looking at how one of my favorite Atari demo screens was done.


  Rakkestad meeting
Sun 1st May 2016   
When you own a relatively uncommon vehicle it's generally a good idea to try to get in touch with other owners.

I heard of the 1. mai treff for Volvo Felt on the Norsk Volvo Felt-register and decided it was definitely the place to go.

  STNICCC 2015
Sun 17th April 2016   
In December last year, the little city of Gouda became once again the home of some very strange people celebrating the 25th anniversary of an event almost nobody ever heard of.


  Global Game Jam 2016
Sat 6th February 2016   
Like last year I spent the last weekend of January at the Global Game Jam.

In total, about 6800 games have been worked on by more than 36000 persons across 93 countries.



2015
  Charsets
Thu 17th September 2015   
If there is one thing that can make a game look like it was professionally produced, it's definitely using a different character set than the one provided by the system.

Let's take a look at some existing games to show what I mean.

  Preprocessor abuses
Sat 15th August 2015   
Here comes the first article about tips and tricks that can be used to make your Oric development easier and faster.

Choosing an assembler

Originally the Oric C development kit was using FRASM to assemble the 6502 code generated by the C compiler front-end.

One of the first changes we did when starting the OSDK was to use instead a real 6502 macro-assembler with an extended set of features, and ultimately we choose XA because it supported most of the C compiler preprocessor directives.

  The Bright Side
Sun 2nd August 2015   
If there's one thing I've learned from the Monty Python, it's definitely to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

I had my share of crapy moments, but it's important to try to put it perspective within the grand scheme of things.

  The Bright Side
Sun 2nd August 2015   
If there's one thing I've learned from the Monty Python, it's definitely to Always Look on the Bright Side of Life.

I had my share of crapy moments, but it's important to try to put it perspective within the grand scheme of things.

  Noise reduction
Sat 2nd May 2015   
I'm planning to attend the STNICCC 2015 demo party later this year, ideally with an Atari prod ready in time to participate to the competitions.

Even if I'm doing most of my development on emulators, it's important for me to test everything on the real hardware!

Unfortunately the hardware in question is old and prone to failures, so it's time to get it ready and fix the issues.

  My software history (part 4)
Wed 29th April 2015   

Welcome to the fourth (and last) part of this series of articles.

The previous part was about Eden Games, this new one covers the period from when I moved from France to Norway in 2005 to join Funcom.

This article is a bit different from the others, because I am still working at Funcom. All the content of course represents my personal views, other people may disagree :)

  Let's make noise
Sat 28th February 2015   

This article was first published in the CEOMag 296.

Our beloved Oric computer is equipped with a sound generator compatible with the one found on the Atari ST, Amstrad CPC, MSX and some models of Sinclair Spectrum, so theoretically there’s no real reason why most of the earlier Oric games had no music at all or perhaps just a game over tune.

  osdk-dot-org
Fri 27th February 2015   

osdk.org

While doing some maintenance on the Defence Force infrastructure, I realized that the osdk.org domain name was now available.

Few minutes later it was registered, and a couple of hours later there was working DNS and redirect information.

  Global Game Jam 2015
Mon 26th January 2015   
Last weekend, January 23 - 25 2015, more than 25000 persons and 78 countries spread over 518 locations created games simultaneously. I was one of them.

2014
  Scandinavian road trip
Sat 26th July 2014   
After some hectic week-ends spent converting the car to a mini camper-van, we were finally ready for our road trip around Norway and Sweden.

  Beds and Storage
Sun 6th July 2014   
Time to address the important topic of the storage and sleeping solutions.

The concept

One of the interesting things about the Valp, is that it's a perfect small utility vehicle: It's about the same size as normal car, but you can fit an impressive amount of thing inside.

Losing this just for the sake of a camper conversion used a couple of weeks each year does not sound very optimal.

  Audio system
Mon 23rd June 2014   
A decent audio system is part of the comfort of modern vehicle.

Components selection

Obviously, since we had nothing at all, we had to select and buy all the necessary parts:

  Fridge installation
Tue 10th June 2014   
Camping without fresh beverage or food is not nice.

Chosing the fridge

After having checked the various type of solutions available (portable cooler plugged on the cigarette lighter, absorption coolers than runs on multiple power sources, special fridges running on 12v, etc...) we finally decided that the best for us was to actually go for a good old standard 220 volt fridge, just smaller - so it would fit in our installation.

  Renewable energy
Mon 2nd June 2014   
So, we decided to try the solar energy to power our vintage camper van.

