Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

Time Fountain

When physics becomes art: the Time Fountain, an amazingly nice use of the stroboscopic effect (watch the video!)


Solr: Indexing XML with Lucene and REST

My good friend Bertrand has published an interesting hands-on article on Solr, a RESTish front-end to Lucene. We've been using Lucene quite heavily lately on my current project (even if not with Solr). It really kicks ass: fast, easy to use, robust, scalable, etc. And by using its low-level ...


Terror and insecurity

I was in New-York earlier this week (for work), and flew back to Toulouse via London yesterday, when the terrorist alert was raised. The plane landed on time in Heathrow, but it then took us more than 1 hour to effectively enter the airport. Because of increased security measures, all ...


A weird fix for no sound in Flash on MacBooks

For some time, there was no sound for Flash movies on my MacBook, and I couldn't find any way to fix it. Even tried the new Flash 9 beta with no success. I finally found the solution on MacOSXhints: open GarageBand, play anything, and you're done. Flash sound ...


SAnt: Shared Ant

Johan Stuyts, one of the fine guys at Hippo showed me SAnt ("Shared Ant") build system he's been writing up for Hippo software. This a thin layer on top of Ant and Ivy, and using Subversion as a repository. SAnt relies on "project domains", that define organisation-wide or multi-project ...


ApacheCon Dublin

Arrived in Dublin yesterday afternoon for ApacheCon, welcomed in Ireland by a sunny weather. Looks like Dubliners rush out in parks and shopping streets when it's sunny... You can follow the conference on Flickr's ApacheCon and ApacheCon 2006 tags. Today is the first of the two hackaton days ...


On JavaScript libraries

Intially meant as a comment on Andrea's blog, but worth a blog entry on its own! Andrea talks about "JavaScript libraries" and why in his opinion they're not needed. Actually, I don't really see the point about "libraries". This is more a discussion about "real JS" vs ...


ApacheCon approaching

Blogging is light these days but I'm still alive. Working on a big project with lots of smart people doesn't leave much time to blog. What's that project? I can't disclose it right now, but it's huge! I'll be at ApacheCon in Dublin next ...


Thunderbird goes universal

Thunderbird 1.5.0.4 that was released a few days ago is finally a universal binary on Macintosh. Although the PowerPC version wasn't running that bad in emulated mode compared to what it was on the PowerPook, the native Intel binary is *fast*! Considering how much I use ...


Picadilly Circus

I'll be in London for two days, close to Picadilly Circus. I heard it was rainy here lately, but today the sky is blue and the sun shines. Perfect weather for someone coming from Toulouse! The two photos below show the interesting contrast between the different buildings around the ...