Sylvain Wallez

Google is shaking the social networking arena lately. After OpenSocial, they unveiled yesterday the social graph API.

What is it? Basically a specific use of the complete set of hypertext links they build while crawling the web. The links between people (or their website) described using XFN or FOAF can now be searched to discover who is linked to who, and on what site.

Practically, this means that when you register in a new social network, that site can ask Google who your relations are, and tell you who among those are already registered on this new network so that you can more rapidly rebuild your network in the new site. This service can also allow you to know what sites your friends are registered in, which might also be of interest to you.

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Anyware Technologies, the company I've been co-founding more than 7 years ago was bought by Wavecom today. Wavecom is a manufacturer of embedded wireless communication modules that wants to expand its activity higher in the application stack to provide end-to-end solutions.

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Happy New Year to you all, known and unknown readers!

This year is not yet 2 days old, and there already has been a big change since last year: it is now forbidden to smoke in bars and restaurants in France. Woohoo! No more painfully enduring bad smell or "sorry the non-smoking area is full but we still have room in the smoker's area".

This is a request to my dear readers. I'm currently looking for a replacement for my Canon Ixus 40 camera. I've never been very happy with its image quality, and lately the lens is doing scary mechanical noise like some missing teeth on gears, and it seems to be loosing sensitivity, pushing the ISO to higher values, thus increasing the image noise.

So I'm looking at the current compact cameras, and nothing really stands out of the crowd. Manufacturers have been pushing resolution to incredible values (up to 12 Mpix) for small sensors, leading to quite noisy pictures when you go past 200 or 400 ISO.

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Google's annoucement of the Open Handset Alliance a few days ago wasn't that exciting: an interesting group of partners and some interesting perspectives, but the meat was missing. It arrived yesterday with the actual release of the Android SDK. And... wow!

This is a complete stack, from the kernel (Linux, of course) up to a very capable web browser (Webkit, also used on the iPhone and the Nokia's) up to the application layers. And the application development is done in Java... or is it?

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Yes, like many others, I want up to date Java support on the Mac! I don't care if it comes from Apple or Sun, but I want it. The Mac is very popular in the opensource Java development community, and these über geeks are very visible (just look at conference pictures) and are purchasing advisors in their work places in "business oriented" departments, i.e. not limited to the creative workers, and also in their families (my parents, sister and parents in law each have several Macs).

So Apple, read this: if you neglect Java developers, you will loose marketshare.

There is one utility I couldn't live without on my Mac, it's QuickSilver, that allows me to launch/open/reach all the stuff I routinely use throughout the day with a few keystrokes. An incredible productivity booster that up to now was a closed development by a unique (although brilliant) person.

I just read on TUAW that QuickSilver is now open source! Yay! And even better, it uses the Apache License. I now know that QuickSilver will be there for a long time, for our pleasure and productivity.

Many thanks to "Alcor", it's author. QuickSilver rocks!

Urged by the explosive growth of Facebook, Google and a number of partners have unveiled the OpenSocial APIs that were rumored for some time. Pretty interesting stuff that will allow the development of portable widgets (or gadgets as Google calls them).

My feeling is that Google doesn't aim to be a major player as a hosting platform. Their Orkut was one of the first social networks (I was invited when it opened in 2004) but is not really successful, except among brazilian girls :-)

So their interest is most probably in the creation of a large ecosystem of social networks, which will use Google ads as their primary revenue source. Don't compete directly with Facebook, but feed those who will.

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Erlang has a very rudimentary typing system, there are some primitive types (atoms, binaries, integers and floats), functions (it's a functional language), aggregate types (lists and tuples) and a bunch of Erlangisms (pid, port, and reference – a kind of UUID). The record type is really a tuple in disguise, since a record is a tuple whose first term is the record name, followed by the record fields in their declaration order.

And that's all. There are no means to define complex types as we are used to in traditional OO languages, nor is it possible to to associate behavior to a data structure by means of a class (or a prototype in JavaScript). This is surprising for a long-time OO developer that spends a lot of time to carefully craft class diagrams. But I think this is actually part of Erlang's strength.

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Amazon has published yesterday what is going to be a seminal article, just like Google's papers on MapReduce and BigTable.

The article presents Dynamo, their scalable key/value store. The very interesting thing is that it assembles a lot of concerns that are usually addressed individually in the litterature with the production constraints in mind. Data partitioning and replication, disconnected writes with resynchronisation, load balancing, etc.

An additional example that many applications can be implemented with simple key/value pair stores and that relational databases are more an out-of-the-box comfort we've been used to over the years, but that don't work at a huge scale.

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