Reblogged from RichTavee:

There are very few things in life that I’m addicted to – coffee, Dexter (of course), graphic design, infographics. I guess in a way I’m very lucky. My addictions could be significantly worse – drugs, gambling, alcohol…the list goes on. In one of my previous blog posts from July, Infographics: My Addiction, I hadn’t realized until now how many amazing resources are out there not only to find existing infographics but the abundance of tools and tutorials to start making your own infographics. The problem …

Infographic resources

I wanted to write something to acknowledge Dennis Ritchie. Just as Steve change my life for being a believer, a visionary and a leader, Ritchie change it to create the science that supports almost everything I do (and even what Steve did). That’s a tall order to fill up, the word everything is BIG, so let’s check out some of his accomplishments:

1. Creator of the C programming language. That along earns it quite an array of accolades and influence. Here are some ripple effects of this creation:
   • Without C, there is no C++
   • Without C, there is no Objective C
   • Without C, there no Unit OS, or Windows OS. No Linux, no Symbian, OSX, or iOS. Without these, there would be no Nokias, no Blackberries, no Androids, no iPhones or iPads.
   • Thanks to C, the words ‘programmer’ and ‘software developer’ became ubiquitous in society
2. Because of C, software engineering and programming was made accessible to the masses, and became a ‘popular’ career path in university programs.
3. Created the generic operating systems theory that supports the fundamental concepts of all modern operating systems.
4. Implemented the UNIX OS. Again the ripple effects of this accomplishment are too much to list here.
5. Author of “The C Programming Language,” also known as “K. & R.”, standing for Kernighan and Ritchie.
6. Awarded the Turing Award in 1983 for his enormous contributions in the fields of computing and operating systems. The Turing Award is the highest distinction given to a human being for their contribution to the field of Computer Science.

His accomplishments were the foundation to the technology revolution we experienced in the last decades. The gigantic footprint Dennis Ritchie left in the world are in my modest opinion, far-reaching, transformational and revolutionary than anyone that left this world in 2011. He was certainly not the most charismatic and public person in the world, so the media didn’t like him as much as Steve.

This is image is trending today… for some reason 4 months after Ritchie died.

Here is another article making another side by side contribution.

I have nothing but great respect for both of these men. Without their dents in the universe, my life would have been a much different one. If you think Dennis Ritchie deserves your respect, share this with your friends, and let the world know that 2011 was the year when we lost two very important figures, and not just one.

BTW you can follow me on twitter @MichelTriana (http://twitter.com/MichelTriana) and @NinutInc (http://twitter.com/NinutInc)

Reblogged from Information Engineering Research Unit blog:

Last Monday IE member Leonardo Lezcano received his PhD degree, awarded cum laude by the University of Alcalá, after defending his four year research in a dissertation titled “COMBINING ONTOLOGIES AND RULES WITH CLINICAL ARCHETYPES”. The ceremony took place in the Faculty of Law of the University of Alcalá where a committee of experts chaired by Pythagoras Karampiperis evaluated the dissertation. From now on Lezcano will continue to develop his research lines, which are related to the Semantic Web as …

So how do you resolve/implement this problem? You may want to follow K. Scott Allen’s database version control blog series (links below).

1. Three rules for database work
2. The Baseline
3. Change Scripts
4. Views, Stored Procedures and the Like
5. Branching and Merging

These posts are great for the conceptual background and practices when doing the change scripts and such. The problem is there is no much implementation in the series to help speed up the process. To complement the series, you can DOWNLOAD my implementation of SQL Source Control. It consist of roughly of 4 tables and 4 sprocs. If you want to implement it on your SQL Server Database, download this update script and run it against your database (make a backup first, just in case).

Here is the ERD of the version control entities:

To use it, just create your change script (maybe follow some of the advice from Scott Allen), and follow this template to add the final touches to the script. Essentially all you have to do is call the Database_Update sproc and inspect the DatabaseErrorLog table whenever you encounter a problem to find more details.

BEGIN TRY

BEGIN TRAN

DECLARE @DatabaseVersionLogId INT , --This is for later, you may needed if you want to report to a CI Server.
 @UpdateFromDatabaseVersion VARCHAR(32) = '1.2.3' ,--The database version you want to update. This is your starting point.
 @UpdateToDatabaseVersion VARCHAR(32) = '1.2.4' ,--The new version of the database after successfuly updated
 @UpdateScriptName VARCHAR(64) = N'''1.2.3 to 1.2.4''' ,--A friendly name for this script
 @UpdateScriptFileName VARCHAR(1024)= N'''123 to 124.sql''' ,--The file name containing this script.
 @CreateScriptName VARCHAR(64) = N'1.2.4' ,--A friendly name for ANOTHER script (not this one) that generates the new schema from scratch as opposed to from the @UpdateFromDatabaseVersion database
 @CreateScriptFileName VARCHAR(1024)= N'124.sql' ,--The file name containing the @CreateScriptName script
 @Tags VARCHAR(MAX) = N'1.2.4, 1.2.3, super release'--A CSV for tagging and searching your releases later on.

 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION
 -- ADD YOUR CHANGE SCRIPT IN THIS SECTION

EXEC @return_value = [dbo].[Database_Update] @UpdateFromDatabaseVersion,
 @UpdateToDatabaseVersion, @UpdateScriptName, @UpdateScriptFileName,
 @CreateScriptName, @CreateScriptFileName, @Tags,
 @DatabaseVersionLogId = @DatabaseVersionLogId OUTPUT

SELECT @DatabaseVersionLogId AS N'@DatabaseVersionLogId'

 PRINT ( 'All good. Update finished... now go open a beer' )

 COMMIT

END TRY

BEGIN CATCH

PRINT ( 'Michael Jackson''s moonwalk. The script is a piece of shit. Fix it and try again. Your database is safe.' )

 ROLLBACK

END CATCH

You can download the same script HERE

Enjoy and Happy coding!

