About Me

As much time as possible is dedicated to activities that I like since my retirement. This is an enviable situation for which I am very grateful.

About Contacting Me

I can be reached by e-mail. The address is shown on the last line at the bottom of each post, but please click on the link. On most systems that should open a new e-mail in the default mail client with the title of the post as the subject. Furthermore, the first line of the e-mail will contain the full name of the HTML file which will let me know exactly what the message is about. If Javascript is disabled, only my e-mail address is shown at the bottom of the post.

About This Site

Computer science has fascinated me for a long time. Among other things, I'm interested in programming and home automation. The pages that are found here are mostly related to these two subjects. To tell the truth, the site is a little luxury, an indulgence that is not without value for me. Writing down the steps followed in any procedure greatly increases the possibility of repeating them later when I will probably have forgotten the details. Similarly, describing an algorithm meticulously, which requires some thought, often yields improvements.

I do not claim expertise about subjects discussed on this site: Caveat emptor. I am self-taught and a grateful beneficiary of a large community of enthusiasts who freely share their knowledge. I try to emulate them while remembering that we were all hopelessly confused neophytes at one point or another. That is the reason most of the posts here are long and detailed.

About the Appearance of the Posts

Almost all pages follow a common template. From top to bottom, the following elements are found.

• A title bar with the date of publication of the post or the date of the last revision, whichever is most recent.
• A menu with three or four choices depending on the availability of a translation of the page. I write in French and English.
• A personalized search box using DuckDuck Go (DDG) or Startpage (SP), although the latter is only available if Javascript is enabled. These sites claim to respect the privacy of their users. Other search engines can be found on the archives page.
• Some pages belong to a sequence of notes on a given subject. In that case, these pages also display links to the previous and following posts at the beginning and at the end of the text.
• The last three lines at the bottom of the page provide
  • the date of the original post and if the post has been modified in some non-trivial way, the date of the last update;
  • a copyright notice;
  • a link to send an e-mail.

The results of a search performed with the local search at the top of each page will be displayed in a new tab on the web browser. Links to the pages on this site that correspond to the search criteria according to the chosen search engine will be displayed in that tab. Some search engines include links to pages found elsewhere before or after the local pages.

The menu choices are:

  news and recent posts

A list of the most recent posts no matter its subject.

  about

This page.

  archives

A complete list of all posts on the site in chronological order.

  version française

Several pages are available in English and French. You can access the translated page with this choice if available.

About Downloads and GitHub

Prior to March 23, 2023, there was a downloads icon in the top menu which would bring a list of resources, such as programs and scripts, that are available at various locations on the site. Unfortunately, that page was out of date, so taking the lazy way out, I just deleted it. The resources remain available, the links to them are still found in the individual posts.

At the end of 2020, I started uploading various projects to GitHub at github.com/sigmdel. Currently there are about 15 repositories containing mostly my own work and about 6 repositories that are forks of useful projects which may contain small changes I have made for specific purpose. I try to document the reason for these forks. As time allows, more and more projects will be moved to GitHub repositories and gists.

Bobby Jack has published a good reference about GitHub Gists.

About Privacy

As of March 23, 2023, I have added a script in each HTML file on this site that can be found just before the closing </head> tag. The script is from Matomo which is a "Google Analytics alternative that protects [my] data and your [...] privacy". It is being run on the host of my web site and not in the Matomo Cloud. Some time ago, when I was gainfully employed I did use Google Analytics on my "professional" web site mostly because my employer refused to provide any type of statistics about the site. Except for the overall statistics, I did not find it that useful at the time. This time around, I am hoping to get granular data that will help in two not unrelated regards. There is too much outdated material, but it is hard to decide what needs to go because some of the oldest posts about technology which I haven't used in years still get occasional hits. Furthermore, I do not anticipate that this site will remain up for many more years, it is time to think about finding "good homes" for what might be worth preserving once the site is closed down.

Each web page has other scripts. There is one to perform localized searches with StartPage. The other is used in a futile attempt to obfuscate my e-mail address and to start the default e-mail client when the mailto link is clicked. Otherwise this is a static site which does not use cookies does not carry advertisement or other forms of dynamic content. Look at the source code, it's just plain HTML and CSS.

About GTML Used to Generate this Site

The HTML preprocessor, GTML, is used to simplify the maintenance of this site and to ensure consistency in the presentation of its Web pages. If your site is composed of static pages, then you may be interested in doing the same.

About Copyright

Unless otherwise noted, all the  source code  that I have written and made available on this site is released into the public domain. In those jurisdictions where this may be a problem, the BSD Zero Clause License (SPDX: 0BSD) applies.

The "Zero clause BSD is a public domain equivalent license" according to its creator Rob Landley. Contrary to the BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License which applied previously, neither the copyright notice nor the rest of the 0BSD licence needs to be included with the source code.

By all means, use the code; just don't hold me responsible if a piece of equipment or the cat gets fried as a result. It would be appreciated if you acknowledged my contribution when you use my code, but that is not mandatory. Of course, code from others that is referenced on this site remains subject to the licence chosen by the original authors.

All the  text  on this site, which for the most part is delivered as HTML, is released under the standard "all rights reserved" copyright. Canadian copyright law has fair dealing exceptions for the purpose of research, private study, education, criticism or review, new reporting, parody or satire which I wholeheartedly endorse. In practice, I will not be doing anything if part of the text found here is plagiarized, but I would prefer that you link to the original post here instead of reproducing it, or, if you do quote text from this site, that correct attribution be included. Such an acknowledgement would be an appreciated recompense for the work and expense put into making this material available.

About Licence and License

The accepted Canadian and British spelling is "licence," but it would not do to change the spelling when quoting an American source where the term is written as "license". This is why both spellings occur above.