Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

Mounting zip archives?

One of the cool features of MacOSX is the ".dmg" archives, which are disk images that can be mounted as filesystems. Now most of non-Mac archives are Zip files, and I'm wondering if some utility exists to mount them in the Finder, which would allow to browse their content ...


Apple's hidden X11 installer

I wanted to intall OpenOffice on my PowerBook, and it requires X11. No problem, I thought, as Apple ships X11 with Panther. It's not part of the default system install, so let's get it from the DVD. However, I only got a system restore DVD which is different ...


PowerBook hardware impressions

Some impressions after a few days spent in my new digital home. Let's start by the hardware. The PowerBook has many features (and non-features) that make life easy with it. Some may seem futile, but are so important when you spend the largest part of your week days with ...


A day in the hospital

Yesterday morning, my son and I went to the hospital to control how things were going under his arm's plaster. Bad. The broken bones had moved and were no more aligned. So instead of a simple visit, we stayed the whole day there (went out at 10pm), as the ...


Switch!

Yessssss! The baby has finally arrived: a nice 15" PowerBook (the one with DVD burner and backlit keyboard). Joy! Joy! Joy! Power on, enter a few information (language, user name, etc) and it works. The first amazing experience is the network connectivity: it's easier to find a Windows PC ...


Broken arm (again)

A few months ago, my oldest son injured his two arms while iceskating. Yesterday morning, he fell strongly on hard and icy snow during his snowboard lesson (weather conditions were bad), and broke his left arm. We spent the afternoon in the hospital, where the fracture was set, and the ...


Ski holidays

I'm off for one week in the Alps. We go at my parents-in-law's house just near a ski resort. Very convenient, as they take care of the infrastructure! No DSL here: broadband has not yet reached the deep mountain valleys. I fallback to the good old (and slow ...


Stefano teaches RDF

Stefano is quickly getting up to speed in his new job at the MIT, and explains us why and how RDF can be used. A very interesting read. Others like that one will certainly help more people to understand the benefits of the semantic web stuff. Keep writing, Stefano!


Mobile server applications with Cocoon

Read this great introduction by Matthew on Mobitopia explaining why Cocoon rocks to build mobile (and more generally multi-channel) server applications. And remember also that Orixo is heavily involved in these projects.


No donut for Orkut

Error messages are like easter eggs. Not easily visible, but often funny. Here's what Orkut told me this evening when I tried to login.