Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

How to hack an iPod into an iPod-shuffle

That one made me ROTFL!! Via Erik .


Apple is cool AND cheap

Take a look a the new Mac mini. It is cool. Definitely cool. And cheap. $500. A computer that everybody can use. No complicated installation. No viruses. No nasty security holes. A computer you can put everywhere in you want: living room, room, office, etc. A computer you can move ...


Bonne année

Bonne année à tous! A happy new year to all of you! This traditional sentence seems a bit cynical when thousands of people have died in Asia and millions are homeless. But well, the show must go on and we should be optimistic and help them be happy again. On ...


Lazyweb: removing zebra stripes in Thunderbird

Dear Lazyweb, I've been searching for several hours with no success how to remove the grey zebra stripes that were added to Thunderbird for MacOSX since RC1 (see screenshot). They don't look fine on LCD screens, where darkness of shades of grey highly depend on the screen tilt ...


Struts 1.2 "cool new features"

An O'Reilly blog mentions some cool new features in Struts 1.2 among which "wildcard mappings". Woah, I'm so impressed... Yawn... looks like a poor-man's Cocoon sitemap. There was already struts-flow that brought Cocoon's flowscript to Struts, and now wildcard matching (which, let's recall it ...


Bwana: the ultimate MacOSX man page viewer

I just found Bwana, a very small utility to view Unix man pages, that once copied on your disk provides a very powerful man pages viewer in a totally invisible fashion: it handles a new "man:" URL scheme that opens a colored and hyper-linked version of the man page in ...


Cocoon training from the source

On the road again... I'll be flying to Paris in a few hours to give yet another Cocoon training. Two days covering Cocoon architecture, writing new components, Flowscript, Cocoon Forms... people usually enjoy it! Other companies are offering Cocoon training in France, but from what I've seen, then ...


3 million euros funding

A bit of business info. Anyware Technologies, the company of which I am the CTO and which I cofounded 4 1/2 years ago recently received 3 million euros funding from Spef Venture, a french VC. This funding is targeted at developing a wide range of applications and products to ...


Apache Avalon officially closed

Sad end to an ugly story, the Apache Avalon project is officially closed. I was a committer on this project, and I learned so much there that I feel sad. Its memory won't disappear though, as its developers and code have spread around over the years, infecting the industry ...


Fractal papercut

This evening, our eldest son (13) told us "today, during the history lesson, the professor was only speaking and speaking, and my hands were bored of doing nothing. So I started cutting paper, while still listening to what the professor was saying". Not sure if he was really listening, but ...