Es de sobres conegut que els corredors populars tendim a comptar-ho tot, el temps, la distancia, els km setmanals, etc. fins i tot arribem a tenir el que n’Arcadi Alibes anomena la “marquitis”. Aquest es un símptoma de que ja formem part de la família de corredors, que em passat de sortir de tant en quant a tenir uns objectius i entrenar per aconseguir-los. Cal dir que tot corredor passa per aquesta fase,  es molt temptador quan no pots fer ni 5km i has arribat a fer 10km en casi 40 minuts. Però, com la majoria de les obsessions, no ens porta a res mes que la auto destrucció, en el cas del corredor popular al sobre entrenament.

Les obsessions no son dolentes, sempre i quan les tinguem controlades, ja que per exemple en el cas del corredor popular ens pot portar al sobre entrenament i per tant a tenir molt mes lluny aquests objectius. No cal pas destacar que dels populars ningú guanya diners per fer el que fem, si no per la feina normal de cada dia!, el plaer ha de ser la nostra màxima.

Tot aixo ve d’una conversa que vaig tenir ahir amb un parell de companys del grup d’entreno, dos punts de vista totalment diferents sobre aquest tema. Amb el primer tot diguem-ne normal, un home que ja ha passat per la fase de la “marquitis” i que tot i entrenar dur la seva maquina es millorar,  però si no ho fa avui no li agafara cap depressió.  L’altre, potser per ser mes exitos en les seves curses, encara es troba a la fase de la “marquitis” i per ell voler millorar sense una obsessió malaltissa no es normal, a cada cursa s’ha de pretendre fer MMP.

Cal recordar que, com tots, jo també he passat per aquesta època, sobretot el primer any quan veus que has millorat moltíssim, pero després d’estar una any sense fer res i tornar a corre de nou, m’he adonat que si vull millorar el que he de fer es primer de tot gaudir de cada entreno, si de les series també! Corro per que m’agrada, per que em fa sentir be, entreno dur per que soc competitiu i sempre dono el 100% de mi mateix, pero tot requereix temps i no es pot pretendre fer sempre MMP.

Aquest diumenge ho intentarem, pero si no passa, gaudiré de cada km, de cada vista, de cada gambada! i arribaré fos, rebentat per que es com s’ha d’arribar, donant-ho tot. Però el dilluns sortiré a entrenar com casi cada dia, preparant una nova cursa.

M’he quedat amb les ganes de parlar dels beneficis de l’esport a la feina del dia de cada dia, però aixo es tema per una altre entrada.

Salut!

Last Saturday I’d the pleasure of visiting Casa de Convalescencia in Barcelona to attend NoSQL Matters 2012 Barcelona edition, however it was not a long events the set of selected papers where mind blowing, also the location help a lot. Before continuing with the recap of the talks, would love to say thanks a lot to the organization for giving me the option to collaborate with theme as a program committee member.

The day starts with a cool opening talk by JAO, who was introducing us their nice start-up bigml.com, a cool service showing the power of the Catalan start-up community, without nothing to envy cool places like Berlin, etc.. As always JAO gave us some interesting quotes everyone should think about it.

#mat12 Ruiz:”we choosed mongoDB because..well I don’t know..perhaps the name was cool…;-)”
“It s better to ask for forgiveness than for permission” but do not “better safe than sorry” Jao about how he uses consistency #mat12

Thanks to @edlich and  @fceller

After that the regular talks started, so in my case I was supposed to moderate the little room where most of the use cases where going to be presented. We started with a cool talk, but that would need more time to be correctly communicated, by Pavlo Baron who spoke to us about distributed system and DynamoDB, I’m starting to think that this guy dream with this systems he really have lots of knowledge.

After Pavlo some coffee break with some food was supposed to be served, but I was late and found no more food, bad ideas as far as I had no breakfast and I was starving, but in Barcelona there are still nice “Bakerai” so I grab an awesome Serrano jam sandwich, something hard to get in Berlin!.

Now, so then, was time for a couple of talks more, this time with David Arcos from Catchoom who have us an introduction to their use case of nosql technologies. Regarding this talk I’ve to say it was quite interesting, specially cause here started the flow of 2k references to redis as one of the most references databases during this Saturday, on the other site the product they presented looks quite interesting and would love to give it a try.

