Marychard™ Technology is a all-in-one hi-performance set of tools and runtime code dedicated to the iPhone® and iPod® devices.

Written in Objective-C 2.0 for Cocoa, the technology is made of the following components:
— a runtime environment ;
— a set of tools to produce highly-optimised data for the iPhone®.

Runtime libraries

Runtime libraries are made of 3 different components that can be used separatedly or in concert:
— hi-performance rendering of complex 3D objects and animations ;
— physics engine: it integrates physics model over time in realtime so that you can simulate rolling balls or whatever you want, linked to the iPhone® sensors such as accelerometers ;
— game engine: it maintains actors lifecycle thru your game session ;
— multiplayer engine and protocol : with SDLTP 2.0 — the TCP-based protocol dedicated to MMO games and persistent environement — you can develop any simple or advanced multiplayer games you might think of., including MMOs. The server side is developped in Java J2SE as a set of distributed modules that cooperate to handle high-loads.

Production tools: SdlImage® TEN

Thru the new version TEN of the long-lived SdlImage™ technology, Marychard performs the following set of operations:
— imports Collada files and generate iPhone® optimized runtime data files to be displayed on the device, still handling objects hierarchy and animation ;
— optimizes and boosts your set of textures to make your 3D realtime visual much better than you never seen before, without extra work!

Keep posted…

While reworking a function that basically dumps the PHP stack when a crash occures, I came accros an interesting things I silently complain about for the past few years: why the hell I cannot write a function name with accents in there?

Well, the dream comes true in PHP 5.x, here you are, see the function Mélody_είναι_συμπαθητική () which mixes both french accents and greek caharacters -- says: Mélody is friendly.

<?php
// additional code
	
function Mélody_είναι_συμπαθητική($arg="avec un long long long argument qu'il faudrait raccourcir un peu") {

	print dumpPHPStack(false);
	print "nn";
}

function main($arg1, $arg2) {
	print "En PHP 5.x on peut appeler des fonctions ayant des accents...n";
	Mélody_είναι_συμπαθητική("avec un long long long argument qu'il faudrait raccourcir un peu");
}

main('here', "we go");
?>

Which outputs the following:

PHP STACK DUMP
| #	| Line #	| File name										| Function call	
| 1	| 102	| /Users/stephanedeluca/Desktop/phpdump.php	| dumpPHPStack (false)	
| 2	| 109	| /Users/stephanedeluca/Desktop/phpdump.php	| Mélody_είναι_συμπαθητική ("avec un long long long argument qu'il faudrait raccourcir un peu")	
| 3	| 112	| /Users/stephanedeluca/Desktop/phpdump.php	| main ("here", "we go")	

I also tested right-to-left characters such as arabic and it works!

PHP STACK DUMP
|#	|Line #	|File name										|Function call	
|1	|82		|/Users/stephanedeluca/Desktop/phpdump.php		|dumpPHPStack (null)	
|2	|87		|/Users/stephanedeluca/Desktop/phpdump.php		|mélody◊صوفي ()	

I'm really happy about this.

Recently I gave a try to moo.com, an oline service that can print business cards for you and others things.

The site looks pretty good and the user interface is quite simple. So I decided to give it a try.

I created this colourful card, a recto and a verso with a good resolution:

moo.com quickly print and shipped the cards and I received it about one week after I ordered. Alas, the result is quite poor, look at it:

As you can see -- the color is really over saturated and the teint is yellowish!

The print resolution itself is okay -- when you see the cards.

I dropped a mail to them and wait for an answer. I keep you posted.

[UPDATE Fri. March 25 2009] Apparently, after looking at the issue, moo.com decided to reprint the cards. I REALLY APPRECIATE THEIR EFFORT. They are very quick at fixing issue. That's a good point. Let's see the result.

[UPDATE Tue. April 1st 2009] Just received a mail where they say that the first print had suffered from a technical printing issue and the reprint looks goo. He sends it to me. Goood! Can't wait to see it.

Je lisais ce soir le dictionnaire de l'Académie française en sa première édition -- daté de 1694, et je fût quelque peu surpris par l'épître, dont je vous livre un cours extrait. J'ai pris soin de le "traduire" en français de ce siècle pour vous en faciliter la lecture, citoyen !

