Technical trivia

First, this site is powered by plain old XHTML. The absence of any scripts, Flash, etc. is a conscious decision—I do not believe that such tools add anything to the attractiveness or readability of a simple Web site such as this one. I do understand the use of Javascript for presentation convenience (in fact, I might use it myself in some not so distant future on my photography page), but I see no reason for Flash or other heavyweight technologies.

I strive to be standard-compliant and I wholeheartedly support the Viewable with Any Browser campaign. All the pages on this site are W3C compliant and should be viewable just fine with any decent borwser (and some less decent ones I suppose).

The look of this site is inspired from, though not identical to the template used by Bishop's University (where I work). Their however indirect contribution is warmly acknowledged.

On the technical side, I am using XEmacs to maintain this site—indeed, Emacs is already one of the best editors out there, and XEmacs is just one notch better and hence the best. I use extensively server-side includes for modularity. The site itself is hosted by the departmental Web server (an Opteron-based HP ProLiant ML115 running Gentoo Linux, which I also maintain), though it used to be hosted by my office machine, an Apple Power Mac G5 (the 2GHz dual processor variety) also running Gentoo Linux. This gave (still gives, though not for this site) me a Big Endian—Endians aside I am in general a fan of the PowerPC architecture.

Speaking about being a fan, I am a strong supporter of Linux and the concept of open source in general. Not surprisingly, I am not wild about Microsoft products, as I have issues with both their software quality and their legal and licensing practice.

There are no GIFs on this site due to past patent issues.