Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

The new iMac

It was announced at the Apple Expo in Paris: the new iMac is there! No more half-sphere: it's just a LCD screen! But the nice thing is also inside: it's powered by a G5, which means Apple engineers were able to find a solution to the cooling problems ...


Springframework.com: "professional opensource" and community dynamics

Should have blogged this earlier, but lacked the time for it. Last monday, the core developpers of the nice Spring framework announced the formation of Interface21, a company dedicated to providing "expert support, consulting and training". That's good, as it will allow them to feed their families with what ...


Back

I'm back from my yearly offline week. Refreshing times at the ocean. We met Torsten and went to a restaurant where he tried oysters. "I have to try this once in my life" he said. Done! During the dinner, my eldest child (13) started speaking with Torsten in english ...


Heading west

Tomorrow, we'll be heading west towards the Atlantic coast, for one camping week. Just as last year, this will be a fully offline week. For the first time since I have my PowerBook, I will switch it off. Yeah really off, and not asleep. A bit of computer thinking ...


Videolan fortunes

Clicking around, I found VLC's fortunes, funny excerpts of Videolan's IRC channel. Some of them really made me ROTFLMAO. A must read, although some are in french. But it's not a problem for me ;-)


Addicted to QuickSilver

Yeah, I got addicted to QuickSilver, a really cool utility that allows me to access most of the data I need in a few keystrokes. Impressive productivity boost, yet so user-friendly. Others also got addicted as well. I personally use the cmd+enter combo to call QuickSilver (the two keys ...


Belgian visitors

On Saturday, Steven and Mieke (see photo) came to visit us with their 3 children, Sander, Tim and Saar. They are currently on vacation 100 km away from our home, so this was a good occasion to meet. Very pleasant times: two families learning to know each other, talking about ...


We want native continuations in Java

More than one year ago, Cocoon brought the use of continuations to webapp development, using a special version if Rhino. Incredibly cool, as you no longer have to deal with complicated state automata to define page flow. Recently, an experimental implementation of continuations in Java was added, using bytecode preprocessing ...


European Foo Camp: sorry, I can't...

I received today an invitation from Tim O'Reilly for the upcoming first European Foo Camp, from 20 to 22th August. This is a gathering of top-level geeks with no defined schedule. The schedule self-defines when people start brainstorming together. Considering the impressive list of last Foo Camp's participants ...


Memories of a Java geek

Today I looked at AspectWerkz because I need to inject some monitoring code into existing Java libraries without modifying their code, and naturally thought about using AOP for this. Nice piece of work, especially the various kinds of on the fly weaving. And this once again triggered memories of some ...