I was born in 1955, last Sunday of the year. Other times. Half French, half Spanish but grown up in France. I have been working from 1990 to 2019 in the same company as a software engineer in the OCR team. My company was dedicated to postal equipment, providing letter sorting machines as well as IT solutions. I am retired now.
You can contact me at gilles_arcas at hotmail dot com.
Facebook: active only when traveling.
github: hobbyist programming projects.
Here are the personal programming projects I have carried on far enough to be useful for other people.
Drago is a Windows freeware program dedicated to the game of Go (baduk, weiqi). A kind of Swiss army knife which functions include game editing, game reviewing, game printing and exporting, problem solving and game database handling. It enables also to connect to game engines providing a user friendly interface.
A command line program to download and manage tile databases. Tiles are the pieces of image used to display maps. This is actually the program I use to download maps when preparing my bicycle rides.
sed.py is a full and working Python
implementation of sed. Its reference is GNU sed 4.2 of which it
implements almost all commands and features. It may be used as a command
line utility or it can be used as a module to bring sed functionality
to Python scripts.
Compiling python into sed. numsed compiles a
small subset of python into sed scripts. This subset is sufficient to
make any calculation using integer numbers.
An implementation of lisp language written in python. Shallow binding and tail recursion optimization coded with exceptions.
I have learnt to play Go in the eighties but really tried to improve in the nineties. I have participated to some tournaments and some French summer camps. I had also some lessons with Farid Ben Malek 5d. I have been a member of the "club d'Antony" and the "club de Cachan".
At my best, I played as a 4k although I never went above 5k on the French ladder. No more seriously playing now and my rank is slowly declining.
Here is the list of the main tours I have ridden so far:
| July 2025 - March 2026 | South America |
part1 part2 part3 |
9 months | 11 700 km |
| May 2025 | Lyon - Antibes |
blog |
2 weeks | 800 km |
| May-December 2024 | Vancouver - Panama |
part1 part2 part3 |
seven months | 12 200 km |
| March-September 2023 | Melbourne - Darwin - Perth |
part1 part2 part3 |
six months | 10 000 km |
| July-October 2022 | Paris-Istanbul-Paris | blog | three months and half | 6700 km |
| March-May 2022 | USA - Southern Tier |
part1 part2 |
three months | 5450 km |
| Summer 2021 | Paris-Malaga-Paris |
part1 part2 |
three months | 5850 km |
| Summer 2020 | Tour de France |
part1 part2 |
two months | 4400 km |
| July-August 2019 | Strasbourg-Bucharest (Eurovelo6) | blog | seven weeks | 3000 km |
| February-March 2019 | Adelaide-Darwin |
part1 part2 |
two months | 3300 km |
| August 2018 | Basel-Gien-Melun (EV6, EV3) | eight days | 850 km | |
| November-December 2017 | Perth-Adelaide, crossing Nullarbor | blog | five weeks | 2750 km |
| June 2017 | Paris-Roscoff-Biarritz | blog | one month | 2200 km |
| August 2016 | Paris-London-Paris | nine days | 650 km | |
| August 2015 | Loire à vélo - Nantes Nevers | eight days | 640 km | |
| May 2015 | Brisbane-Cooktown | blog | five weeks | 2400 km |
| July 2014 | Paris-Santiago | blog | one month | 2300 km |
| August 2013 | Basel-Budapest on the Eurovelo6 following the rivers Rhin and Danube | three weeks | 1500 km | |
| May 2013 | Canal du Midi, Cap d'Agde, Mazamet, Olargues | eleven days | 800 km | |
| February-March 2013 | Adelaide - Melbourne and the tour around the bay of Melbourne | blog | one month | 1700 km |
| August 2012 | Basel - Nevers, tour of Burgondy, Nevers - Paris | three weeks | 1600 km | |
| May 2012 | Canal de Nantes à Brest, canal du Blavet, Quimper | youtube | nine days | 600 km |
| July 2011 | La Loire à vélo, Nevers - Saint Brévin - Nantes | two weeks | 700 km | |
| Total | 81 500 km |
Histogram of daily distances. Average is 79 km per day (n = 784).