Sylvain Wallez

Today is my 36th birthday. Last square number was 25 (wow, I was young at that time), and next one will be 49 (wow, I'll be old at that time).

Time goes on, and seems to speed up each year. My theory about this is that the fraction of our life that a year represents is smaller each year, hence this impression of acceleration. Other acceleration factors are children (they fill empty moments) and Apache (which fills the remaining empty moments) !

My gift should have been an Ixus V3 (aka Powershot S230) digital camera : a small digital jewel. But Canon is currently out of stock :-( If I can't have one in the coming weeks, I may change for a Powershot S45, although bigger.

Back in december, I blogged about the CVS protocol I was working on. I'm please to announce its availability on cocoondev.org.

Steven kindly accepted to host this because of some LGPL constraints that forbid it to be at Apache. This was the occasion of some pleasant chat sessions. Thanks for all, Steven !

We used to call Ovidiu "our favorite HP employee". And today he announces he's leaving HP for the famous Google.

So from now on he will be "our favorite Google employee" (actually, he's the only one I know). I hope to see one day the "powered by Cocoon" logo on Google's main page.

Congratulations, Ovidiu and enjoy you new job (and tell us how it's inside).

Michael Melhem and Jeff Turner have been proposed (here and here) and massively voted as new Cocoon committers.

Funny how such nominations are "in the air" : I was thinking or proposing Michael when Ovidiu did it. Apparently, Steven had the same idea at the same time.

Michael is a great guy that I had the chance to meet at the Cocoon Get Together last november. With Marcus, he's our second Germano-Australian committer. Unfortunately, none of them has a blog.

Today, cocoon-dev looked like a chat room. Carsten and I, seconded by Nicola Ken and Stephan, were discussing at the speed of light on some design and naming issues.

In other groups this kind of discussions quickly turn to flame wars, but this almost never happens on Cocoon. Discussions are hot, but targetted at a goal that's common to its participants : make Cocoon better and nicer.

I like these discussions, even if they eat a lot of time when I have something else to do. They are the ones that really build the community, help people to better know each other and make the developer group strong.

Two answers for you, Matthew :

• the geek answer : buy a PDA like the cool Sony Cli� (yes, I have one) or a PDA-like phone like the Motorola A388 or the SonyEricsson P800 (no, I don't have one)
• the non-geek answer : use, ahem... a paper and a pen ! It's always ready for use, and smaller and lighter than any electronic device you'll be able to find ;-)

Today it's snowing here in Toulouse. This hasn't occured for 3 or 4 years, so it's a real event, and people are absolutely not used to that.

My sons were jumping everywhere when they saw the garden covered by white cotton, while my wife was very anxious : although she likes domesticated snow in ski resorts, she has an irrational fear of driving on the snow, even if it's more like water on salted roads.

Let's hope now that it won't be too cold and roads will not turn into skating rinks...

Between Christmas and New Year, we went to Paris to visit our family (both my wife's and mine). Lots of gifts, lots of food ! We also visited the Eiffel Tower and Disneyland Paris. Lots and lots of people :-(

Disneyland has a very carefully crafted queue management : people park lanes are kilometer-long and provide some in-queue attractions to help people waiting. But that doesn't change the time you spend waiting : during the day, it ranged from 20 minutes (just after the opening at 10 am) to 115 minutes in the afternoon. I refused queuing for more than 60 minutes. Waiting nearly two hours under the rain for a 5 minutes travel in a small train seems totally crazy to me.

I wish you all, known and unknown readers, a happy new year. Feel free to add comments so that you are less unknown ;-)

Matthew writes a funny modern Christmas tale. Do you think Santa has read ClueTrain ?

Happy Christmas to all of you !