After David was time for Michael to spoke us about Cassandra and real time, my feeling with this talk can be easy described as a cool introduction to the features of Cassandra, but probably to much in deep with theory. Although it’s important to notice I’ve learn a lot from this talk so I will probably consider using Cassandra whenever I need to be close by “real time”.

After a probably too long lunch time, was time for Alexander Morgaut who provide us with a bit of romance at NoSQL Matters, he was speaking to us about JavaScript and NoSQL, something quite cool as far as we’ve right now proper database technology in our browsers thanks to HTML5 and also most of the NoSQL databases provide some sense of  support for JavaScript. I really enjoyed this talk and think is one of the best I attended.

The penultimate talk of this edition that I attended was the talk about ArangoDB by Martin Schönert, really like the community of hackers around Cologne, looks really promising. As far as the competition within the NoSQL market is really huge you always take a look to the most famous ones, but this one is also a good idea to test, I will do it on the next months for sure.

We’re reaching time for the last talk of the day, and as far as I’m not really fair, it was one of the best ones I’ve heard during today’s event. Marc Pous gave us an introduction to open city’s and how they analyse the way we’re using the city transportation systems so managers can understand and look for better ways of using it. Specially love some quotes he gave us as:

We should use citizens as a sensors.
Be pragmatic and use whatever is better for every use case.

I also loved that his video from the 11 of September rally in Barcelona, proud of it.

I really enjoyed being there, and the opportunity to join this adventure and perform the first NoSQL conference in town, had lots of fun meeting colleges and friends from Barcelona and all the world, attending great talks et all. However cause of we’re staying in Igualada, to visit even more friends and family, I could not attend the night party, hope every one had lots of fun there.

Looking forward to see you again next year in Cologne, or if possible, again in Barcelona!

I’m not sure if just the Catalan/Spanish speaking people will understand this, but my feeling about this weekend is more or less like this:

Making your website fully compatible with Internet Explorer can be a really nightmare, but if you are more or less a newbie to this front end effort can be a headache. As some of you know, recently I’ve been involved on creating a front end using nice javascript technologies, have to say I really rediscovered the power of this part of the ecosystem, however I’ve to provide support for IE9, and sometimes I find interesting stuff.

One of this “interesting” behaviour is how Internet Explorer manage the console object, for the ones of you who still don’t know it, console is a useful add-on on to the DOM spec. So as you can guess every one is doing whatever he/she wants with this object.

Lets go to our use case here, how Internet Explorer manages that utility. The main idea is that the console object is just available when the Web Developer Tools are open, and right after that, but if your code makes usage of this object, and you where in “normal mode”, so no console exposed, the code will fail and return undefined.

At StackOverflow there is a very good explanation of that problem.

In Internet Explorer 9 (and 8), the console object is only exposed when the developer tools are opened for a particular tab. If you hide the developer tools window for that tab, the console object remains exposed for each page you navigate to. If you open a new tab, you must also open the developer tools for that tab in order for the console object to be exposed.

The console object is not part of any standard and is an extension to the Document Object Model. Like other DOM objects, it is considered a host object and is not required to inherit from Object, nor its methods from Function, like native ECMAScript functions and objects do. This is the reasonapply and call are undefined on those methods. In IE 9, most DOM objects were improved to inherit from native ECMAScript types. As the developer tools are considered an extension to IE (albeit, a built-in extension), they clearly didn’t receive the same improvements as the rest of the DOM.

This can provoke interesting problems, so take care of using a proper logging library, mocking the console object, whatever you think appropriately for your application.

List of useful tools for logging in web applications:

• log4javascript : Is a JavaScript logging framework based on the Java logging framework log4j.
• Log4js : The Logging Framework for JavaScript.
• Blackbird: A dead-simple way to log messages in JavaScript and an attractive console to view and filter them.

or simple use a pice of code like, so mock or have a simple cross browser solution:

if (!window.console) window.console = {};
if (!window.console.log) window.console.log = function () { };

here you can custom as much as you want, or need, the logging capabilities of your library.

The last, but not the lest, I added a new repository at GitHub with some demo code, so you can play and see whats up with your Internet Explorer version.