As for the general design of the camper, I dived back in the swampy fields of humankind's collective knowledge to extract information about hooking up solar panels.

I have to admit that I was not impressed.

I would have thought that this was a mostly solved problems, but it appears that the field is a giant mess of conflicting informations about do's and don'ts, so in the end I had to take a leap of faith and take sides.


  Here comes the leet-mobile! (part 5)
Wed 21st May 2014   

Despite all our previous attempts the engine was not working particularly well, so I decided to do something I should have done a long time ago: Check the compressions.

  Camper conversion
Thu 15th May 2014   
Before starting any significant project, it's generally a good idea to evaluate the state of the art, and then only proceed:

There's probably some glory in spending time solving an already solved problem, but it's definitely not time effective.

  Engine top replacement
Fri 2nd May 2014   
Despite all our previous attempts the engine was not working particularly well, so I decided to do something I should have done a long time ago: Check the compressions.

  Blogging about the blog
Sun 27th April 2014   

The new blog engine is alive!

It took quite some time, and probably has some bugs, but I guess it has reached a good enough maturity level.

Hopefully I will now be able to finish the last part of My Software History without feeling like punching through my monitor!

  My software history (part 3)
Sun 16th March 2014   

Welcome to the third part of this series of articles.

The second part was about my time at Adeline Software and Héliovisions Productions, now this entire article will cover the 1998-2005 period at Eden Studios (aka Eden Games).

Help wanted

I joined Eden Studios in October 1998 and immediately started to play with the Dreamcast development kit.

Soon I had my old ZBuffer house moving smoothly on the screen.

  Time Commando The Storyboard
Thu 13th March 2014   
And without further comments, here is the storyboard for the intro sequence.

  My software history (part 2)
Sun 9th March 2014   

Welcome to the second part of this series of articles.

The first part was basically about what I did before working in videogames for a living.

This one was supposed to cover my first 10 years working in video games, , but I realized that already covering both Adeline and Héliovision was more than enough for one article.

That's a shame because I love round numbers and symbolic dates!

  My software history (part 1)
Sun 2nd March 2014   
Sometimes on IRC you find people you've not met in many, many years. Inevitably at some point the discussion have to go round what you've been doing all these years, if you are still a programmer, where you are working, etc.. etc... and then of course younger participants start asking questions about our older stuff, probably because they are not used to interact with dinosaurs who actually programmed in COBOL, used black and white terminals, and even touched punch cards.

  New site
Sat 22nd February 2014   

Web 2.0?

For now about 13 years the OSDK has been a version 0 point something despite having been used to create quite a significant amount of software.


2013
  Here comes the leet-mobile! (part 4)
Tue 18th June 2013   

After our first drive on the parking we were quite excited, but still there were some issues to deal with: the exhaust had to be fixed and we had to find out why the engine would die on idle.

Even more important, we had two months to fix all the issues before having to pass the EU Technical Control.

  EU Kontrol
Tue 18th June 2013   
After our first drive on the parking we were quite excited, but still there were some issues to deal with: the exhaust had to be fixed and we had to find out why the engine would die on idle.

Even more important, we had two months to fix all the issues before having to pass the EU Technical Control.

  Here comes the leet-mobile! (part 3)
Sat 30th March 2013   

So the Valp was now parked on the parking: Time to get things going.

Is it dead?

The first thing we did of course is to try to start it. Nothing happened. The blinkers and windshield wipers worked so at least we knew there was electricity going on, but since starter engines are notoriously power hungry we decided to buy a battery charger, remove the batteries, and let them charge for quite a long while.

  Fix it, fix it, fix it!
Sat 30th March 2013   
So the Valp was now parked on the parking: Time to get things going.

Is it dead?

The first thing we did of course is to try to start it. Nothing happened. The blinkers and windshield wipers worked so at least we knew there was electricity going on, but since starter engines are notoriously power hungry we decided to buy a battery charger, remove the batteries, and let them charge for quite a long while.

  Shopping time
Tue 26th March 2013   
Now that we knew we wanted one of these horribly cute off-road vehicles, I started to contact the various sellers to ask questions about their state and it quickly appear that you could classify the various available models in three categories based on their prices.

  Here comes the leet-mobile! (part 2)
Tue 26th March 2013   

Now that we knew we wanted one of these horribly cute off-road vehicles, I started to contact the various sellers to ask questions about their state and it quickly appear that you could classify the various available models in three categories based on their prices.

  Let's get a 'new' car
Sun 10th March 2013   
Been few months since I posted something, not because I had nothing to do, but because of a number of projects I committed myself to help with.

