Sylvain Zimmer

A few days ago I had the chance to speak with both Richard Stallman (the father of Free Software) and Gael Duval (who created Mandriva, and is now working on a new top-secret projet called Ulteo).

The three of us were actually invited on a panel about the latest copyright law in France. The debate was interesting, I explained how jamendo works and why it is interesting for many artists to make their music free, or “almost free” (RMS, if you read me… ;-)

Before and after the conference we discussed a lot of issues with Richard and Gael, they are both incredible in their own way. So, big kuddos to them and to our host Frederic de Gournay who did an amazing job!

While working on the future AJAX interface of jamendo, I ran into some performance problems that were due to the extensive use of the new Prototype 1.5 function, $$. (Announcement of $$ on Ajaxian)

Prototype’s current code is quite elegant (as always!) but very slow, so I wrote an add-on that makes this function up to 20 times faster in most usual cases (tested on IE6, Firefox 1.5 and Opera). Don’t believe me, test it yourself!

Download the add-on | Stripped down version (1.3Kb) | Interactive test suite

UPDATE: Thanks to StoneCypher from #prototype I ran the regression tests and fixed a trivial bug. Now the add-on passes the regression tests! Good :-)

Here are the main ideas of this add-on :

• Forwarding the call to the old $$ if the selector expression is too complicated (currently : if it uses attributes)
• Replacing regular expressions with a simple parser
• Minimizing the number of operations done on each iteration.
• Trying to use getDocumentById() instead of getDocumentByTagName() when possible.
• Avoiding recursive functions with return values.
• Not being afraid of some “old-style” code if it speeds up the execution ;-)

I just emailed the code to Sam Stephenson (the author of Prototype), I hope he’ll welcome the speedup! I don’t know if this add-on could make it into the Prototype SVN trunk, maybe some comments from Sam or from readers of this blog will help improve it.

To use this code in your website, just include the javascript file after prototype.js, and the $$ function will be automatically replaced. The old one will still be available as “$$old” (but you shouldn’t need it. The add-on is “feature-compatible” with the original)

This code is released under the same license as Prototype (”AS-IS” ?) so feel free to use it. (In this case, a comment about our exciting free music website jamendo would be appreciated too ;-)

That’s it ;-) I look forward to having your comments on this code, it’s open for discussion!

Tomorrow I’ll drive from Grenoble to Amsterdam where I’m presenting jamendo at both the “Holland Open Conference” and the “Digital Pionners Academy”.

This is very exciting because it’s one of my first presentations of jamendo in front of an english-speaking audience. I’ll speak next to guys from Wikipedia, Creative Commons and OpenBusiness.cc so I guess it’s quite a good start ;-)

Here are my “final” slides for tomorrow : PDF

Wish me good luck for both the conference and the 10-hour drive ;-)

With all the buzz on Flock I decided to give it a try!

My impressions are mixed. I think the default skin looks bad, it has a “toy” feel just like IE7.

I’m currently trying the “New blog post” feature, that’s a good one. I’ll install an extension like this in my beloved firefox (which is crying with my 50+ extensions)

There are also a few severe bugs in the main window, I don’t have time to report them though

PS: I had to publish this post twice to get it working! :-/

Following the example of many talented people out there, I just dropped out of my school!

Okay, I don’t really feel like this will make me any more talented ;-) But it’s a great step, at least for jamendo :

The latest weeks have been very exciting for Jamendo. We shipped several “Web 2.0″ (or whatever it will called now) upgrades of the website, the latest being Blog support.

I implemented both metaWeblog API and Atom API so that we can post everywhere. Currently I have some trouble with Blogger because they seem to be updating their backend. I’ll wait for them to calm down…

Anyway, you can now blog your reviews on the most common blogs out there (TypePad, WordPress, DotClear, LiveJournal, MovableType, Typo, etc…), the previous entry is the first test I made ;-)

I hope the community will use this feature heavily because I spent the last couple of days hacking…

I’m quite proud of the autodetection feature ;-) You just have to enter the URL of your blog homepage and Jamendo will detect its type and API address. Try it now !

