Miguel On Life

I just found a hilarious comic strip based on Accenture (formerly known as Andersen Consulting).  The original comic name was Bigtime Consulting, after AC became Accenture it changed its name to Identure. Originally, the comic was run by anonimous Accenture empoyee that went public after leaving the company.

Some of the strips are really close to reality hehe. Here one of my favorites :

You can view more strips or check Wikipedia page about it.

Somewhere in 2007 I heard the phrase “Software is a commodity”.

3 Characteristics of it:

1.  Always demanded
2.  Interchangeable (well almost)
3.  No “Quality” measure.

That’s true for software? it was not, but know with the “Software Factories” it is becoming more like it. Now I am tired, but I promise to write more about it soon.

This bug is pervasive and common to al Web2.0ish social networking websites.

Generally, when you enter a social web, the application asks for your IM (GTALK, AIM, MSN)  Accounts to check if one of your contact is already in that sociual network and so automatically connect with him  (Examples, LikedIN,Facebook, Twitter,  and so).

So what is the bug? well it happens that for some IM Systems like MSN (and I think GMAIL) you can use your custom email. For example my MSN Messenger account is the same that my GMAIL e-mail addresses. So, what happens then? The system’s designers did not  consider it? Now,  I cannot import my MSN contacts into Facebook  or LinkedIn for that reason. They wrongly supposed that all MSN accounts “should” end in hotmail.com or msn.com

Changos.

It has been a month since I wrote in this piece of blog. Let’s see the highlights of this month:

•  I got a promotion in my Job, which is cool, but I still feel I am in the wrong place.

• In the previous post, I uploaded some vids of me training Brazilian JiuJitsu with my friend Fernando. Well, a Colombo-American guy,  named Will,  contacted me. He is now  living in Medellin, and was desperately looking for a place to train. He’s a blue belt and was training in U.S.A before moving to Colombia. I have been training with him for two weeks and it has been amazing. I   really excited about training Brazilian JiuJitsu for real.  I have learned some nice moves. We are planning to create a community of BJJ practitioners here in Medellin. First, we will be under the Umbrella of Sol Naciente Judo Club, but with the time, we plan to create our own Club. If you are an orphan BJJ practitioner here in Medellin, contact me about the time and place we are training.

• I’ve been struggling to close my thesis (I mean finishing it for real, the result submitted in the document are just the initial ones). It has been a pain in the ass getting the algorithm right. I chose to write it in Matlab, but now I repent, although, in that case I would have had to build my own version SMO Algorithm (or similar) for solving  QP problems, which  I think I  would’ve taken more time to do it.  I want to publish in an international conference, but without serious results I won’t be able to do it :(. help?

• I’ve been toying with Google Application Engine, I have a couple of Ideas that I want to try. It has been good so far, learning Python is easy when you have a little Ruby background. I like Python, but still my favorite one is Ruby.  I have been doing a lot of Java lately at work, with help of Eclipse, which makes my life so easy (but I still use Emacs at home though). I have been learning more Emacs these days. Setting it up is not that easy but the results are cool. Another software I’ve been trying is Git, which look very promising, I want to open an account on Github, and upload some real shitty code I have in my Hard-disk.

• Talking about hard-disks, one my disks  (the main one)  just failed along with my USB Flash Drive and cellphone. All in the same day. I really did not have the “backup”, but I had a copy of the important parts either in the other disk or in remote servers. I lost a lot of data, but not really essential one. I bought a new disk of 250 GB for only $120.000 COP (about 68 bucks). Very cheap thanks to the revaluation.

• I went to watch Ironman. Superb movie, very entertaining. I am looking forward for the Avengers saga to be released.

Well that is pretty much everything. One more month, the year is flying, and I mean it. In the college the time passed very, very slow.

As you guys may know, I ‘ve been training Judo  for like 2 years (but very irregularly, of those years I approximate 9-11 moths of regular training). Although Judo is a fine martial art , from the beginning I  wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ),  a similar martial art focused in ground fighting (chokes, joint locks and son on) whereas Judo is focused mostly in takedowns and throws. The problem is that in Medellin (and I presume Colombia) there are not BJJ academies, so I train Judo instead,  which is considered for many as the father of this Brazilian martial art. Still,  In my Judo training  I focus my game in the ground fighting part of it (called ne-waza).

