Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

A simple distributed lock with memcached

When you have a cluster of web application servers, you often need to coordinate the activity of your servers to avoid the same expensive work being done at the same time when a condition triggers it. Most people use memcached as a simple key/value store but it can also ...


DYI multi-touch table

I'm pretty sure you've already seen some demos of Microsoft Surface (if not, look here). Pretty amazing and sci-fi, eh? Also sci-fi is the ReacTable which allows building sound synthetizers by just moving cubes around on a surface. The hardware for these things for a cheap personal setup ...


What happened to JCache, aka JSR-107?

Looking around for Java cache systems, I found that a lot of them claim to be JSR-107 compliant. Now this JSR never went past the review ballot in 2001, and the latest available draft is from 2005. Among the products that claim compliance, some of them are "serious" ones and ...


Tracking application installation on mobile phones

In any web 2.0 business, it is important to understand where you new users come from to understand where to put the effort in order to increase your user base. Browser-based services usually embed tracking information in URLs, but things are more difficult when you provide mobile phone applications ...


Quote of the day

Very nice quote from Brian McCallister on Twitter: Before saying "but there is more support for X," remember, there is more support for breathing underwater than above. This is so true: sometimes, using a different tool or technology, or even simply a different approach removes a whole set of problems ...


Ad Hoc distribution of an iPhone application

We're preparing a big new release at Goojet, and wanted to collect some feedback from some of our users. For iPhone applications, Apple allows "ad-hoc" installation of an application on up to 100 devices, without going through the AppStore and its painful validation process. Reading the documentation, this sounds ...


Kids grow fast... my son is 18 today

My first son is 18 today, which in France means he is officially an adult. At 24 I was rather young when he was born, but still, today is a milestone. Another important milestone was last september, when he left the home to study in Montpellier, only coming back home ...


Speaking at the Toulouse JUG

The Toulouse Java User Group was recently created, and I will give a talk about J2ME development at its first meeting. There will also be a talk on GWT, and plenty of time for informal discussions around the buffet. So if you happen to be around on May 12th, you ...


Will Oracle kill MySQL? Who cares? A lot of people.

I borrowed part of this post's title from an interesting article at The Register. Basically, the article says Oracle now owning MySQL won't change anything, since MySQL is already dying because of the slow pace at which new features are released, and that forks are already in the ...


Google's stealth social network

Google has silently released a personal profile service, whose purpose is to "give you greater control over what people find when they search for your name". Everybody has searched for their name once to see how well (or badly) they were "findable", and Google promises to give your name a ...