Some new cool features on jamendo I’ve been working on this week :

 - A tag cloud for each user : http://www.jamendo.com/us/user/sylvinus/tags/
 - Friends : http://www.jamendo.com/us/user/sylvinus/friends/
 - IE-ready spy : http://www.jamendo.com/us/spy/

Next week, we’ll unveil our new member homepage with music recommendations… A bit late compared to last.fm and pandora, but we didn’t have enough albums before to make it really interesting.

What will make us quite unique is that you get the recommendation AND the music for free ;-)

Some artists I’ve to listen to next week…

- Sly & the family stone
- Level 42
- Gojira
- Ultra vomit (?!)
- Prince
- Stefano Di Battista
- Stanley Clarke

What’s up with music ? Currently I play bass in 5 different bands. It seems obvious I’ll have to quit some of them because 5 is just too much, but the choice is going to be quite hard :-/ Maybe listening to new music will help!

My blog has been down for a few days … we had some serious hardware failures so we were too busy working on jamendo.

I just came back from a 5-day-long road trip to Florence with my girlfriend Eliane! This was really among the best holidays in my life so I’ll try to keep some memories here.

I took the car from Grenoble to L’albenc where I picked up Eliane and eventually met his mother and little sister for the first time. Then we drove to Montelimar, France where we had lunch with my aunt and her little family. We arrived to St Raphael on the coast right on time for the office, and we spent a lovely evening on the seaside.

We slept in the car every night with a quite comfortable home-made bed, maybe the trickiest moment of each day was when we were looking in the dark for a place to park the car and spend the rest of the night. It was really funny to wake up and discover the landscape that we hadn’t seen completely before.

So we did that in St Raphael and drove to Genova, Italy on Thursday. There, we ate in a good restaurant and visited the city until the night came. Genova has a great historical center and it was worth the walk!

Friday, we drove to Pisa, then to Vinci (birthplace of Leonardo Da Vinci) and then to Sienna. It was 6pm when we arrived there and I’ve to say that Sienna amazed me… it’s a so beautiful and small old city that I wouldn’t mind buying an house there someday ;-) The streets are so …. human! We ate in yet another delicious (and expensive!) restaurant and we slept near San Gimigianno.

We didn’t get to Florence before 1pm because we got stuck in the field where we parked the car! It was crazy, we tried to get the car out of there during 1 hour but it was quite impossible for us and a few wood sticks. So we asked some local farmer to use his tractor to pull the car… and he agreed ;-) In my opinion it was actually too easy! We could have given him some gift but we had nothing, so once again, thank you!

Florence was fine, I was expecting to be dissapointed… I think I find it boring and a little bit overrated. Of course there are some incredible momuments and museums but you have to pay in order to visit every single church and tourist spot so it wasn’t really motivating for us poor students ;-)

After a last visit in the north of Florence on Sunday morning, we drove back to Grenoble and nearly got stuck in the snow near Briancon, France. But we made it!

I’m so happy to be full of happy memories of this trip with Eliane, I hope they’ll last! Of course now it’s quite hard to get back to work on jamendo, but as you know … the show must go on…

This is incredible. Yesterday jamendo had a special 2-minute feature on the first french TV channel, in the news report of Sunday evening which is basically one of the most viewed TV shows in France. A conservative estimate of the audience is 10+ million.

The report was really clear and focused on both the artists and Creative Commons, with Pierre from Jamendo explaining shortly what’s CC, and a zoom on a License Deed.

It’s so exciting to bring CC into mainstream like that. I really feel that this is the greatest accomplishment for jamendo so far. Now that more than 10 million people have heard of what we’re doing, a lot of things are going to be much easier.

Here is the full video in French :

Note for fun : our servers went down seconds after the airing ;-) We expected our database to crash but surprisingly our load balancer died first. It took us a few minutes to get the website back up but since then we have been experiencing very high trafic.

Some figures… Today we have 10.000+ members and countless new album uploads, yesterday we had more than 600 concurrent BitTorrent downloads, our main BitTorrent seeder was uploading at 5Mo/s… Impressive! Keep sharing!