As there wasn’t a BJJ academy nearby, I begun to learn by myself by using instructional videos and then trying to apply those  techniques while training Judo. This was not always possible and I constantly got criticism from Judo purists. After some months of training, I recorded one of my fight with myJudo  sensei and posted it on YouTube. Through the commentaries of the video I met Fernando,  a Renzo Gracie’s Colombo-American BJJ purple Belt which was going  to fly to Medellin for Bossiness.   He came to our Dojo and train some of us on basic BJJ techniques. It was good finally to have a taste of real BJJ;  I  got more excited about the art.

Two weeks ago he came back to Medellin and we went to train together,  this time it was more one-on-one training, with just one guy from the Dojo staying to watch and learn.  After training some basic techniques we rolled (spar) for a while. I have to say that I was in no shape and I have stopped all Judo training due to time constraints. But that’s not the reason I lost, I mean, a white belt BJJ guy like me have no chances against a BJJ purple belt . Anyway it was very fun and  I am looking forward to train again (and hopefully have some rematchs!).

This time we trained without Gi’s, the uniforms with the color belts. This is called No-Gi BJJ or sometimes Submission Wrestiling. We recorded the two fights, I  lost both off course, but I learned a lot that day.  Below the videos of the fights. the Rashguard I am using in the videos was gift from Fernando, thanks dude!.

First Fight

In this first fight we started from the top, Fernando tried to get me in his guard, but I initially avoided  it but while trying to get him side-controlled I fell in his guard and then he tried to apply a triangle choke (from which I barely escaped), then he tried a Armbar from which also I escaped (I can belive I did it but it was neat). at that point of the fight I did a serious mistake: exposing my back to him, from there he tried a rear naked choke. Initially I was able to stop him, but while trying to scape I uncovered my neck and he finally applied it which made me tap out.

Rematch

It does not look like, but sparring is a very energy consuming activity and needs a lot of cardio. By the second fight (we rested like 30 secs) I was already tired.  We started clinching and I got the opportunity for the take down I and I took it, I did not  grabbed his legs properly so I ended up in his half guard. He did a excellent sweep and got me in his guard from which I stared to  look for ways of passing it. I eventually stood up but I was  really exhausted  and he took me down easily and got the mounted position. I taped out because I was really tired and I could not continue (we were training from 11:30 and it was like 2 PM when we stared to roll).

I had a really good time training BJJ with Fernando, it looks like he is going to come more often to Medellín, which will allow me to train BJJ more regularly and sharp my ground fighting skills. Thanks Fernando! Looking forward to get my ass kicked one more time hehehe :P.

PD. For some of my Judo frieds that say that I only post videos of me  winning I just posted two where I get defeated very easily. Nevertheless,  I can still kick your individual asses.

Okay, this is another personal blog. I have some technical related posts cooking, but that will have to wait.

I was supposed to write more often in this piece of Weblog, but well life is not always as you expected it to be… but in many ways life is good.

Let’s get started and be more concrete, I have been very busy at work and things in someways are getting better but on the other hand I have realized of some injustices and company practices that I am not really fond of. Anyway, I feel I am learning a lot and so far I’ve been given a very good feedback from my superiors.

Not all news are good though, I applied to some grad school (like 3, really) I sincerely believed I had a chance in one of them, But so far I have been rejected from the waitlist of one of my favorites. I still waiting for the answer of another, but I don’t really believe I’m gonna get in. Anyway, my plan keeps intact. I have good chances to enter in the Msc. program another world renowned University for next. This year I did not applied  because of time and financial issues.

Enterprise experience has been not as good as I expected, but I have learned a lot, not technical really, but how the things are done in Big Companies (The processes suck anyway). So, I will be in Colombia for at least another year. The objetive this year is to publish a article related to my thesis (link in a future) in a international journal so I will have a stronger CV.

As for the Job, I think will be using Java and JNI (so we can code some function in C). The client wanted speed but the lot of boilerplate and non-functional code needed to carry on the the tasks was just outrageous. (I bet you have never done a SQL-query from C to a Oracle database).

That’s all for the last month in my life. Well I got sick but I am better now. That’s something to be grateful for.

Ya vamos para dos meses en Accenture, sí, esa firma grande de IT Consulting donde trabajo. Algunas frases y palabras que he escuchado y me han quedado sonando en el transcurso de estos casi dos meses (dentro y fuera de la empresa).

