Sylvain Wallez

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 flight by regulating the four propeller's rotation speed. Give it a few seconds to calibrate after switching it on, and here we go, flying around in the living room! The only one who doesn't love this toy is the cat, particularly when it suddently takes off close to him :-P

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 well.

One leg will be operated on tomorrow, and the second one on Thursday. I'll be back home in the evening after every operation, but will have to stay at home for a week, and can't fly nor do sports for at least a month. So unfortunately this means no ApacheCon in Amsterdam this year.

Update: both legs done and going well, I now have to stay at home for a week.

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), but they have a very successful mail system, and this is where the people's real social network is, automatically created from the conversations you have. Your closest friends however are in your phone's addressbook, and if you have an Android phone, they are automatically available in GMail. Google's strategy it taking shape...

Need to play a bit with it, to see how much of GMail is exposed to the OpenSocial gadgets, and how the activity stream materializes in Gmail.

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 accepted to follow him in this adventure. I explained this story to my wife, and before I finished she said "no, you're not gonna do that" :-)

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's ceremony did not carry the same emotion as his talk on his election day. We saw today a man with a strong determination to restore his country's health and pride, basically saying "wake up people, we're the same despite the crisis, and our future belongs to us". I liked when he said "we'll be judged on what we've built, not what we've destroyed". Heard that, Bush?

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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 ;-)

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 was something like 1820x1030 pixels when the native resolution of the TV is 1900x1080, causing the borders of the PC's desktop to be cut, and even worse, causing the display to be blurry because of some image resizing happening somewhere.

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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 me started on the Samsung Player), but that one is definitely different.

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Yes, Mario is alive! Have a look at this video, where he drives in the streets of Montpellier (France).

Mario is actually played by Rémi Gaillard, a french guy who does stupid but hilarating things in front of a camera!

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?

I finally did what I should have done right in the beginning: copy/paste the exception message in Google and see what comes up. And here is the answer...

What's happening is that the phone allows to start an application directly after download, when the web browser is still running. In that case, the browser still runs in the background, and the phone cannot allocate enough contiguous memory to capture the picture, and fails! And I spent the afternoon changing the code, downloading new versions on the phone, and starting these new versions directly from the browser...

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