• The Console playground: A console playground for logging in javascript.

Have fun!

ES - EN - DE ( Powered by Google Translator )

Vivim uns temps incerts, plens de retallades socials, atur, i sobretot plens d’una mena de depressió col·lectiva que ens fa viure amb un ai al cor!. Es cert que venien d’uns anys on molta gent havia viscut per sobre de les seves possibilitats, on un manobre guanyava mes diners que un enginyer, grans cotxes i viatges per tot el mon estaven a l’ordre del dia. Una època on també s’han fet grans infraestructures, pel sols fet d’atreure vots, empesos per una reforma educativa i social que ha minvat una cosa tant important com l’esperit a criticar.

Des d’aquest blog, i després del meu segon primer de Maig a Berlín, m’agrada compartir la meva indignació amb la nostre societat, una societat que ho tenia tot, però que ara no sap com sortir-ne. Una societat dividida, individualista, egoista i consumista, on el que mes importa es un mateix i no el be comú.

En aquestes altures hauriem de tenir-ho clar, això es una lluita de classes, i ells ens portem avantatge. Menys educació,  menys sanitat,  mes desigualtats i limitacions per pujar a l’ascensor social i sobretot divisió entre els nostres. Criminalitzem els que lluiten per uns drets que consideren inalienables, moltes vegades per que ens molesten el nostre dia a dia, senyors no hi ha reivindicació sense afectació!

Però jo em pregunto, quan prendrem conciencia del que ens envolta?, tots volem viure tranquils, pero nois, aixo ja comenca a passar de taca d’oli!!!!. No podem esperar que els altres ens solucionin els nostres problemes, es hora de comencar a agafar el toro per les banyes!, i si no ho fem ens trobarem les conseqüències.

Somio amb en un món on:

• Ser emprenedor no es consideri casi criminal, senyors si ningú crea empreses, com pretenem poder treballar. Somio en una empresa on els treballadors se sentin integrats, implicats i on l’empresari els ajudi, una empresa amb responsabilitat social, sense oblidar l’objectiu principal guanyar diners.
• La gent sap buscar-se la vida, emprendre, il·lusionar-se amb idees noves, agafant totes les seves energies i tirant endavant. No fa falta que el negoci sigui el següent Google, però tots hauriem delluitar per ser feliços amb el que fem la majoria del nostre temps.
• El poble tingui consciencia de poble. Portar vestit a la feina, o estar en una oficina, no ens fa menys treballadors, sobretot quan arribar a final de mes es cada cop mes difícil. Si en prenem consciencia, agafarem les regnes de la nostre vida per fer-la millor, tant per nosaltres com per als nostres fills.
• Els meus fills tinguin un futur, com el que jo vaig tenir, que la gent de families treballadores puguin estudiar, i on tothom es lliure de triar el seu camí. Tinguem-ho clar, les retallades en educació, l’espai Bolonya a la universitat, etc no son res mes que intents per fer mes complicat per a la gent treballadora d’accedir a uns estudis. No vull metges, advocats, enginyers, etc amb tres generacions fent la mateixa feina, vull una societat lliure on cadascú pugui seguir el seu futur.
• La gent visqui tranqil·la, gaudint de les petites coses, sense apunyalar-se per motius egoistes, on la gent es pugui ajudar sense problemes, ni patiments de que ens farà l’altre. Siguem seriosos, el que mes ens omple en aquesta vida acostumen a ser petites coses, i al final seran les úniques que ens endurem al sot!.
• La màxima espiració no sigui tenir l’últim gadget de torn, senyors hi ha molt mes que consumir en aquest món!
• La gent no fa les coses simplement per que els altres ho fan, o no recordem aquella dita de si un es llança per un pont, que faras tu?. Senyors, i senyores, em de tenir esperit crític, dir NO, no es dolent! ens ajuda a millorar.
• Pugui estar orgullós del meu país, orgullós de ser català i de presentar-nos arreu del món. No vull que la gent pensi que al meu país no es fa res per aturar els lladres, on no es creen empreses, on la gent només viu al sol i a la platja! Senyors som molt mes que això, si no digues-li als Alemanys que accepten de molt bon grats enginyers, metges, etc del nostre país.

