UNIX, Books, Photos, Rants, Cryptography and other stuff.

I’m very happy to announce release v0.8 of old-crypto-rs, a Rust library for old pencil-and-paper based cryptography.

cf. the first announce.

I was reading my timeline on BlueSky, and stumbled upon this article about some Rust library that got rewritten. While the hpke-ng library itself is nice and interesting in itself, it was not the main thing I got out ot if.

It was a nice explanation of a concept I’ve seen before in various Rust libraries: Zero-sized types. And the associated

traits that go with these.

Preamble

Yes, we are in 2026, and this is the 2022 edition of the Year in Books(tm). Still working on catching up. 😅

2022 was a much better year for me work-wise; I found a new team to work with, even though it did not reflect that much in terms of reading. And there were even a couple DNF (aka Did Not Finish) ones…

Nevertheless, here it, only fiction this year, new and old authors and series. Please forgive me if the comments are shorter than usual, these were read like 5 years ago…

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

To the books!

For the past three years, I have been learning and using Rust for my day-to-day development at work. I was tasked to migrate an existing set of of code to a more stable, production-ready stage. Before coming to the project, I was using Go 🐹 as my main language and was pretty happy about it.

But I will admit, Rust 🦀, being born out of Mozilla for Firefox, was scratching an itch for quite some time, and I made like two half-hearted tries at learning it, but each time the syntax was making my eyes bleed. I finally decided to bite the bullet and… wow it clicked on this third attempt.

As you may have seen from my site, I have long been interested in old pencil and paper cryptosystems, even before getting hooked on computers. Over the years, I have re-implemented a few of them in various languages:

• Old BASIC on my Sinclair QL like ages ago
• Like 15 years ago in Ruby
• Then in Go when I learned the language in 2016
• And more recently in, what else, Rust

Preamble

Yes, we are 2026 and this is the 2021 edition of the year in books. Still working on catching up.

2021 was as bad as “promised”, with me off-work for 3 months for depression, and I was in part-time medical leave for the whole year. So not a lot of reading, despite the 43 I read, because I included some comfort re-reads like Yoko Tsuno.

Nevertheless, here it, as usual a mix of fiction and non-fiction, new and old authors and series. Please forgive me if the comments are shorter than usual, these were read like 6 years ago…

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

To the books!

Preamble

Yes, we are 2026 and this is the 2020 edition of the year in books. Yes, I’m awfully late. Let me put it on Covid, lockdown which triggered a new, longer and harder depression and a really bad year.

Nevertheless, here it, as usual a mix of fiction and non-fiction, new and old authors and series. Some comics too. Please forgive me if the comments are shorter than usual, these were read like 6 years ago…

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

To the books!

Preamble

After like 5 years of no updates, due to, guess what, pandemic, depression and some other stuff, I have finally migrated my blog to Zola.

Preambule

As always, a mix of re-reading books I like and new authors & series and some disappointments as well, nothing is perfect…

I did not achieve the 2019 Goodreads contest this time, partly because this has been a bad year work-wise (no I won’t give any details, please don’t ask) and I went another way to compensate for this, I started being more serious about playing World of Tanks so it took most of my time. Still read a decent number of books but I felt I didn’t have enough energy to give to books, WoT is easier on my mind in these times. I did not write any blog posts either as you can see apart from these ones.

Our friends at Goodreads have done some nicely presented stats here and this article will go in more details than just stats :)

To the books!