Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

Rhino licensed as MPL, finally!

Licensing is one of the pains points when developing or using open source software, and it absolutely cannot be ignored. Rhino, the JavaScript interpreter in Java developped by Mozilla, was for some obscure historical reasons licensed as NPL, the Netscape Public Licence. The NPL license is basically the MPL (Mozilla ...


Super-Secret no more: The Venice Project

After more than 10 months in stealth mode, with some leaks and hints and the "super-secret-project" that became a recurrent joke in the Apache community as many of its members are involved, we can finally talk about it. The super-secret is no more: this is The Venice Project. So what ...


Baggage restrictions: don't be surprised if I'm not shaved

Update: Benjamin points me to one of the plain stupid situations these restrictions lead to. Here they are: after the London alert last August, the new hand haggage restrictions on european flights. I'm not sure this will actually enhance security in any way, since many people have explained that ...


Google buys Jot. What does this mean for Dojo?

So after Writely, Google has bought Jot. Where will that end? The interesting thing in Jot is that their products are based on the Dojo toolkit of which they heavily sponsored the development. How will Google will integrate this with their GWT? Will we have a Java-based programming model for ...


Spring switching to Maven? Oh no, think twice!

Update: as was to be expected, this post led to many comments and reactions. See Carlos Sanchez (with very good comments by Leo Simons and Jason Carreira) and Steve Loughran. Update 2: Stéphane gives an insider's view on our build system. And yes, I am the one that introduced ...


iTunes 7, iTV

Apple released iTunes version 7. More than just tunes, iTunes is now a complete "downloaded media" organizer. By this I mean the media you haven't created yourself, which you organize with iPhoto or iMovie. The coolest new thing is the cover flow view that gives the feeling of browsing ...


Why do I have green hairs?

Update: looks like the algorithm was changed a bit overnight, as more people have green-ish hair than yesterday (Ard and Arjé), and Maurizio has pigtails!!! No, I haven't changed the color of my hairs, but just registered for the upcoming Cocoon GetTogether and I am the only one (up ...


"Corrupted disk image". Aaaaargh!

Bad things always happen when you really don't need it. The SVN checkout of the project I'm currently working on is stored on an encrypted disk image for security reasons. We're just a few days away from the code freeze of the very first internal release, and ...


NeoOffice Aqua!

Yeah! NeoOffice, a better OpenOffice for Mac just released a new version with the Aqua interface. Still beta, but looks nice and seems to work quite well. The "official" OpenOffice for Mac is using X11, which doesn't quite provide the usual user experience Mac users are caring so much ...


Pier and Satoko

My colleague Pier had to work with my team on Monday and Tuesday. That was the occasion for him to spend the week-end here in Toulouse with his wife Satoko (also a colleague!). They seemed to enjoy the place, the sun, the old houses in the countryside, and more importantly ...