Woody Allen Jazz Band

This is really something worth mentioning: walking on Christmas day in Chatelet, Paris I stumbled upon this show:

I got in and actually bought a ticket to see Mr. Allen. The show was funny, original and kind of ´home made´. The band was awsome and Woody spoke very few and only in French. It is such a feeling to see LIVE a guy that you´ve been admiring for almost 20 years. Way to go Woody, I am dying to see your next movie AND your next show. )

Singularity is near

Singularity, the moment where artificial intelligence will start to design itself, is sending signs. Economist reports:

“Perhaps the most cunning use of an evolutionary algorithm, though, is by Dr Koza himself. His team at Stanford developed a Wi-Fi antenna for a client who did not want to pay a patent-licence fee to Cisco Systems. The team fed the algorithm as much data as they could from the Cisco patent and told the software to design around it. It succeeded in doing so. The result is a design that does not infringe Cisco’s patent—and is more efficient to boot. A century and a half after Darwin suggested natural selection as the mechanism of evolution, engineers have proved him right once again.”

Oh boy…

(see the full article if you want here)

Google banners for Google apps

So why not switch to Google apps?

Captured from this blog.

modern programming languages (fun)

I was just writing some OCL expressions and suddenly I realized that the if-then-else command is sooooooo dated. Here´s a suggestion of a much hip, fresh and zeitgeistlich if-then-else:

if <<condition>> then cool else sucks.

So cool replaces boring true, and sucks replaces ancient false.

I am hoping the Java team implements this soon

I am a bootstrapper (new book from Seth Godin)

from Seth Godin new book:

“A bootstrapper is determined to build a business that pays for itself every day. (…) it´s easiest to define her by what she is not: a money-raising bureaucrat who specializes in using other people´s money to take big risks in growing a business.”

 Yeah! rock it!

http://www.changethis.com/8.BootstrappersBible

A MUST read for anybody that wants to leave the dull public job or the yellow-grey corporate cublicle and go start-up.

A kingdom of coders or why is it so difficult to reuse quality software

I have read a lot of talks recently about APIs. Google APIs, Facebook APIs, OpenSocial APIs, APIs for making coffee and strawberry jam and so on. As a computer scientist I resent the fact that all those efforts are still made on a very primitive level. None of the new or old software industry bulldozers are trying to making it easy for developers. Not true. They are trying, but with the wrong ideas.

For the past years I have been involved in building an inference engine for putting together a set of reusable components for automated reasoning services (commonly known as artificial intelligence). This is part of my PhD thesis that I am hoping to finish next semester. Many inference engines already exist, however the idea of our research group (it´s very much a collective effort that I am part of) was to try a radically model-driven approach. This means, instead of diving from the very beginning into Java or C++ complexity, we took our time to think the architecture of our inference engine as a set of well-defined components that any engineer could look at and within a few minutes understand the services that such component provides.

Yeah, I know. Software engineering bla bla bla. Well, that was exactly what I thought in the beginning. But let me tell you what really happened: after 3 years reading lots of math and logical stuff I finally was ready to project a few components that realize the set of services we were interested in. Although I was dying to implement them right away in Java I took the time to do two things: I figured out the basic functionality I wanted to together with the data structures, then using only UML class/component diagrams I model each basic functionality. And then I used an old software engineering idea, design by contract, to link together the components services (actually methods) through pre- and post-conditions.

I used a new standard from the Object Modeling Group (OMG) called the Object Constraint Language (OCL) to specify the stuff. Mind you, you could use Java as well or any of these new Java flavors to write these constraints. What happened next was that I found out that by using only OCL I could fully express not only the structure of my data but also the behaviour of each component. So as it turned out I did not have a dead model, that would be forgotten as soon as I started my Java implementation. I had a complete system that lacked only the tools to be executed (e.g. a transformation from OCL to Java or to C++).

Then back to my point in this posting: why Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Salesforce (ok maybe their new platform has some of the things I am talking about here) do not try this leap? I was browsing the other day the OpenSocial API from Google and it really sucks all those hundreds of lines of code. Why is it so hard to present a graphical model of the stuff with nice well-defined interfaces that we just could browse, drag and drop and build the applications much easier? After all, it´s almost a bunch of SQL queries and read/write operations.

It´s a kingdom of coders out there. That´s why. And for some strange, unconscious or conscious reason, those guys are not letting go off their kingdom. Once we have Component-based systems on the web, not only techies will build software. I bet almost everybody that has an engineering background or even is good at logics and math will do. So is this the real motivation of everybody in the software industry to postpone model-driven development or am I just being paranoid?

Google’s new mantra

Excelent posting in ZDNet today about how Googlers are planning to pay something back giving innovative open software for the web developers community. The idea is to do whatever it is possible to accelerate the transition to web applications and the computing-cloud (don´t tell this to the Microsoft guys please).

“It also makes good economic sense. The more applications, the more (Web) usage. More users means more searches”

A super smart speech, hope it turns into a super smart move as well.

Top product from Apple in 2020

After the IPod, the IPhone and the IVacuumCleaner, the ICANHEARYOUTHINKING is the next big thing from our most beloved technology company.

Best argument on why Social Networks are overrated

Google Blogoscoped citing Jason McCabe Calacanis at a discussion in front of a crowd interested in Facebook issues.

<<Social networking is second only to chat rooms as being the lowest CPM, the worst place to advertise… that’s not gonna change. And the reason for that – and this has nothing to do with Facebook, MySpace has the same problems – the reason is the content of your friends and family is more compelling than any advertisement will be.

This is why the comments in the last panel were so foolish about it being so competitive to Google, because Google has the greatest advertising in the history of media ever created… which is search advertising. When you type a word into the box, we know what you’re looking for.

When you’re on Facebook, we know you’re looking to meet a girl or a guy, or talk to your friends or your family. It’s a terrible platform to advertise, it always will be. It will always be low CPM, but high page views that make it up in volume. It’s a terrible, terrible way to make money.>>

So true!

Force.com may unleash the genie for small software businesses

On Sunday Force.com will be released as a platform to build entire web applications from scratch using Salesforce.com infrastructure. They are calling it PaaS (Platform as a service). They write “With the Force.com platform, you can build any application, any database, any logic, and run it all on demand on our trusted, secure infrastructure.” Force.com comes with Visualforce, which they promise gives the developer the possibility to create quickly great Ajax-based user interfaces on top of their applications.

Force.com gives freely Force.com cookbook, which I think it´s worth a quick read: Wow, it integrates with the Eclipse Platform! So you create your applications confortably offline and then zap, upload it to Force.com. The text has some inprecisions (calling the MDC pattern a paradigm for instance), but all in all is a good start. I bet they will improve that when people start using the thing.

Remeber Java? If this catches on, Salesforce.com may be the epicentrum of a movement for a new generation of small software companies from Pakistan, Brazil, Bulgary, South Africa and wherever there is internet to develop and market their software through a reliable world wide brand. Force.com has the potential to become the first marketplace ever of reusable software components, applications and mash-ups. Tapping in a huge, huge money pod.

We will see…