Today’s post is not computer related in any way, it’s about vehicles!

Commuting bliss

I moved to Norway about 8 years ago and have happily used the public transport system all that time.

  Here comes the leet-mobile! (part 1)
Sun 10th March 2013   

Been few months since I posted something, not because I had nothing to do, but because of a number of projects I committed myself to help with.

Today’s post is not computer related in any way, it’s about vehicles!

Commuting bliss

I moved to Norway about 8 years ago and have happily used the public transport system all that time.

  Welcome to L3314N!
Fri 1st March 2013   
This is still a work in progress, but basically you expect to find some information about the Volvo L3314N vehicle in general, and my own in particular!


2012
  Tilemap tutorial (part 5)
Sun 9th December 2012   
Welcome to the fifth and final part of the Tilemap tutorial.

As promised in the previous article I will finally explain how to render the tilemap using a special shader that allows you to draw the whole tilemap with only two triangles.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 4)
Sun 2nd December 2012   
Welcome to the fourth part of the Tilemap tutorial.

The previous article explained the concept of batching and using texture atlases to draw a tilemap more efficiently.

This new article will finally attack the final topic: How to write a Tilemap optimized shader.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 3)
Thu 22nd November 2012   
Welcome to the third part of the Tilemap tutorial.

The previous article left us at the point where we could display tiles without wasting time drawing any of these out of the screen.

I will now explain the next step, which is to be more efficient at drawing the tiles.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 2)
Mon 19th November 2012   
Welcome to the second part of the Tilemap tutorial.

Hopefully at this point you should have a reasonably clear idea of what tiles and tilemaps are. Now is the time to see how this all translates in programming terms.

  Tilemap tutorial (part 1)
Sat 17th November 2012   
This is the first real article with technical content.

The reason I am writing it, is that apparently there are many people out there who are writing games using 2D tilemaps for the background, but unfortunately are using totally inefficient methods.

When I explained what I did on the #sfml support channel there was apparently a number of light bulbs appearing over people's head. So I thought it would be worth sharing what I did.

  Minitel memories
Sat 3rd November 2012   

What's this Minitel thing anyway

Outside of France most people never heard of the Minitel.

Released in 1981, first as a small scale test in Bretagne and then extended to the rest of the country, the Minitel business plan was a stroke of genius from France Telecom: Give the choice between the regular printed White Pages and a small dumb black and white terminal allowing you to find the same thing faster; then use the large number of available terminals to allow the creation of commercial offers to make a profit of it.


2011
  Are Cheap Androids An Electric Dream
Mon 16th May 2011   
Last Christmas was tough on my netbook. The travelling around, the trains and planes being cancelled or delayed, the packing and unpacking, the plugging and unplugging, and the occasional knocks finally killed my good old and trusty Asus eeePC 901.

More exactly, the screen decided to die.

  I'm in love with Kira
Sun 27th March 2011   
No, Kira is not the name of my girlfriend, it is not the name of my cat either, and I'm not in love with any particular film celebrity bearing a similar name.

Kira is only a small device you connect to your network, which in turn allows you to control anything that uses infra-red, kind of like an universal remote control.

  Home-automation experiments
Fri 25th March 2011   

Inspiration

For about two weeks now I've been working on a small home-automation project.

The inspiration came from few cool YouTube video, and in particular that one:



I'm not particularly fan of Star Trek, but the idea of controlling all the audio and video system from a touch screen using some fancy interface kind of resonated with my inner-geek.

  Communication protocol exploits
Sun 27th February 2011   
If you found this page using a search engine with the hope of finding any relevant information about exploiting things on the Internet, you are going to be disappointed. What I'm going to write about now was relevant only in a now semi-distant past.

I have to start first with a disclaimer: What you will read is related to events that happened a long time ago, when we were young, stupid and lucky. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

  Simple C++ threading
Sun 20th February 2011   
For some reason, people tend to think that creating multi-threaded applications in C++ is a very difficult thing to do.

It is in fact not that difficult, but there are basically two main issues to consider: How to make the code correct (it should not crash, deadlock, corrupt data, etc...) and how to make it efficiently use as many cores as possible.

  How fragile is this Internet thing
Sun 30th January 2011   
Quite a lot of people these days take for granted the ability to communicate with their computers and mobile phones at any time of the day .



2010
  The cooking process theory
Wed 15th December 2010   
These few last weeks I've been doing a number of unrelated things: I watched Master Chef on BBC LifeStyle, finished Fallout: New Vegas then started to play Titan Quest, finished a book from 37signals and another from Microsoft Press about project management, and finally spent time reading blog posts on some various famous IT heroes.