• Escalar
• Reunión
• Te Cuadra?
• “Eres débil” - De Benito a cualquiera que no quiera seguir tomando.
• Parametrico
• Harina de Pescado
• “de que”.
• “…Que te cagas”
• Interfaz
• un audio
• Modulo, Componente y Rutina
• “La metodología” - ver artículo de Joel Spolsky cortesía de Federico.
• Control de Cambios
• Funcional
• Técnico
• Le Garage
• La Guayaba
• Hamacas
• “Va invitar” o el imperativo: “Invite pues”.
• Nos Impacta?
• “Como vamos con el cronograma?”
• You know mi hermano!
• Yoda - Nick de Andrés
• “En que anda?”

Creo que ya ha sido suficiente :P. En el trabajo estamos haciendo Big Design Up Front (BDUF) y no es el de Joel Spolsky, es realmente un BDUF para hacer un desarrollo en cascada (que no me gusta nada). Por tal motivo, ahora no estoy tocando nada de código sino “analizando” y diseñando. Lo malo (o lo bueno) es que creo que soy yo también el que le va tocar implementar el sistema, osea yo mismo me puedo echar cuchillo.

Como es de esperar, en “la metodología” de la empresa implica hacer un sin número de documentos, yo la llamo una metodología orientada a los deriverables :P. En todo caso, me ha tocado desarrollar muchos diagramas de clase, cosa en la cual ya tenía algo de experiencia, pero que siempre había usado como un sketch al mejor estilo Fowleriano.

En este caso no podía hacer esto, y para poder definir el comportamiento del aplicativo, una vista estática como lo es el diagrama de clase, sencillamente no es suficiente. Inclusive, para definir adecuadamente la vista estática, no es suficiente tener una idea de como van a interactuar la clases. Entonces, pensé en un diagrama de secuencia para los casos de uso principales podría ser de ayuda. Efectivamente, esto no solo me ayudó a refinar el diagrama de clase, sino que también me permitió a ser mucho más concreto y preciso en el mismo. Eso me gustó mucho y ahora recomendaré que, luego de haber definido las principales clases y relaciones entre las mismas, escribir un diagrama de secuencia para los casos de uso más importantes. Sin embargo, y quiero ser muy enfático en esto, el diagrama de clases, luego de hacer los de secuencia no estaba completo. Le faltaban (y aun le faltan) cosas. Debo decir que para mi gusto, el diagrama está lo suficientemente concreto para poder escribir código. Lo anterior solo me confirma lo que dice el mismo Fowler en el libro al que hago referencia arriba: lograr un diseño completo desde el principio, sino imposible, es muy , pero muy difícil. Pero bueno, no soy yo el que pone las reglas del juego y me tocará tratar de hacer lo mejor posible cada fase (y pues iterar por mi cuenta cuando sea necesario).

Otra practica que me pareció interesante (y que personalmente nunca había hecho) fue la de escribir pequeñas CRC para mi, con esto vislumbré que clases debían dividirse (por el principio de única responsabilidad) y con que otras clases tenían relación.

Volviendo a lo de BDUF (porque no sé para que dije todo el rollo anterior, creo que quería desahogarme), encontré un artículo muy interesante sobre la tragedia del Challeger y los diseños top-down (que es básicamente BDUF) y como se relaciona con el desarrollo de software actual:

Richard Feynman, the Challenger Disaster, and Software Engineering

Bueno, creo que es todo lo que quiero comentar por ahora. Como parroquial, comento que el gran día ha llegado y me gradúo mañana a las 3 de la tarde en el teatro metropolitano de la hermosa ciudad de Medellín. Muchas gracias a todos los que escribieron con frases de apoyo y felicitación.

Últimamente he tenido poco tiempo y muy poca voluntad para actualizar el Blog. Ha pasado algún tiempo desde que escribí algo en el blog, y bueno, creo que hay cosas que vale la pena mencionar.

Ha pasado un mes en el trabajo, el proyecto es muy importante y también es interesante, no es propiamente un proyecto de desarrollo, lo que hace que me toque trabajar con gente con perfiles muy variados, que es muy enriquecedor. El ambiente de trabajo es muy internacional, por ejemplo tengo dos compañeros de trabajo españoles y según tengo entendido, viene otro de Italia. Sumado a lo anterior, el idioma oficial del proyecto es inglés, por que una de las compañías con las que trabajamos conjuntamente es fraco-americana (y bueno, eso me da la oportunidad de practicar el idioma de Shakespeare). Trabajar en este tipo de compañías tiene cosas no muy buenas también, pero ya aprenderé a vivir con ellas.

