Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

Looking for a J2ME developer in France

At Goojet we are developping applications for the mainstream mobile platforms, currently J2ME, iPhone, Android and BlackBerry, and Symbian in a near future. These applications are essentially enhanced web mobile browsers, supporting the mobile widgets and social features brought by our platform. Our J2ME application is the most complex because ...


What should I do with my old Macs?

I have two very old Macintosh computers in my basement: a Mac SE bought in 1987 and a PowerMac 7200 bought in 1995. I also have hundreds of floppy disks for these computers, with all sorts of games and utilities, including the very first versions of Word and Excel! These ...


My new web site, Drupal powered

When I started blogging in November 2002, there weren't many free blogging tools available. The major one was Movable Type, which I first installed on the company server before moving it to my own domain. Alas, Movable Type is written in Perl, which I find hard to read and ...


Eclipse Community Awards

Update: I had some feedback that I should have separated the positive congrats to Benjamin from the criticism about the process. Apologies if he or others felt offended, this definitely wasn't my intention, and again Benjamin has some merit that should make him a committer more than a contributor ...


Flying saucer

Yesterday was my youngest son's 13th birthday, and he had a remote-controlled flying saucer we ordered at ThinkGeek. My son loves geeky gadgets and can spend hours on their website! This little toy is actually a pretty cool piece of technology: it embeds 3 gyroscopic sensors to stabilize the ...


Surgery

Tomorrow I will have surgery to remove varicose veins from my legs. It's a planned minor surgery, that I know I will have to go through for more than a year. This is a family problem, as my two parents and my younger sister needed to have it as ...


GMail is an OpenSocial container

Interesting news: GMail is now an OpenSocial container. This is as far as I know the first mail system (I mean real mail, not like Facebook or LinkedIn mails) that exposes itself through social network APIs. Google did not succeeded in the social network arena with Orkut (except in Brazil ...


The birth of CouchDB

CouchDB is an amazing product, but even more amazing is the story behind it, with Damien Katz selling his house and living off savings to build "something cool". I'm truly impressed by this idealistic approach that actually succeeded. Damien's wife also deserves a lot of respect for having ...


Obama's inauguration (live on Joost)

I've been watching Barack Obama's inauguration live on Joost and the video has played flawlessly with a pretty good quality during the whole ceremony. Kudos to my ex-colleagues at Joost, you did a great job! I was in New-Orleans on November 4th when Obama was elected, and today ...


The answer to life, the universe, and everything

Today is my 42th birthday. Do I finally have the answer to life, the universe, and everything? Still not, but this year is probably a good one to re-read HGG ;-)