Des d’aquest moment us dic: No tenim por! prenem les regnes de la nostra vida, sense tenir-vos en compte! lluitarem per sortir-ne seguint els nostres principis, no els vostres! I espero que vosaltres feu el mateix!

Per últim, un parell de coses bones que passen a Igualada/Anoia:

• Una iniciativa igualadina proposa als desocupats convertir en professió les seves habilitats personals
• ‘La principal ruïna humana és no fer el que t’agrada’

Endavant nois, aquest es camí. Espero poder posar-hi el meu petit gra de sorra aquest estiu!

Salut

Recently I’ve been involved in prototyping a web application where maps, lots of custom paintings, access to internal and external REST APIs, etc lay together so the first idea is to use JavaScript as a front end technology, but as most of us I was not really happy and willing I will face with lots of problems. First of all I’ve to say I’ve not much of experience dealing with this technologies, my usual ecosystem is at the backend of every app I’ve been involved, so I probably made some newbie errors. Here there is my experience!.

When you are willing to build a JavaScript app you face with the decision or to use a framework, that lets you write JavaScript using your favourite programming language, like GWT, or you can use pure JavaScript form the beginning. So when I started the current project I’d to make this decision, however my experience with GWT was not really painful, I decided to go to use pure JavaScript. I’ve to say an important fact was how I was introduced to this kind of frameworks by @molily, after being a few month working with him you really understand how this technology is not anymore the one from the old days.

What I wanted to show here is the power of a couple of libraries that let’s you follow, a more or less, proper MVC architecture in your apps, I wanted to introduce you a bit of Require.js and Backbone.js, two important peaces that will let you write proper front ends.

With the first one [Require.js] you will be able to organize your code in proper modules, as their website tells you:

RequireJS is a JavaScript file and module loader. It is optimized for in-browser use, but it can be used in other JavaScript environments, like Rhino and Node. Using a modular script loader like RequireJS will improve the speed and quality of your code

there is an important problem when dealing with this kind of software pieces, and it’s how to make the app faster and faster, so in a pure JavaScript app if you have a library that lets you load file on demands, let’s you compact some modules under one requests, etc …, definitely it will help us a lot. Another important fact is how easy is to use it,


require(["jquery", "jquery.alpha", "jquery.beta"], function($) {
//the jquery.alpha.js and jquery.beta.js plugins have been loaded.
$(function() {
// here it goes initialization code for you app, etc..
});
});


but you will find more detailes information with their tutorials.

But, sooner or later, this kind of applications get bigger and bigger and to follow a proper MVC architecture will help you a lot, if you want to do that using JavaScript there is Backbone.js.

Backbone.js is there library that let you have:

• Models: They are the entities of your application, where the behaviour of your application data gets managed.
• Views: The control of what, and how, information you show to the end user.
• Controllers: This peace is the responsible of handling the communication between views ( the users ) and one or more models ( your application data).
• Routers: Here you will face with your application router, more or less like in Rails with the resource definition, so how you communicate views with controllers.

If you are willing to introduce yourself to Backbone, take a look to the nice Tutorials page, lots of nice examples included.

But if you want to see a nicely constructed app, using this technologies, take a look at Chaplin, @molily child together with the Moviepilot guys.

The last but not the lest, I’ve face with lots of integration problems, sure guys I don’t understand how complicated it’s for each browser vendor to implement the same set of features, not to fuck up ourself. This could make sense on the past, but no now  and specially cause users are not anymore choosing their operating system by the browser their use, sincerely guys:

Enjoy the rest of the week, today in town Berlin Hack and Tell, another awesomeness of being in this city!

As you saw this blog was quite death for a long time, noting was posted since the last Coding Dojo, no special reason, but lots of work and no special need to write, this happens but I love writing so I propose myself to fix this. And what the best starting point with a post mortem of the last Hadoop Get Together in Berlin.

Berlin is a really cool city (specially in summer) with lots of movement when talking about IT, lots of meetup’s are organized every month, they have a huge amount of people attending and presentations are really high level. So if you are still not willing to be in Berlin, you are probably not into IT, or hate start-up’s.