Quand je pense que l'on entend encore que la République française est une monarchie... Je vous en laisse juge.

Épître à destination de Louis XIV :

« [...] Cet ouvrage est un recueil fidèle de tous les termes et toutes les phrases dont l'éloquence et la poésie peuvent former des éloges ; mais nous avouons, Sire, qu'en voulant travailler au votre, vous nous avez sentir plus d'une fois la faiblesse de notre langue.
Lorsque notre zèle ou notre devoir nous ont engagé à célébrer vos exploits, les mots de valeur, de courage et d'intrépidité nous ont parus trop faible ; et lorsqu'il nous a fallu parler et de la profondeur et du secret impénétrable de vos desseins, que la seule exécution découvre aux yeux des hommes, les mots de prévoyance, de prudence et de sagesse même ne répondaient qu'imparfaitement à nos idées.
[..]
Comment exprimer cet air de grandeur marqué sur votre front, et répandu sur toute votre personne, cette fermeté d'âme que rien n'est capable d'ébranler, cette tendresse pour le peuple, vertu si rare sur le trône, et, ce qui doit toucher particulièrement des gens de lettres, cette éloquence née avec vous, qui toujours soutenue d'expressions nobles et précises, vous rend maître de tous ceux qui vous écoutent, et ne laissent d'autre volonté que la votre.
[...]
»

If you ever wondered when accents appeared in french... l'Académie française used the accents for the first time in 1740 with the 3rd edition of the dictionary:

L'Académie s'eſt donc vûe contrainte à faire dans cette nouvelle Edition, à ſon orthographe, pluſieurs changemens qu'elle n'avoit point jugé à propos d'adopter, lorſqu'elle donna l'Edition précédente.

Letters J and V were introduced a 22 years before in 1718 with the 2nd edition of the dictionary in order to clarify the pronunciation of words that were respectively composed with letters I and U.

Long s -- i.e. the glyph ſ -- disappeared from french in 1780 and was replaced by the s.

All this occurred only 250 years from now.

In May 2007 I have joined the startup MobiLuck.com as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO). This startup is focused on geolocalized social network for mobile phones.

Closer to my friends: geolocalization and social networking.

Users are geolocalized automatically so that they benefit from advanced features such as find the nearest indian restaurant or meet handsome people close to them. Users receive SMS alerts when their friends come close.

Our technology is carrier-independent as we have developed an original and the service works worldwide as it is available in more than 10 languages including chinese, arabic and hebrew.

Traffic explosion: I.2M users & 35M pages/month

This LBS friends finder service has attracted more than 1.2 million users (June 2009) since its launch in August 2007.

Currently the service recruits an average of 2K to 8K users per day as per the current trend.

By end of Q2 2009 we saw our traffic doubling every 3 months which hit 35 millions pages per month!

Technical environment

Server side: clusterization of the application

The server-side development is based on LAMP: Linux, Apache, mySQL and PHP.
The service is distributed throughout a cluster of servers (ranging from duo core 2 with 4Gb of ram to octo-core with 16Gb or RAM).

Each box is given a role -- and only one every time is possible:

• front server: run the Web server (Apache2)
• back server: run a mySQL instance

In order to face the traffic explosion we have, I recently clusterized mySQL itself and switch to a Master/slave replication on two octo-core servers. I migrated to mySQL 5.1 from 5.0.

Client-side: iPhone and Facebook

- Client-side development in xHTML and xHTML Mobile
- iPhone development in Objective-C/Cocoa: geolocalisation API, networking and communication with the back-office
- Facebook app development: enable facebook user to run mobiluck from within Facebook

Web-services

We interface with many third-party through web services: Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, Maporama, SMS brokers, advertising agency, cartography, geocoding & reverse geocoding, etc.

Advertising platform and service wide monitoring

The business model relies on ad distribution based on users’ profile and localization. We integrate miscellaneous advertising agencies and distribute ads on a per country or per profile basis in order to maximize our revenues.

Our system embeds an home brew monitoring system and statistics tracker that enable us to conduct the business and take decisions in an agile way.