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Jean-loup's home page

Hi! I'm Jean-loup Gailly. Here are some of the things I'm interested in.

Data compression
gzip
zip
zlib
fractal image compression
comp.compression FAQ
Security
Patents
The game of go

Data compression
I am the author of gzip, a data compression program relatively popular on the
Internet, designed to replace compress. Mark Adler wrote the decompression
code. For this work Mark and I received the Usenix 2009 STUG award
(video).

I have written the compression code of the portable archiver zip of the Info-Zip
group. zip and unzip are compatible with the pkzip archiver.

The zip compression code is used in the PGP encryption program.

 In collaboration with Mark Adler, I have written the zlib, data compression
library, which lets you compress or decompress data in memory or read and
write files in the gzip format.

The data format used by the zlib library is described by RFCs (Request for Comments) 1950
(zlib format) and 1951 (deflate format). This format is used in particular in the PNG image
format. A closely related format has been adopted for one of the PPP compression protocols.
zlib is used in many other applications (Apache, PGP, Java, Microsoft Office...).

The zlib authors can be reached by e-mail at zlib@gzip.org . Please read the FAQ and the
manual before asking us for help. We are getting too many questions which already have an
answer in the zlib documentation.

I am a coauthor of Mark Nelson's book The Data Compression Book; I wrote

the chapter on fractal image compression. A short introduction to fractal
compression is also given here.

The sources of my fractal compression program are here (tar.gz or zip format).

Finally, I created the FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) of the comp.compression

newsgroup. (Also available by ftp.) In particular if you wonder how to extract a
file in format X on a system Y, please check the FAQ before posting or mailing.

Security
I have a strong interest in computer security. See my specific security page about this.

Patents
Before the release of gzip, I studied a lot of patents on data compression to make sure that
my implementation avoided all of them. See section 8 of the comp.compression FAQ for a
small subset (several dozen) of all patents I've looked at.

During my search, I found two interesting patents on a process which is mathematically

impossible: compression of random data. This is somewhat equivalent to patents on
perpetual motion machines. Check here for a short analysis of these two patents.

Work
In 1978, I published together with James Lequeux, my professor at the Ecole
Polytechnique, a paper on the galactic distribution of pulsars (Astronomy and
Astrophysics, 70, L15-L18, 1978). A pulsar is not visually appealing, so have a look instead
at Cygnus Loop which contains a pulsar. The Crab Nebula results from the explosion of a
supernova in 1054; it houses a pulsar in its center.

In 1979 and 1980, I studied the stratospheric turbulence within the Service d'Aéronomie du
CNRS, by attaching a very sensitive anemometer under a stratospheric balloon filled with
hydrogen.

From 1981 to 1989 I participated in the construction of code generators and real-time
systems for the Ada language within Alsys. I was a member of the Ada language design
team.

From 1990 to 1995 I was responsible for the real-time executive of the Chorus micro-kernel.

From 1996 to 1999 I have been responsible for medical imaging applications
within General Electric Medical Systems.

From 1999 to 2001 I was CTO of Mandrakesoft, the company producing the
Linux Mandrake operating system. I was then interviewed on Slashdot.

In June 2001 I joined Vision IQ / Poseidon, a software company

specialized in computer vision, as Chief Information Officer and Chief
Software Architect.

From 2003 to 2006 I led the Release Management Tools

team at Business Objects.

From 2006 to 2014 I was Tech Lead Manager at Google

Switzerland then Google France.
 I am a fan of the game of go (also named WeiChi or WeiQi in China and Baduk in
Korea). Visit my go page to see some nice images.

The French newspaper Planete Linux interviewed me for its Oct. 2002 issue. The text and
images are here (in French).

Thanks to Zjev Ambagts and Ken Warkentyne for images of go players. Thanks to Bill Chin
for some of the clipart used in this page.

Send your comments to jloup@gailly.net . My PGP key is here. You can call me
either Jean-loup or Jean-Loup, but not Jean or Mr. Loup!
Last modification: Mai 2019.
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