Yesterday I attended one of the this meetup’s I’ve always lost, because I was to late to get the ticket, because I miss the date, whatever, but really Hadoop Get Together is the place to be for data geek’s, I really enjoyed being there. There are always high quality talks made by people who is really working on the edge of this kind of technologies, but the best is probably how professionally this meetup is organized, with videos, catering, etc.

So if you like to check what had been spoken there, take a look to their Vimeo chanel, or at they Xing group. But lets see what they show us yesterday.

Sebastian Schelter on Introducing Apache Giraph for Large Scale Graph Processing.

Sebastian shows us the power of Apache Giraph, the open source initiative to implement a Google Pregel paradigm over Hadoop. Sebastian shows us some toy examples on how, and why this approach was really the solution when dealing with huge amount of data that looks like a graph, and what can we say everything is a network ( or looks like ) today.

With pros and cons, Giraph is probably the way to go when dealing with this kind of data, specially because they provide to you a very easy way to start using all your current Hadoop infrastructure. If you are interested on that I really recommend you to read the Pregel paper, plus if you are in Berlin after Buzzwords you should attend the Giraph Workshop.

Dr. Falk-Florian Henrich on Applying Compiler Technology to Event Stream Processing.

Dr Falk-Florian, told us how they use LVVM technology in order to build a proper compiler technology who can manage event stream processing. Still not sure If I like what they are doing or not, but have to say their first benchmarks are really impresive. Looking forward to have a more detailed overview of that in order to build a proper opinion. If you like the idea of using proper muti core computation to solve real time analitics, feel free to follow it at Celera One Gmbh.

Dr. Mikio Braun on TWIMPACT: On Real-Time Twitter Analysis.

The last, but not the least, Dr. Miko told us how they perform real time analysis of Twitter. Have to say they followed a really smart, step by step approach, specially loved the tip: Know your data, do you really can scale on Real-Time?. Also liked how they end up discarding some cool databases when dealing with this kind of process, ending up having some kind of usage of custom specialized data structures. Looking forward to have the option to put here their slides.

A side note was made by the Data Science Berlin people, showing up what they are promoting in town. A place to have an eye to, specially cause they are also organizing a data hackaton, we will see with what they come up.

Not related with data, but on the March edition of this Get Together there was a nice introduction on how to use Kanban to get more often and better releases. Only can say I subscribe 100% of the ideas presented by this guy.

See you more often here!

- purbon

Ein hoch aktuelles und spannendes Thema in der Informatik ist die effizient Verarbeitung und Speicherung sehr großer verteilter Graphen in hierauf spezialisierten Graphdatenbanken. Einer der wohl bekanntesten und beliebtesten Vertreter dieser Datenbanken ist neben OrientDB und DEX zweifelsfrei Neo4j. Aber auch eine zunehmend große Anzahl von Frameworks wie Blueprints, Apache Hama oder Google Pregel unterstützen den Softwareentwickler bei der Umsetzung graphbasierter Fragestellungen, welche sich von Sozialen Netzen über Empfehlungssysteme bis hin zu Routing-Algorithmen erstrecken.

Unser Ziel ist es Experten und interessierte Neueinsteiger zusammenzubringen und allen Beteiligten eine langfristige Möglichkeit zu eröffnen sich immer wieder über ihre tagtäglichen Graphprobleme auszutauschen, Best Practices zu erfahren und sich über aktuelle Entwicklungen der Datenbanken und Frameworks zu informieren. Hierzu starten wir am 27. Oktober 2011 den ersten “Berlin Graph Coding Dojo”.

Alle Interessierten sind herzlich eingeladen ab 19:30 Uhr im Berliner co-up gemeinsam die Welt der Graphdatenverarbeitung zu entdecken und gleich vor Ort die ersten kleine Anwendungen zu entwickeln. Für erfahrenere Leute haben wir interessante Probleme vorbereitet, deren eleganteste und schnellste Lösung prämiert wird. Vergesst also nicht eure Notebooks mitzubringen!

Wir möchten uns beim Berliner co-up, und moviepilot, bedanken ohne den diese Veranstaltung nicht möglich gewesen wäre. Für jede weitere Unterstützung, egal ob als Sponsor oder Mithelfer, aber auch für jede kleine Spende sind wir dankbar. Nehmt einfach mit uns Kontakt auf.

