My photo gallery
My photo gallery
Some of the images were rescued from old floppies, CD-ROMs, Syquest, Zips and magneto optical disks.
Fortunately enough I kept some old Macs and drives which are still alive and well.
1952-60: Holidays, School & High school reminiscences
A lot of fun with funny drawings (during school) and home made soapbox cars (after school).
The Elastoc figurine dates back to 1952-1953 and worth the story.
Membership card of my soap box club
My fun book
"Elastoc" an early nylon figurine
1959: My portable... hu!... transportable tape recorder
I was 15 when I bought an almost professional magnetic tape-recorder. This was an affordable Fidélité 58 by Magnétic-France (Radiobois, 175 rue du temple, Paris 3e) with a lamp electronic (no transitors yet) but offering a pretty good sound quality.
I connected it to the radio set and, every morning before school, I used to switched it on to record the famous and very funny radio soap opera "Signé Furax". There was no programmable switch at that time and thus I recorded several hours of junk each day to get my 10' of fun.
With a weight of only (!!!) 25 kg it was considered as transportable and I did traveled a lot with it.
1969: My first research project
Hexogen single crystals
Crystallography lab of Prof. Regis Gay, University of Bordeaux I
I got a CEA grant for the determination of crystal structure of the secondary explosive Hexogen (C3H6N6O6, also known as RDX, Cyclonite or Esogeno). Unfortunately enough it was soon found that the structure was already published in an unclassified report of the Naval Research Laboratory.
I was then asked to study the response of the material to irradiation. As a total newbie I built a very simple experiment, a metal can containing a single crystal, an ultra-violet lamp or an X-ray tube on one side, a 16mm B&W camera on the other. I got strange results that were never published. See the movie "Hexogen, a boiling crystal"
1972: First experiments at the ILL
(jpg - 49 Ki)A Siemens AED diffractometer (from Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)
LI5 equipped with a nitrogen gas flow cryostat.
No neutron diffractometer already commissioned at that time at the ILL, the only available instrument was LI5, a four-circle X-ray diffractometer Siemens AED.
It was driven by a DEC PDP8 computer and the data input was through punched tapes on a Teletype terminal ASR-33. Since the core memory was only 4k of 12bit words, our colleague, Alain Barthélemy, had hard days tracking any empty space to implement extra assembly language instructions in this very tight space.
Together with Michel Thomas, we trained ourselves to new diffraction techniques that, later on, we introduced on single-crystal neutron-diffractometers such as D8, D9, D10, D15. We also fought a lot with a gas flow cryostat and concluded that we had to develop more reliable techniques for ILL diffractometers.
1973: Building the neutron diffractometer D8 at the ILL
Data input and programming through the Teletype terminal ASR-33 of D8
Driving the instrument through the many buttons of a CAMAC electronics
The proud team of the neutron diffractometer D8 at the ILL.
(Left: Michel Thomas, right: Alain Filhol)
D8 was a very high flux neutron 4-circle diffractometer now replaced by D19. It had a stout eulerian cradle and this made it possible no compromise low temperature experiments down to 10 K (double stage Displex cryocooler) and high pressure experiments (gas pressure cell up to 0.5 Gpa).
1980: My son Fabien
Only good memories! I really liked playing with him.
1981: ID card for the CEA-CENG
The Centre d'Etudes Nucléaires de Grenoble (CENG) of the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique (CEA) is a large research center near the ILL with which there was a lot of interaction.
Not my first CEA-CENG ID card but the oldest I could find.
At that time it was easy to access and collaborate with local labs, now getting a pass is much more complicated.
1984: Refilling the helium cryostat of D15
D15 was a neutron diffractometer build by Michel Thomas and now decommissioned.
It had a normal-beam option very convenient for low temperature and/or high pressure experiments. This allowed me to measure the structure of the superconducting phase of the 1D organic conductor beta*-(BEDT-TTF)2I3 at 4.5 K and 1.5 Kbar.
It had also a 4-circle option with a stout eulerian cradle with offset phi circle. Michel and I, we solved the blind region problem through an automated use of Renninger rotations.
1992: Science festival in Grenoble
Students agglutinated around a Macintosh, a big success indeed! They are discovering "Video_ILL_interactive" an early multimedia presentation of the ILL. An Hypercard™ engine was used to drive a set of Magic™ animations and several C and Pascal interactive simulations of neutron experiments.
The team : A.Filhol (ILL), Jean Polge de Combret and Yves Baulac (Diadème ingénierie), Albert Wright (ILL).
1992-94: Caricatures
(jpg - 106 Ki)My son Fabien (1992). Street art
Me as seen by my son (1994)
(1992) My son Fabien
Street art in St Jean-de-Monts (Vendée, France). All our relatives agree that the caricature is excellent.
(1994) Myself
Yes it is just how I look 'for real'! My son had a lot of fun with Photoshop.
1998: Me at Apple Expo 98 in Paris
(html - 2.18 Ki)Click the image to spin my head!
Quicktime VR was a brand new technology by Apple at that time and Briq demonstrated it at the Apple Expo (Paris) by shooting some of the visitors.
If stitching photos together to produce panoramas, either cylindrical or spherical, was totally new at that time, it is now very popular and available even on smartphones. The ILL virtual tour is based on a series of such spherical panoramas.
The original file by Briq: AF-AppleExpo98.mov if you still have an old Mac OS supporting Quicktime VR.
1999: My son "Fab-the-genius" is growing up
Nothing but wonderful memories! No need to detail.
