User:Gachet

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"Above all nations is humanity" --Goldwin Smith

"Science is rooted in conversations. The cooperation of different people may culminate in scientific results of the utmost importance." --Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Beyond: Encounters and Conversations (Harper & Row, New York, 1971)

I am an occasional Wikipedian that has always been fascinated by the many ways to use technology to transfer knowledge. I personally see Wikipedia as a wonderful legacy for the future Internet generations, representing the brilliant encounter between technology, knowledge, freedom and humanity.

I assume that a good Wikipedian should be an artist (involved in bold and daring creative activities), an advocatus diaboli (critically reviewing his/her and others' works), and a janitor (doing his/her fair share of maintenance and cleanup tasks).

I am currently a visiting research scholar at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, in Honolulu, HI. I have a M.Sc. and a Ph.D in computer science from the University of Fribourg, in Switzerland.

When I am not in front of a computer screen, I like to spend time with my wife and my two-years old son, read the masterpieces of the French medieval literature, study the Hawaiian folklore, listen to Frederic Chopin's nocturnes, or just play a tune on one of my occarinas.

[edit] My own experience with technology serving knowledge

When I was a teenager, I bought a 2400 bps modem (yes, that was about 135 slower than a DSL line!) and connected my Amiga computer to bulletin board systems (BBS) late at night (when the telephone charges were cheaper) to read and post articles. I was also an active member of several echomail conferences on the friendly Fidonet network.

Preoccupied by the phone bills I was handing to my parents, I soon got an amateur radio license (callsign HB9HFX) and switched to a 1200 bps packet radio modem. I started haunting the ham radio BBS on the UHF/VHF bands, mostly to read and post technical articles (this was wireless networking long before the WiFi hype!) My best memory of this period remains the contact that I made with the BBS of the Russian space station Mir (callsign R0MIR) during a night of 1996. I also contacted many fellow amateurs on the HF bands using the purest form of telecommunication for human ears: the morse code!

Then, well, came the Internet era. I immediately embraced the new technology and set up various websites on different topics. I closely tracked the evolution of the underlying technologies, mostly through the various incarnations of several programming languages (Java and PHP in particular). Blogs and Wikis are good examples showing how dynamic the Web became in the past years. I impatiently await the advent of the semantic web, which should add a new dimension to the transfer of knowledge over the Internet.

Even though I strongly believe in technology to transfer knowledge, I do not discard old-fashioned knowledge supports for all that! I love books and, in fact, translated about ten computer books from English to French for O'Reilly and Associates, including best-sellers such as Java in a Nutshell, PHP Cookbook, or Webmaster in a Nutshell.