Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

New year, new job

It's been 2 months since I left my previous job. I used this time to get some rest, think about what I wanted to do next, meet people and have lots of discussions. I've also been questioning myself if it was time to join a larger company and ...


My last day at Goojet

Today was my last day at Goojet. I've been the CTO there since april 2008, and have been involved informally with their team since even before the company was created in 2007. As in every startup, there has been ups and downs, incredible times with an amazing creative energy ...


Today is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything

Warning: super-geeky stuff ahead :-) Today is October 10, 2010, or in other words 10-10-10. This is in itself a noticeable date, but it gets even more interesting when you consider that 101010 is the binary value for 42! So today is not only 10-10-10, but also the day of the ...


10 years ago, my first mail to Apache...

Damn, I missed the date! A bit more than 10 years ago, on September 4, 2000 I sent my very first mail to an Apache mailing-list, cocoon-users. The day after I sent my first mail to cocoon-dev. And again, and again, and again... More than 4700 mails sent to the ...


Twitter victim of a basic XSS attack

The (twit)world is taken by storm with today's Javascript injection attack against Twitter. This attack is so basic it's strange it hasn't been found earlier neither by the Twitter team nor by script kiddies. Here's what it looks like : The code for the black section ...


ColiPoste : double présentation, double peine

To my english speaking readers: this is a rant about the french national parcel delivery service, that insists on ringing two times (one day and the day after) at my door while I'm at work, thus causing frustrating delays in the delivery. Une fois n'est pas coutume, voici ...


Apple, Darwin and the vivarium

Apple has a interesting relation to Darwin. On the one hand, the Unix kernel that powers all Macs and iPhone-like devices is called Darwin and was released as open source 10 years ago, with the first release of MacOS X. There even was OpenDarwin, a community effort co-created by Apple ...


[fr] Goojet cherche un admin système et responsable des opérations

[This is a job offer for a sys admin/ops position in Toulouse, France] La société Goojet dont je suis le CTO cherche un nouvel administrateur système et responsable des opérations. Le poste est basé à Toulouse, et les missions couvrent le maintien en opération, mais aussi la définition et ...


Applying game mechanics to functional software

My dear colleague Thomas recently pointed me to the enlightening presentation “Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software” where social architect Amy Jo Kim describes the mechanisms that game developers have for long used to keep the interest of gamers, and how they can be (and ...


Websites that I find useful

So I've been tagged by Stéphane. Like him, I think limiting the list to 5 sites like Ludo originally asked for will lead to everybody giving more or less the same answers: Google, Wikipedia, Amazon, LinkedIn, Flickr, etc. So let's try to make a list of useful but ...