(M)Apple and the Simpsons
The Apple business and his Steveness in Simpsons land: incredibly funny, because so true! What are we ready to give away for some apple goodness! Even for iPhone developpment where you almost need to get an Apple tatoo on your heart to go to AppStore heaven!
Check out part 1 and part 2 on Dailymotion. Don't know how long they will be available, since Twentieth Century Fox already had them removed from Youtube.
And see also a similar movie on Joost.
Marketing commons
Today I was at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium that was held as part as the Eclipse Summit Europe close to Stuttgart (Germany). I was an invited speaker there, giving a talk on the various business opportunities I discovered and explored in my 10 years of involvement in the open source world. This symposium was gathering marketing people from companies members of the Eclipse Foundation to share experiences and discuss how to best promote the use of the Eclipse open source framework as the base of customer projects.
Continue reading »
Book review: Wicket in Action
More than 2 years ago, I was searching for a web application framework
to build some of the Joost
backoffice systems. I was looking for something simple yet powerful, if
that thing existed, and did not require a massive amount of learning
nor lots of XML configuration files to be able to develop something
useful. I stumbled upon a series
of articles on JavaLobby
about something called Wicket, and it was jaw-dropping: a simple
Swing-like Java library, plain HTML with a few added attributes was all
what was needed to build useful web applications.Continue reading »
Don't forget to set java.net.URL default timeouts!
If your Java application uses java.net.URL, and chances it does are very high, and you are using Sun's JVM (since 1.4.2), you should set the sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout system properties to a reasonable value. Otherwise, if a remote site hangs, your application or server will also hang.
This is what happened to Goojet this morning: because of a problem at our ISP, the TCP connections to some remote websites were just stuck, without succeeding nor failing. Our backend quickly became unresponsive, all threads waiting for remote connections.
Continue reading »
Lorem ipsum
A couple of weeks ago, I got a fidelity card from our local movie theater. They asked for an email address, and started to send a weekly newsletterspam. Not only did I tried unsucessfully to unscribe from this newsletter, but this week's edition is quite funny: it contains "lorem ipsum" text filler and misses a lot of images.
I guess someone probably hit "send" too fast or without checking, and must now be hiding somewhere after realizing this has been sent to thousands of people...
Continue reading »
Open Terminal Here, Leopard version
Not exactly new, but I just find this incredibly useful utility today. It allows to open a terminal on the directory currently selected in the Finder, with options to use a new terminal window, reuse the last window or open a new terminal tab.
An absolute must have for any terminal-aware Mac user.
Back from U.S. vacation
It’s been nearly a week now that we came back from our 2 weeks trip to the U.S. This has been very nice, except maybe the plane being delayed for 2 to 3 hours in both directions, and one rainy day. Although a bit of rain can be fun when you’re in vacation an the weather is rather hot!
We visited Washington DC, New York and Boston. This post is about my general impressions, and I plan to post later a series of posts detailing some particular aspects of the cities or the U.S. culture that particularly caught our attention as frenchies.
Washington, D.C.
Continue reading »
Java developer wanted in London or California
An ex-colleague of mine is looking for a Java developer either in London or California. This is for U-Myx, something inbetween GarageBand and the MOD/S3M/XM music files that were popular before the advent of MP3.
If you're interested, check out the job description. Note that I have no interest or affiliation of any kind with them, but I would be grateful that you inform me if you get the job after reading this!
Vacation on the East Coast
On wednesday, me and my family will be flying to the US for 2 weeks on the East Coast. We will start with 3 days in Washington DC, then one week in New York City, and finally 3 days in Boston.
If you are around and want to share a beer, or if you have interesting tips for these cities, leave a comment or drop me a mail!
Goojet lipdub
Fun times at Goojet in Toulouse yesterday: we made a lipdub with the summer song that constantly plays on the french radio this summer!