In some perverted way it all makes sense.

So, what's the common idea between these seemingly unrelated elements? Well, the common element is the notion of recipe.

  Mini review Fallout New Vegas (ObsidianBethesda Softworks)
Sat 27th November 2010   
After 71 hours playing Fallout: New Vegas, I've finally reached the end of the story.

Mind you, I'm not done with the game: Since you can't continue to play after reaching the end of the main story line, I loaded a previously saved game to explore parts of the world I did not visit yet (I picked-up the Adventurer Perk just to get the list of all locations), which is about half of the possible locations.

Talk about a huge game :)

  Random notes about Community Management
Thu 14th October 2010   

Foreword

I was really not planning to write anything about Community Management, mostly because I did not consider myself as a Manager, and certainly not a Manager of a Community.

I more or less revised this position few weeks ago when after having released 1337 and posted messages on the various relevant message boards and forums we then started to receive messages and comments asking how Defence Force was working, how such a small community managed to release such large and polished games (compared to for example the Thomson and Amstrad communities), and if we could help them by making games on their own machines!

  Hacking confessions (part 3)
Sun 5th September 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

The beginning of the end

If I'm not mistaken, this article will be the last in the confessions category. After that I stopped experimenting, mostly because I had no good reason for doing them anymore.

  Hacking confessions (part 2)
Wed 25th August 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

Up the ante

I wrote in the previous part there would be two parts, but considering that I miserably failed at writing, reviewing and publishing some of my longer essays, I decided that writing instead few short ones each dedicated to a particular issue would be more manageable. So here we are, expect at least a third one :)

The previous episode happened during the last year I spent in High School, this one happened three years later when I moved to Laval for my BTS Informatique de Gestion. The year is 1991, the place is the Lycée Douanier-Rousseau, a pretty Ok place to be considering how boring Laval can be.

  Hacking confessions (part 1)
Sun 22nd August 2010   

First a disclaimer: What I'm writing here now is related to events that happened a long time ago, at a period of time when it was relatively safe to do it, the worse that could happen would have been the expulsion from the school. If you try to do this kind of thing now, you may very well do some jail time and have heavy fines to pay as well.

Self made man

I'm one of these people who learnt by themselves most of what they knew about programming before working as a professional programmer. Sure I learnt a lot after I started work, but before that I did university mostly to get a diploma: Except methodology, and formal methods, I can't say I learnt much.

  Five years in Norway
Sat 1st May 2010   

Celebration time!

Yes! I arrived in Norway the 2nd of May 2005, so this Sunday marks my five years anniversary in Norway. I think it's about time to do a quick look back, and possibly discuss what I can see coming next.

Some people asked me why I moved to Norway in first place: was I unhappy in France, why not moving to USA or UK, if I was planning to come back to France one day - and when -, etc, etc...

  What happened to the story line
Tue 13th April 2010   


Recently I finished a number of games, of the types that are supposed to be bundled with a story in it: Fallout 3, Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 and yesterday I finished Dreamfall.

Dreamfall as a game is probably not perfect, if only because it was originally a Xbox game, so some of the textures are a bit wonky, the controls on PC could have been better (damn you camera!), there's a bit too many fed-ex missions, and the fight sequences could have been more interesting... but as an engaging story, it's ace: You could watch it as a movie.

  Backups Better safe than sorry!
Sun 4th April 2010   

Do you copy?

When I ask to my family, friends and colleagues how they proceed to keep safe their important digital data, most of the time I get one of these answers:
- I've nothing worth keeping
- Well, it's on the PC/Mac so it's safe no?
- I have copies of all my files in another folder on my hardrive !
- I'm doing backups regularly on cd/dvd/exernal hardrive
admittedly some people are answering differently because they have already been burnt by the issue of unsafe backups and have solved the issue by implementing a real strategy.

So let me tell you why should you be worried about the notion of backups.

  How to not upgrade an Ubuntu server
Mon 22nd March 2010   
In February last year I decided to extend Defence-Force.org by having a secondary server in my home. That's the reason why I originally bought the VIA Artigo A2000, I wanted something small and silent I could put in a corner and forget. After a bit more than one year of usage I can say I'm globally satisfy with the choice.

Ok, the machine is not that silent, as a desktop is quite slow, but as a file/multimedia box/SVN server it's doing its job.

  Mini review Dragon Age (Bioware-Electronic Arts)
Sun 28th February 2010   
I just finished Dragon Age this evening, apparently I only managed to do about 40% of the whole content of the game, but when I'm being told that the survival of the land is on my shoulders and that time is of the essence I don't stop to do side quests...