1999: My friends Jacques and Nénesse in my office
Together we developped a set of Mac aplications in Pascal implementing statistical algorithms and taking advantage of the Macintosh toolbox. Our main tool was a Mac+ with an external drive. Our main achievements were ABFfit (neutron powder diffraction data analysis), MacSurvival (survival analysis for physicians), ABCstat (statistical analysis), three programs for Mac OS classical with advanced statistical algorithms.
Prof. Jacques Berruyer (Univ. St Etienne, France)
Prof. Jacques Berruyer (Univ. St Etienne, France)
Our development setup
2000: JDN9 at Colleville-sur-mer
2001: With my son
2000- First test of a WACOM pen tablet.
2001- My son and I we are testing a new digital camera, a Sony Cybershot DSC-F505.
2002: Tartaras school equiped with Macs from the ILL
I equiped the school of the village of Tartaras (Loire, France) with written-off Macintoshes from the ILL. Those were perfect for teaching the basis of word processing and drawing, as well as networking. The latter was the self configuring Appletalk personnal network because it was so simple to install and manage.
2003: The Computing for Science group and friends
A pot to celebrate something important or, may be, just for the pleasure.
2004: My smiling wife happy to retire
We first met at the ILL.
She impressed me very much by the way she handled my request for technical information.
She never felt to impress me since then.
2004: Nanopolis
Nanopolis (iMediasoft group), the editor of my neutron encyclopedia "Exploring matter with neutrons", asked me for a photo.
The project lasted from 1999 to 2005 and I traveled twice to Bucharest to work with Dan Bog's team at iMediaSoft. I have excellent memories of the trips except for a crazy French expatriate that almost killed us twice during an excursion to Dracula's castle.
The encyclopedia is no longer available in the form of a CD-ROM is still available here.
2005: Hang gliding at St Hilaire du Touvet
(mp4 - 1.13 Mi)My very first flight! Bogdan Burdalescu (iMediasoft) also had his very first flight. This was his first travel outside Roumania and, after working hard at the Mac OS version of the CD "Exploring matter with neutrons, we had to celebrate with something huge.
Here the flight school advertising: Learning to fly?
2007: My wife and I discovering Photo Booth on my new MacBook pro
A good way to convince her that she needs a modern Macintosh with a built in camera.
30 Sept 2009: Retirement party
A photo of the celebration.
From left to right: Alain Filhol, Michel Thomas, Garry McIntyre, Ken Andersen
2010: ILL scale model
©2010 Briq, Francis Gorgé
Modernization of the ILL scale model. Brieuc Segalen (briq.com) shows an early version of the new interface developed together with Olivier Vinot and Francis Gorgé. Yannick Raoul also helped for tests and the auto-restart procedure.
The scale model software was designed with a mixture of SPIP (CMS), javacript, PHP, Flash, AppleScript, MAMP, Safari, Shaft (kiosk mode), etc. The data base contained 500 web pages with 900 images, about 100 animations and some videos.
In 2012 the content of the scale model data base was ported to Typo3 (CMS) and is now part of the ILL's web site.
2010: Object panorama shooting
A high pressure cell was placed on a cradle and manually rotated step by step. Laurent Thion (Ecliptique) records photos at various elevation angles.
An ugly tinkered setup indeed but we could not anticipate the working constraints.
The 1st photo can be seen at page 207 of the book "Photographier en toute stabilité" (i.e. Photograph in total stability) by Laurent Thion, 2010, Dunod.
2011: Making movies
(jpg - 150 Ki)Here at work at the level D of the ILL reactor.
The camera is a SONY HDR-HC7, an excellent choice for a novice cameraman!
The stand is a Manfrotto Kit 501HDV,755CX3K.
2012: My first smartphone/tablet application
Neutrons4Science (for the web, iOS or Android) is an application developed in collaboration with Ipter, a company that no longer exists. It offers a set a scientific animations demonstrating some aspects of neutron science and techniques. The animations are both 3D and interactive and one of them is in the form of a serious game.
The web version desappeared with the ban of browser's plug-ins but the "Magnon" part (html - 57 Ki) was resurected using webm.
2016: Esmeralda collaboration
A Ge single crystal cut in the form of a sphere.
Esmeralda is a Laue diffraction package. I am encharged of producing the macOS versions.
One of the main problem with Laue pattern processing is extracting reliable integrated intensities. This implies estimating the incident beam spectrum from the data of a well-known crystal. I organised a collaboration with Benoît Boulanger and Jérôme Debray (Institut Néel/CNRS). Jérôme produced this nice germanium crystal cut in the form of a sphere.
Unfortunately, neutron tests showed that, if the crystal kept his optical properties, his mosaicity was strongly impacted.
Linus38 - self employment
Due to both changes in laws and regulations and the lack of an emeritus status at the ILL, I was forced to self-employment to regain access to ILL's buildings (ZAC zone), instruments and facilities.
Hence Linus38 was created on the 8th of March 2023.
2023 - Time lapses
As a backup solution for an external service ordered too late, Yannick Raoul and I, we built a cheap, quick and dirty, time lapse solution for one year works on the 1st neutron guide hall and in the reactor. 3D printing, Python, shell script, Fortran programming, Hanbrake scripting ...
A lot of fun but at the expense of many hours of work.
The result can be seen here: XtremeD work, H1/H2 pool, D11+ upgrade
2024 - My first experiment at ISIS
My very first trip to ISIS, the English neutron facility, was for an experiment on the instrument VESUVIO together with Gilles Noguère (CEA Cadarache). The trip, the stay and the experiment itself were a real pleasure.