I have been working at Joost for the last two years as architect of backend systems and tech leader of the backend development team. I started there at a time when the architecture of the system was a blank paperboard. Exciting times, that allowed me to use my creative thinking ...
I came across an interesting report on the first Hadoop Summit that happened last week. Hadoop (an open-source implementation of Google's distributed mapreduce infrastructure) is getting a lot of steam, and there are now higher-level open source projects emerging on top of it that I wouldn't even haven ...
My wife Claire has been horse-riding for years, and wanted her own horse for her 40th birthday. That was 3 weeks ago, and the birthday gift arrived almost on time a few days ago. It takes some time to find a good match between the rider and the horse! So ...
My dear colleague and friend Nicolas Lalevée has been elected committer on Ant/Ivy, the dependency management tool that allows the use of Maven repositories without the pain of Maven, for his work on the Eclipse plugin for Ivy. I've been working with Nico for two years, and he ...
Did you know that the Wii remote contains a 1024x768 pixel infrared camera? With this knowledge an a bunch of IR-emitting LEDs and tape, Johnny Chung Lee, a student at Carnegie Mellon, has done some truly amazing things. Multi-touch screen, Minority Report-like interaction, 3D scenes controlled with you heads movements ...
Skype is constantly eating 10 to 15% of the CPU on my MacBook, and makes it hot even when I'm doing nothing. Is it because I have close to 200 contacts and usually more than 15 open chats? I have about the same number of contacts on Adium, and ...
Google is shaking the social networking arena lately. After OpenSocial, they unveiled yesterday the social graph API. What is it? Basically a specific use of the complete set of hypertext links they build while crawling the web. The links between people (or their website) described using XFN or FOAF can ...
Anyware Technologies, the company I've been co-founding more than 7 years ago was bought by Wavecom today. Wavecom is a manufacturer of embedded wireless communication modules that wants to expand its activity higher in the application stack to provide end-to-end solutions. Anyware's business, which was initially focused on ...
Happy New Year to you all, known and unknown readers! This year is not yet 2 days old, and there already has been a big change since last year: it is now forbidden to smoke in bars and restaurants in France. Woohoo! No more painfully enduring bad smell or "sorry ...
This is a request to my dear readers. I'm currently looking for a replacement for my Canon Ixus 40 camera. I've never been very happy with its image quality, and lately the lens is doing scary mechanical noise like some missing teeth on gears, and it seems to ...