So anyway, I killed the villain, saved the land, got the glory, and then the super long end credits.

  15 years working in videogames
Mon 25th January 2010   
Damn, that's typical of me - and of the industry - to miss a deadline!

On the 2nd of January 1995 I started working at Adeline Software, so the 2nd of January 2010 was my 15th anniversary in this interesting industry :)

  I can see the wall out there
Sat 23rd January 2010   
... yes, there is a wall.

We've been told for a while that the wall was here, and that we should prepare for it. Get the equipment ready, get the bodies and mind in good shape, this kind of thing. But well, you know how it works, we tend to wait until the very last moment before we change our habits.

But sometimes changing the habits is not enough. Sometimes you need more than that, you need to find alternatives that works... assuming they actually exist.

  Happy new year 2010
Sun 3rd January 2010   
Ok, I'm a bit late, but I guess the 3rd of January is still a ok time for giving best wishes for the new year.

2009 has been an interesting year - for me at least -: Managed to get through job related hazards, released my 20 years anniversary demo for the Atari STe - with plenty of very nice comments I was not really expecting -, met a nice gf and moved together in a quite nice new apartment - hopefully will not have to move again until a long while -, and got some family visiting for Christmas.

2009
  Atari STe 20th anniversary
Wed 25th November 2009   


In 2005 I participated to the online demo competition organized by the group DHS (Dead Hackers Society). With other members of the group Creators we made the Conflict of Interest demo screen, and reached the 3rd position in the compo.

We are now in 2009, and yes 20 years ago - 1989 - this was the unveiling of the Atari STe. Time to do a new demo !

  4 years !
Wed 6th May 2009   


I moved to Norway the 2nd of Mai 2005, so this month was my fourth year in Norway.

At this exact moment I'm following the live feed from the French parliement (Assemblée Nationale) about the HADOPI law "Protection de la création sur Internet", and I have to say that I'm not impressed by this demonstration of democracy.

  User friendliness in the 21st century
Sat 25th April 2009   

One week ago, I got a power cut in my apartment. Nothing too bad, unfortunately it was the second time since the beginning of the year, and for one month or so I had a file server running. Obviously you don't really want the power to cut while somebody is updating your SVN repository.

The solution is simple, I just needed an UPS.

After discussing with some tech-savvy acquaintances, I finally decided to buy an APC Back-UPS ES 700VA.

  ClickSafe is dead
Sat 28th March 2009   
Yesterday, an ex-colleague contacted me, he had sad news for me:



"ClickSafe is dying, we are going to replace it by Perforce."

  Online persistancy
Tue 10th March 2009   


The World Wide Web is not that old.

At least not in the way you, me, and our parents uses it.

Sure, there was all the original military and university networks derived from Arpanet, but what I'm talking about is when the random person could get a modem, a (insanely expensive) subscription to some ISP (which will be gone in less than two years), and a large (100 kilobytes) storage for their personal homepage (accessed from an impossible to remember link using some tildes or complicated city based domain structure).

  Needs a new mobile, let's try Nokia for a change
Mon 2nd March 2009   


Yes, I needed a new mobile.

My very first mobile phone was a Sagem MY X5m, but when I moved to Norway it was not really up to the task, mostly because the battery life was almost gone, but also because the T9 did not have support for Norwegian (I don't even remember if it did English). So I got a fancy Sony Ericsson w800i for my birthday. Apparently it was a fancy present because it was kind of hard to get one, most shops were out of stock.

  Learning norwegian if you are an IT worker, you have to be motivated !
Thu 26th February 2009   
After about two years without Norwegian lessons, I finally decided to take some new ones. Waiting for the company to decide when we will have the next batch of lessons was a bad idea, as one said, better do things yourself if you want them done.



  How to learn linux by setting up a server
Mon 23rd February 2009   
As some of you already know, I decided that Windows Vista was not for me. The number of things that displeased me from Microsoft was large enough to make me seriously consider changing entirely of operating system. Which is why I considered Linux: Mac OS seems cool, but jumping from a proprietary system to another one just seemed very silly.

  Nice winter
Sun 22nd February 2009   
While some of my friends and members of family are in the areas of the world where you need a swim suit and some sun glasses, I just enjoy the relaxing view of the about 60 cm of snow that has fallen from the sky in the two last weeks

  Here we are
Sat 21st February 2009   
Hi Hi, here is a blog.

Yeah I know, most blogs really have no purpose for the vast majority of people, but I guess it is an harmful enough activity.