Sylvain Wallez

The Wicket project has graduated! What this means is that after 9 months spent in the incubator, Wicket is now a real Apache project, and you'll find it pretty soon at wicket.apache.org.

9 months... just what is needed for a baby, but is actually pretty short for an incubating project. This is because the baby was already nice and healthy when entering incubation!

Congrats to the Wicket team. This project is nice, technically and socially. The job of mentors (Upayavira, Bertrand, Alex and me) to guide in the migration to Apache was really easy!

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Andrew recently invited me to Dopplr, where I can see his travels, and of course where I can add my own planned trips. Now why would I want to add yet another web 2.0 site to the LinkedIn, Flickr, Dopplr, Frappr, Twitter, and all others (including this blog) where I can tell things about myself? Also, shortly after I accepted Andrew's invitation, Ugo added me to his Dopplr contacts. Now why would I want to one more time build a network on that site with the same people I'm already linked to in other sites?

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Safari 3 will be availabe not only on the Mac as usual, but also on Windows! Browser wars again!

Now how will Apple invite Windows users to use this new browser? Nothing announced, but I assume they'll use their massive iTunes user base as a their door to the PC. Just as installing iTunes also installs QuickTime, it's likely it will also install Safari. Will they go as far as making it the default browser?

Anyway, we'll have another browser on Windows that supports SVG and the canvas tag!

I bought last saturday my first DSLR camera: a Nikon D40x kit with two lenses (a 18-55mm and a stabilized 55-200mm zoom). Kit lenses generally aren't top quality, but I didn't wanted to spend a huge amount of money, and those ones have received pretty good reviews.

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Catchy title, eh? No, no geek porn here! Lucas, who titled his blog "My Naked Truth", has been elected committer on Eclipse Modelling Project for his contribution of a search system for EMF models, using either XPath or regexp.

Pretty cool! Congrats Lucas!

PS: if you want to make Lucas happy, tell him something about how Klingon is cool, and that the Klingon charset should be officially part of Unicode :-)

Re-PS: and since he wants to increase his trafic... Lucas has Joost invites! Plenty of them!!

ApacheCon Europe 2007 is over, and it was kind of busy for me. Joost has opened the invitation gates last Thursday (no more limits) and people have rushed, overloading our backend. A stressful day (and night) was needed to fix it with Pier, Torsten and the team in Toulouse, and it now runs faster than ever.

As always, ApacheCon is a great occasion to meet people. Among the notable encounters for me:
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For some time my freezer at home was behaving strangely. Going to alarm mode because of temperature rising, but then restarting normal freezing operations when setting super-freeze mode on the control panel. It was then working correctly for one or two days and then going to alarm mode again.

Weird... obviously not a mechanical problem because super-freeze quickly brought the temperature to -30°C. A malfunctioning relay? Let's open the beast.

No relay there. All electronics, and... a tiny fly, less that 2 millimeters long, that got burnt between a transistor and a LED pins on the control panel and was perturbating the temparature regulation.

I removed the dead body of the poor fly, put back together the freezer pieces, and there we go. The freezer has been freezing normally again for about one week now!

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Google has added GeoRSS support to Google Maps and Google Earh. Pretty cool! It's now insanely easy to build your curtom map. Take a look at the instant mashup Jeremy did with his latest pictures!

What would be even cooler now is to have a digital camera with an embedded GPS to avoid the pain of manual geo-tagging :-)

While looking at some JavaScript code from Joost's client software yesterday (you should all know by now that it's based on the Mozilla platform), I found some unusual statements which led me to discover the new features in JavaScript 1.7.

It's actually not that new since it's been there since Firefox 2.0, but pretty cool anyway. JavaScript has borrowed some nice features of Python, namely generators and multiple-value returns.

The classical Fibonacci suite written with JavaScript generators:

function fib() {
  var i = 0, j = 1;
  while (true) {
    yield i;
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What is Web 2.0, and how we moved there from pen & paper in 15 years? Watch this brilliant video by Michael Welsh, assistant professor of cultural anthropology (wow!).

Via Andrea