About

About myself

My name is Ollivier Robert, also known as “roberto” or “Keltounet” in various areas (social medias, IRC), around 59 right now.

Working in computer science for more than 40 years now, mostly on UNIX-based systems like FreeBSD or Linux.

After being an Internet & Security Consultant at at a small but well-known agency called HSC between 1994 and 1996, I was hired as Information Security Officer at a European agency called EUROCONTROL (or ECTL to make it shorter). Since then, I had several different positions there and am now an IT Expert in the CNS (Communication Navigation Surveillance) team.

Areas of interest

My main interests in life, after my family and friends are, in no particular order:

• Reading lots of books, mainly Sci-Fi and Fantasy ones. I’m a big fan of J.R.R. Tolkien but George R.R. Martin, C.S. Friedman and Patricia Keneally-Morrison are among my favorites¹. I read novels a lot of novels from Anne Bishop, I like the stories and characters; More recently, I’ve read novels from Charles Stross, John Scalzi, V.E. Schwab and Emily Tesh.. Self-publishing is all the rage now, especially for ebooks and Lindsay Buroker is one of them, steam-punk kind of fantasy, sci-fi, I like her a lot. And many more, just read the blog with the books tag to find them all.

My Goodread profile with most of my books is there. I might move from GR at some point, because 1. it is getting rather slow, and 2. Amazon is closing the site a bit, like requiring to be logged in for some links.

• Computers have been one of my hobbies for a long time, my list of previously owned computers includes ZX-81, Oric Atmos, a Sinclair QL and various PCes.

• Cryptography has been of interest to me even before I owned my first computer back in 1981… Mostly historical ones, like paper-pen based or some older mechanical ones. Modern cryptography is way too much math-based for me, but you can see how things like the different cipher modes (CBC, GCM, etc.) were inspired from.

• Photography in case you haven’t noticed on the site before :)

• Typography is also something I’m interested in, mostly French but also English as well. That includes fonts and how to write correctly.

• I listen to music all the time. My favourite band is Dead Can Dance, closely followed by old songs from Deep Purple, Genesis, The Who, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and some Hard Rock/Metal like Metallica, Iron Maiden, Therion, Sabaton and Apocalyptica. I also like the music from Pat Benatar, Loreena McKennitt, Agnes Obel and many others. I’m also a big Count Basie and Miles Davis fan amongst many Jazz bands & singers. Don’t forget some Classical on the side, like Antonín Dvořák and Beethoven.

• Cats, I just love them.

Social media

Bluesky: Keltounet — my main social network, now that Twitter is becoming home to fascists thanks to Elon Musk.
Mastodon: Main account & bsd.network

I deactivated my Twitter account now, I can’t be associated with it anymore.

E-mail

• main address @ keltia.net
  
• FreeBSD project address @ FreeBSD.org
  
• Alternate address @ GMail
  

Legal Stuff

This is a private blog, written solely by me, the author. Most of its content is usable under the Creative Commons license called CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 (see Wikipedia for exact terms and references).

All images on Flickr & 500px are Copyright © by Ollivier Robert (unless specified otherwise), please contact me before using any of these.

According to Art.6 of the French law « Loi de confiance dans l’économie numérique » (aka LCEN), I have to declare that this site is hosted on a dedicated machine by the following company:

ONLINE SAS
BP 438
75366 PARIS CEDEX 08
FRANCE

If you need to contact the author of the site, please use the contact info above.