The remnants of a burnt motorbike sighted on my way to the office:
While at the ICC 2009 conference yesterday I had the opportunity to go visit the computer museum. The museum is located at the top of the Grande Arche de la Défense (I'll post pictures of the view from up there later).
It was fun to see all these old machines and their evolution throughout time. I even saw an old Atari computer which reminded me I used to play on one of those when I was younger. I particularly recall one where cars were playing football against each other, but I can't get to remember its name.
I started working at XWiki back in November 2006. At the time I was studying marketing in London and was looking for an internship. I started playing with and discovering wikis and quickly decided they had a lot of potential (check the Wiki category for articles I wrote back then). I contacted XWiki for an internship and after a couple late Skype calls with Ludovic (@ldubost) I started working part-time for the company from London.
In July 2007 I became an apprentice, working at XWiki 3 days a week while completing my Master 1 degree in marketing at the University Paris Dauphine. Then I worked part-time again from August 2008 to January 2009 while completing the first semester of my Master 2 degree in management, still at Dauphine. I went on to become a full-time intern in February 2009.
The time has now come for me to become a real employee :-) I'm one of XWiki's latest employee, having been hired on October 1st, 2009. And I even have a contract to prove it:
And since I'm in my bed right now with nothing but my iPhone to jot notes down I figured out I might as well blog about it rather than forget it. Here goes: with XWiki's new macro definition feature it's easy to define a macro in a wiki page and make it available to users through the WYSIWYG editor. Since you can access the XWiki API & scripting languages in your macro nothing prevents you from adding a check that adds an XObject to the current page if no object of that XClass is present on the page. Now once the object has been added you can use the value of your macro's properties to fill the underlying object's properties upon document save. Meaning that for simple items one no longer need to have a sheet nor a template since the UI will be provided by the WYSIWYG and the XObject creation will be done by the macro. So you can easily add new objects in pages using macros which is already super cool. But it doesn't stop here: with Asiri working on converting the livetable macro and creating default implementations, including one that will list all the documents holding a given XObjects, we'll soon be able to write full XWiki applications using only macros. The possibilities opened by this stuff are endless!! Can't wait to try this out for real now... Well done to the Dev team for making such powerful features available in XWiki Enterprise 2.0... And that's only 1 out of 5 amazing new features we added during this release cycle!
This had started fine... Sipping a coffee in the mild sun of our office backyard, teaching our new office assistant how to light matches by flicking them away, business as usual... until Thomas (@eveilleau) found the dead mouse.
His logical reaction was to look for a way to use it as a weapon and he threw the mouse at me (he was less than 3 meters away from me). The poor beast landed in my coffee - I barely had the time to leap sidewards in order to avoid it. I was lucky enough to have caught Thomas' move from a corner of my eye as I was definitely the intended target.
I had to retaliate. I took the yard's waterjet and opened the tap, directing it straight at Thomas who enjoyed the benefits of a couple buckets of fresh water to cool his spirits down.
He hurriedly left the yard only to come back seconds later with what was left of a bottle of Coke Zero. I took my t-shirt off seconds before he started spraying coke on me, chasing me across the yard.
We left it at that... at least for now.
PS: did I mention @jvdrean used the occasion to hijack my Twitter account (@glerouge)? JV, I will not forget that either ;-)