Informationen

27/Oktober/2011 19:30h
Berlin co-up [http://g.co/maps/j2tmb]
Adalbertstr. 7-8
10999 Berlin

Graph databases, together with graph processing problems, are a trendy topic right now. Neo4j is a well known graph database, but there are also others like OrientDB, DEX, etc. and there are also a big set of graph processing toolsets like Blueprints, Apache Hamma, Google Pregel
like systems, etc. So from recomendations systems to routing problems graph processing is an amazing thing to have in your toolset.

With the objective to have together experts and newbies, and for all of them to have the oportunity to learn new things by doing we launch the Berlin Graph Coding Dojo. Next 27 of October 2012 we will meet with the main task of learning and practicing new graph related tasks.

There will be enought food for more experienced people, but also for the ones who just say, ei! graphdbs are cool, lets gonna see what can I do in a short time with theme.

If interested, no mather your level of experience with this topic, show up next 27 of October at the Berlin Coworking Space. Bring your laptop, and in a couple of hours your will for sure solved a new thing using graphs.

Lots of thanks to the co-up for making this event possible. Also if you want to be an sponsor, collaborate, give your five cents, whatever!, contact us!.

For more information you can join: graph-b@googlegroups.com or take a look here https://bitly.com/ofGzoB

Details
27/October/2011 19:30h
co-up [http://g.co/maps/j2tmb]
Adalbertstr. 7-8
10999 Berlin

As some of you know my current job makes me program in Ruby thing that I have to say I like, mostly cause sometimes you find interesting facts like the one I will write about here.

Yesterday, together with my college Adolfo Builes, we had an interesting ongoing discussion about the performance of the map operation, specially in some use cases we face with.

You can check the code I used to benchmark this operation obviously on github, and obviously try to reproduce it. And please all the statements I make here are based on this numbers and my experiences, comments are really welcome!.

So lets check my thoughts about this operation. Before start with the numeric analysis I would love talk a bit about the methodology I followed.

We faces with the use case where we want to use a map operation, over an ruby enumerable, with the main business of tuning this collection with new data useful as an output of the function. So after a long time debugging we discovered that the most important batch of time was used by the map operation.

So I tried to compare this situation using the next configuration:

• JRuby 1.6.3.
• Ruby versions 1.8 and 1.9.
• Having the collection in memory or not.
• Using a custom class with lots of data and Fixnum as the tiny one.

So for this I used the ruby standard library benchmarking facilities, specially the Benchmark.bm and Benchmark.bmbm modes, and a MacBook Pro as a test machine. It is important to notice that all the executions where made using the default JRuby configuration options.

And obviously after that there came some interesting insights I think important to share with you:

• As a general fact, using the map function with bloc as a parameter, its quite more faster than using the method symbol as a single argument. This seems to be well known for the ruby community since a long time. I think has an argument when you think how the procedures are managed into the ruby compiler.
• Either you use 1.8 or 1.9, and your data is not simple and also more likely not to be always in memory, it is better to avoid using map. It performs a lot better to use your custom code. Really would love to understand why? will look deeper on how the JRuby implementation of this function looks like.
• But if your data is simple, using map with a bloc as a parameter is your best shot. And the custom mapping the worst. Think this could be related with the memory assigned to the JRuby heap, but also need more in deep knowledge in order to understand it at all.
• If your data is going to be most of the time in memory, other facts need to be take it into account:
• • Using map with a bloc parameter looks to be the best shot either using 1.8 or 1.9 modes, when talking about complex objects.
  • Also mapping data throw a your custom code looks not to be the best shoot, however in the 1.9 mode is better than using map with a symbol parameter.
  • But when talking about the tiny ones, using map with a symbol parameter always succeed as the best one.

Obviously this can not be take it 100% seriously as I am too new to the ruby world, but its interesting how the same function performs in different ruby versions, and processed data. Would love anyone with more experience in the language to share your opinion about, also all the ruby programming tips are really welcome!

Next steeps try to discover why this functions is performing like this in different scenarios, moving from the number to the real knowledge of the causes!

Keep on!

- purbon

 
JPL – La teva trobada anual – Free Software, Open Source i Coneixement Lliure.
Barcelona