Fabrice Bellet's web page

Fabrice Bellet

I'm an employee of the CNRS, with the status of engineer, currently working at CREATIS laboratory.

My diary will hopefully be updated from time to time.

Fedora contributor

I maintain the official packages for Fedora providing the Flightgear open-source, multi-platform flight simulator, and a couple of related software, fgrun, the FlightGear launcher, and Atlas, a cool tool providing high-quality maps based on FlightGear Sceneries, and also a flying-assistance companion.

As part of my work, I also provide some other unofficial Fedora packages, for scientific sofware, including CERN's Geant4 simulation toolkit, ODIN the object-oriented development interface for NMR, AMIDE, a medical imaging data examiner, and some other.

Free Software contributions

While using Fedora for my linux desktop, I happen to encounter sometimes bugs and misbehaviors in the applications I use. Even if these bugs are reported upstream, they may not be fixed immediately for a variety of reasons (the developers cannot reproduce the problem for example, or the patch is too ugly and not generic enough), so I needed I way to quickly fix the software, when I could.

For this goal, I maintain a local repository of RPM packages for Fedora, mostly following the official packages releases, and just including some patches when needed. There's no warranty that theses packages work for you, but they may help.

Another of my interests is the MAME, Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, and more specifically the MESS project, that targets old vintage 8-bits computer that existed in the eighties. I started using computers with such a beast, a long time ago... MAME is a very interesting tool to emulate such an old computer, because it focuses on the emulation quality of each hardware chip that composes a machine, which makes MAME very generic because a given emulated chip may appear in a lot of emulated machines, and emulating a complete machine is relatively straighforward, by providing the definition of the relations between these emulated chips together. MAME with its integrated debugger is also an incredible tool to provide an ubiquitous view of the way these old computers worked internally: it is now possible in MAME to follow the execution of the emulated processor instruction per instruction, to inspect its registers, to change its memory, to set breakpoints, all of these actions at the level of the emulated machine. It becomes possible to discover clever and efficient programming tricks by the people, who wrote the code for these computers initially.

I'm also interested in the software stack that allows audio and video chat capabilities between linux users, without relying on proprietary source and protocols, starting from the empathy GNOME software, the telepathy communication framework, including the XMPP protocol, the GStreamer multimedia framework, and going to the low level communication elements, Farstream, libnice, implementing the required RFC for ICE, STUN and TURN. These components require some fine-tuning, patches and customization to make them work together in the expected way.

I contributed to some patches in the software allowing geolocation in linux, using commodity hardware like broadband modem cards, typically including GPS capabilities. The GPS raw data are provided to the system with the ModemManager software. Another component like Geoclue gathers geolocation data from various source with different accuracy, the GPS being one of them, but also GSM cell tower geolocation, Wifi ESSID positions, collected by the Mozilla Location Service, and provides it to other part of the the linux desktop that requires geolocation service, for example GNOME Maps, Empathy or Firefox.

RPMFind

I maintain the RPMFind server in my lab, thanks to CISR for providing the needeed bandwidth, that I could certainly not afford. The goal of this service is to provide mirroring capabilities for popular RPM-based linux distributions, and also and mainly an html representation of the content of RPM packages (set of included files, change logs, dependencies, aggregated information per distribution...). RPMFind offers a search engine on top of all this indexed metadata, which allows to query for package details in an independant way of a particular linux distribution.

Unix docs

I wrote some documentation about Unix practice for the new students in my laboratory in French. This stuff is really messy, and incomplete. So contributions and are welcome to improve this document.

PHD Thesis

I obtained a PHD thesis in 1998, at the Grenoble INP, France. I worked in the TIMC laboratory under the responsibility of Catherine Garbay in the Computer Vision field.

You can grab my report as a postscript file or as LaTeX sources in french, as well as the slides of my talk in french too :

My public PGP Key