Del proyecto en sí, no puedo comentar mucho, pero aspiro escribir próximamente sobre aspectos relacionadas con el mismo, como la metodología que estamos siguiendo y ciertas cosas algo extrañas (técnicamente hablando) que el proyecto por su naturaleza nos ha impuesto.

También estuve en el Zonalito (Inducción) de AIESEC. A finales del año pasado había considerado hacer un intercambio a través de la organización pero las cosas no se dieron. Este año decidí unirme como miembro de la misma, aunque a este evento fui a conocer un poco más de que cerca la organización. Debo decir que encontré extrañas ciertas practicas (como los Roll Calls) pero me en general pareció muy interesante el concepto y la orientación del grupo. Personalmente, creo que debí haberme unido al grupo mucho antes, cuando estaba en la Universidad (yo diría que el séptimo semestre en adelante). No lo hice, y ahora dudo mucho en que tanto pueda yo aportar a la misma (tiempo) y ella a mi. Conocer gente siempre es bueno y expandir la red de contactos me parece sumamente importante.

El zonalito se realizo en una finca en cerca a Girardota, con piscina y toda la vaina, aunque no se pudo aprovechar por el clima y el tiempo disponible. Hay otras cosas que mencionar, pero ando algo cansado, estos ultimos fines de semana han sido muy intensos, gracias en parte a los compañeros de trabajo :-P.

Por cierto, me gradúo de Ingeniero el próximo 14 de Marzo a las 3 de la tarde. El evento será realizado en el Teatro Metropolitano de la ciudad de Medellín. Vayan comprando los regalitos :-).

I’ve been using Facebook’s Movies appliication to review some of the Movies I have seen lately, I think I am gonna post some of the review here, and make it more public. Also this is the first post that uses Eeekfun’s semantics to share products recommendations .

3:10 To Yuma Rating:   I liked the overall of the movie, I pretty much hate western genre, but this one was a fine movie. The movie owns a lot to the cast with very convincing performances from Bale and Crowe, some people say that they were minimalistic but I think is part of the movie and maybe the intention of the director, making the both character very enigmatic. It was also fun to see Tudyk again. This is not a movie for everyone tough, but I would recommend it.

Angel-A Rating:   Well this is a excellent movie but not perfect. I liked the cinematography, the performance of the actors (and well, Rie Rasmussen is just gorgeous). The story is also good but I think it could be more deep and the dialogue more elaborated, altough it is a beautiful film, some of the conversations are rather simplistic. This is a movie with great message, totally recommended

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street Rating:   I really hate musicals, but this is the exception, I think is because the respect I feel for the work of Tim Burton. I liked the grim atmosphere of the film, and of course the performance of the Burton’s favorites Bonham Carter and Depp. But it was a Musical after all and it broke my nerves a lot of times. Overall I like the film, I did not like the end, it’s a good work but at least for me, it is not one of the best films from this great director.

I will post more reviews soon, some new ones and others from my Flixter profile.. . .

Alejandro Forero from Freak Unido’s hall of fame (:P) have been busy lately. I really like this guy’s ideas because some of them are very orginal,  even if sometimes I feel that they are little strange. Anyway this is not the case and this guy have come up with two new systems Eeekfun and Chr97.

EekFun

Basically Eeekfun is a weblog based Social Network. One of its main features is that through the use of the user’s weblog it can extract a list of items  the user has written about, e.g Movies or Books. (you could say that it is a an aggregator on steroids) One of the main reasons that made Alejandro create this system was the fact that social networking sites like Facebook does not ofer a more deep interaction among the users and it is only limited to “listing” what the user likes. Although in the specific case of Facebook there are “applications” that allow a certain degree of interaction they are locked in the Facebook world. Eekfun provides a good way to share opinions about items and can bee seen as an alternative way of browsing another person’s Weblog.

Alejandro also says that people is not blogging anymore because of the Social sites, I dissent with this statement, I believe that Weblogs were a fade and not everyone want to blog or have the time to do it. I think that pretty much people were creating weblogs because everyone else had one, and many of those blogs didn’t even contain original material.

I would be nice to have RSS feed for each category of items (Movies, Books, etc) and a RSS per user that would allow the user to publitize the items’ reviews (and the system) through their weblogs.

Eekfun looks “fun”, I would like to see features like rating a movie or book for example, that would be nice. I haven’t tried it yet but if Nelson still has invitations I probably will ask for one.

Chr97 (in 97 Chrs or less)

Do you wanna write something anonymously about anything? Do it. let’s waste some time.