Sylvain Wallez


Random musings of a busy geek

Removing HDMI overscan on a Sony HDTV

Christmas was quite media/techie this year: we bought a nice 52" Sony HDTV and a small Acer PC with HDMI output as a media center. And also a Wii with Guitar Hero :-) Connecting the PC to the TV with HDMI showed a good amount of overscan: the viewable resolution ...


One week with Android

One week ago I got a T-Mobile G1, the very first phone powered by Android (thanks Phil!). Being the CTO of a mobile-oriented company, I see and use lots and lots of phones. All "iPhone killers" I had in my hands before the G1 were quite crappy (don't get ...


Mario Kart is alive!

Yes, Mario is alive! Have a look at this video, where he drives in the streets of Montpellier (France). Mario is actually played by RĂ©mi Gaillard, a french guy who does stupid but hilarating things in front of a camera!


The joys of mobile development

Currently working on taking pictures with J2ME phones, I banged my head a large part of this afternoon against a SonyEricsson phone that "refused" to take a picture for really unexpected reasons. Also, other applications on the same phone were able to take pictures but not mine. Why, oh why ...


(M)Apple and the Simpsons

The Apple business and his Steveness in Simpsons land: incredibly funny, because so true! What are we ready to give away for some apple goodness! Even for iPhone developpment where you almost need to get an Apple tatoo on your heart to go to AppStore heaven! Check out part 1 ...


Marketing commons

Today I was at the Eclipse Marketing Symposium that was held as part as the Eclipse Summit Europe close to Stuttgart (Germany). I was an invited speaker there, giving a talk on the various business opportunities I discovered and explored in my 10 years of involvement in the open source ...


Book review: Wicket in Action

More than 2 years ago, I was searching for a web application framework to build some of the Joost backoffice systems. I was looking for something simple yet powerful, if that thing existed, and did not require a massive amount of learning nor lots of XML configuration files to be ...


Don't forget to set java.net.URL default timeouts!

If your Java application uses java.net.URL, and chances it does are very high, and you are using Sun's JVM (since 1.4.2), you should set the sun.net.client.defaultConnectTimeout and sun.net.client.defaultReadTimeout system properties to a reasonable value. Otherwise, if a remote site ...


Lorem ipsum

A couple of weeks ago, I got a fidelity card from our local movie theater. They asked for an email address, and started to send a weekly newsletter spam. Not only did I tried unsucessfully to unscribe from this newsletter, but this week's edition is quite funny: it contains ...


Open Terminal Here, Leopard version

Not exactly new, but I just find this incredibly useful utility today. It allows to open a terminal on the directory currently selected in the Finder, with options to use a new terminal window, reuse the last window or open a new terminal tab. An absolute must have for any ...