Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

No excuse for not buying a Mac

You've been dying of envy to buy a Mac to have these so cool machines in your hands and use this so cool operating system and all these so cool applications, but always be refrained because you needed some Windows-only "business" apps? No more reason for not buying a ...


ServletPath and PathInfo: servlet API weirdness

I'm playing with servlets these days, out of the Cocoon environment, and have been caught by a very strange behaviour, that is actually clearly stated in the servlet specification. Let's consider this servlet mapping in web.xml that defines "App" as the default servlet: App


You've got to find what you love

Alessandro just discovered the talk Steve Jobs gave last year to Stanford students. I found it really inspiring when I first read it last year, and even more now. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the ...


Open Development

There's more to Open Source than just source code available under an approved licence. The real value of Open Source is in the openness of the community that develops the source code. There's been a number of companies jumping in the Open Source bandwagon lately, using it merely ...


SourceSense logo contest: hurry up!

Hurry up! The logo contest organized by my good friends at SourceSense ends next Tuesday! They received many interesting contributions, and decided to add an iPod Nano as a second prize. Not as great as the first prize (a MacBook), but hey, it's not that bad!


Yes and No

Yes, as some of you have noticed, I haven't been parcicipating nor blogging much lately. Yes, my mail signature has changed. Yes, there is a reason, thanks for asking. No, I can't disclose it yet. But yes, stay tuned.


TurboWidgets: the Dojo ecosystem

TurboWidgets is a set of nicely featured widgets for Dojo toolkit (especially the TurboGrid). They're not opensource, but free for non-commercial use. It's interesting to see how the architecture of Dojo widgets, which is highly extensible, allows the emergence of a very diverse and healthy ecosystem around the ...


"Thanks for your interest in Google Video...

...Currently, the playback feature of Google Video isn't available in your country. We hope to make this feature available more widely in the future, and we really appreciate your patience." Why? I can understand that some Hollywood studios want to control the countries where their videos are distributed (although ...


Sudokid

My kids don't stop to amaze me... Remember my oldest kid's fractal paper cut? The youngest one, aged 9, discovered Sudoku a few weeks ago and decided to build his own grid. Here's what he showed us today when coming back from school: 1 2 3 7 ...


Snow!

Snow is not a common thing in Toulouse. We usually have one day of snow each year, if at all. Yesterday, when opening the windows, everything was white! No as much as in Italy, though: just enough to find it nice but not annoying. Our young cat discovered that strange ...