David Madore

[Une version française de cette page est également disponible.]

Welcome to this Web site! If you're looking for my professional Web site, it is elsewhere, this one is more personal and less serious, and at any rate more eclectic. If you're looking for something specific, you had best consult the site map to locate it. If you want to learn the latest news about me (and this site), read my WebLog.

If you stumbled here more or less randomly, you might want find out who I am, but I first request that you read the important warning below. You may also want to have a look at what's cool on this site.

Please consider this site as “work in permanent unprogress”: it is basically unmaintained now, so broken links and unfinished or completely obsolete pages abound. I rarely complete what I start, hence the many abandoned projects you'll find here. And even when I have the energy to finish something, I never have the patience to maintain it afterward, hence the creeping obsolescence of just about everything. Sorry about that.

If you need to send me email, my address is david[plus]www[at sign]madore[dot]org. Note that I tend to reply to email in a rather random way (it's not anything personal!).

Now for a few introductory words to this Web site.

Foreword

What is to be found here?

Basically, anything that interests me. There is no common unifying theme to my site because there is no common unifying theme to my interests. I suggest you take a look at the site map (or, if you are lazy, the coolest pages) to find out more. Or read my WebLog to learn about my daily musings.

Some important disclaimers

The first and foremost warning that I want to put up concerns the judgment you should (not) have on these pages, and on me through these pages. You should keep in mind that I don't know who you are, or what you are interested in (and, considering the variety of pages found here, it could be a lot of things). Remember this: I must write the same Web pages for everyone: for my friends, my relatives, my colleagues as a mathematician, those who know me through my interest in computer science, those who know very little of me and will try to find out more through this Web site, but also my lovers or ex-lovers, and, of course, all those who have simply stumbled upon this site in their aimless wandering around the Infinite Web. It is a very difficult exercise to write to all these people in the same way: whereas in Real Life one tends to present oneself in a slightly different light depending on whom one is talking to, I simply cannot afford that luxury here. It is a risk that I take, I know, to write anyway, and this Web site could (and indeed will) give a disastrous image of me to some people. So, I take the risk, but I add the following important (and perhaps strange) disclaimer:

When reading these pages, you agree to keep in mind that the impression they might give of their author would not be the same as that which you might get by meeting me in Real Life. You promise to be prudent in forming an opinion: you may use this site for your personal information or amusement, but you should not pass judgment, ill or good, on me personally, based on its content, or its existence.
If you do not agree with these terms, you may leave now.

That is not all. You must also remember that just about everything here is quite out of date, many are unfinished (sometimes with an explicit TODO to indicate what should be added next) and possibly never will be finished (because I may have lost interest, or lost patience, or because I no longer have the time). I always welcome updates and corrections to my Web site, but sometimes I do not have the time to take them into account or even respond to them, and I apologize in advance. Also, the coexistence of several different page styles gives my site a very battered look, I am aware of that, but I, again, do not have the time to make everything uniform. As for the organization, I know it is catastrophic, and there is little I can do that will efficiently improve it.

Furthermore, make allowance for the fact that English is not my native tongue, and although I have a tolerable command of it, I know I make occasional spelling or grammar mistakes, and I tend, more frequently than not, to use phrases that are unidiomatic, or, worse, that mean things quite different from what I intend. Please be comprehensive and remember that content is more important than form. Note, besides, that translating from English to French or vice versa, as I do for some pages, requires a considerable effort (to keep the pages always synchronized), even though it might not appear.

Thanks

Many thanks go to all those who have helped me, at some point or another, in making this site not totally suck, by pointing out errors or making corrections, by providing information, or by sending any kind of feedback, even if the feedback is still buried in my TODO backlog.

I also thank the École Normale Supérieure for having hosted this site for so long, even after I ceased being a student there, on the students' server (of which I am one of the webmasters).

Special thanks go to Google for being the wonderful tool that it is, and for making the Web a really usable source of information. Also, of course, to the World Wide Web Consortium for maintaining the standards that I use to write this page, and to Tim Berners-Lee for having invented the Web in the first place! (And I guess I should similarly thank Vinton Cerf for having invented the Internet.)

Last but not least, thanks to you, reader, for reading all this.

Whither now? Well, to the site map, for example. (It used to be on this page, but has now been moved.)