A Global Ontology

The word appeared for the first time in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1989. Because it’s a relatively new word for English-speaking folks, the word itself it gets in the way of story it tells. In reality it has been around for quite some time in society.

The philosophical study of existence, “what is real and what is not”, it’s been around for centuries. We can find evidence of the questioning of nature and reality all the way back to the Pre-Socratic era, with philosopher Parmenides of Ela. Parmenides is most known for a poem he wrote called “On Nature” (read the poem here). The poem describes two different perspectives of the same reality, but it zeroes in one powerful idea, that no matter how different appearances of that ‘that it is’ (he calls it ‘the way of opinion’), the truth about ‘it’ does not change (‘the way of the truth’). In a nutshell, this is the first recorded attempt to formalize the realization that existential things don’t change regardless of the lexicon or language used to describe them. Many more developed their own thesis on how to define reality. Plato also made notable contributions to the field of Ontology, and his later disciple Aristotle put a dent in this universe with his works Categories and Metaphysics.

Why is this important today? Because all natural science fields that describe elements of the real world, already have their own ontologies, but this is not the case for Computer Science and Information Technology. Physics, Chemistry and Biology all have a very clear lexicon or dictionary that describes their scientific domains. But we have yet to define an Ontology that describes the world we present through software. When building information systems, different authors, developers and companies declare the same entity ‘that is’ not as the entity itself, but instead as one of its appearances. What we end up with is a lot of unnecessary repetition, corrupted data structures for entities and unnecessary computations made for the sake of mapping appearances that represent the same entity. A call for a Global Ontology has been the topic of many academics for a long time, and in many ways considered the holy grail of information sciences.

Mathematics, as the universal language, describes abstractions and logical reasoning to determine the truthfulness of an assumption. We do it with the use of specialized notation, like numbers and shapes that do not have a tangible form. No author, developer, company or human being in the planet will argue what the number ‘3’ represents. Mathematics provides the foundation for all Ontologies of any other domain definable by humanity. I couldn’t put it any better than Galileo Galilei:

“The universe cannot be read until we have learned the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word. Without these, one is wandering about in a dark labyrinth”

Going back to Ontology in the Information Sciences, some questions remain unanswered:

• What are the fundamental objects or structures we ought to define to represent the tangible and abstract concepts from a specific domain?
• How can we successfully share and relate objects from different domain ontologies?
• How can we define ontology structures in a way they are effective for operational and usable digital communications?

The biggest challenge in information science with respect of the use of ontologies, is that of establishing a base line agreement in the industry to use a common lexicon and vocabulary consistent with the theory specified by the a particular domain ontology. A Global Ontology would be defined as the aggregation of all domain ontologies, where a domain ontology represents the abstractions and tangible objects of part of the world or a specific knowledge domain.

Competition begs to be mentioned in these lines. The mammoths in the software industry have shown more interest in sticking their guns out for discriminator structures under the same ontological domain with their competitors. For example, Google Maps, Bing Maps and MapQuest all offer services in the GIS domain, yet they’ve decided not to share the same vocabulary and lexicon to name their GIS objects. Think about this for a minute, if these companies decided to share a global GIS schema, then their only discriminator really would be the quality of their service… but that’ll make it too easy for developers to switch sides; so they decide to give their own twist on unique vocabulary. The result is arbitrary mappings for “State”, “Province”, “StateProvince” and “Municipality”, each with multiple data types, sizes and formatting, ultimately adding layers of unnecessary complexity to such a simple concept like that ‘that it is’.

This is already too long of a post, so I’ll cut it short. Maybe in future posts, I’ll cover ontology more closely to engineering, and what you, as an architect, computer scientist, programmer, etc, can do to make your work  a much pleasant and rewarding one. My very good friend Leonardo Lezcano, has published many works in the healthcare domain ontology, with research and papers covering the Semantic Web and Semantic Interoperability. You can find some of his works HERE and HERE.

This is somehow a challenging topic to explain, and for the recipient to say “I get it” the first time around. I’ll feel good if I get a “I kinda got it” after someone reading this

In this infographic, we examine the world’s up-and-coming tech communities – from Germany to Mexico to Indonesia and more – and compare them on a number of different factors, including entrepreneurial mindset, access to capital and general strengths and weaknesses

© 2012 10 and Under Tennis

If you have WCF services exposed through any of its different endpoints, you have to do the most ridiculous dancing to get something as simple as the HttpContext. WTF is up with that Microsoft!?!

There are like 10 different ways to access HttpContext and Request Headers, all weird in their own ways, none of them standard, and requiring the callers to add headers in different and specific ways:

• There is HttpContext (or this.Context or HttpContext.Current): “Gets or sets the HttpContext object for the current HTTP request” This would be the obvious choice, but the WCF team needed to get COMPLICATED! To support this, you have to add extra magic and attributes to your service contracts (read here)
•  Then we get fancy with something that is not quite the HttpContext the WEB knows and loves, but some new BS called OperationContext (OperationContext .Current). MSDN explains: “Provides access to the execution context of a service method”… but off-course!
• Also HttpContextBase class according to MSDN “serves as the base class for classes that contain HTTP-specific information about an individual HTTP request”. So, you’d only think that HttpContextBase is the base class of HttpContext right? WRONG!

Hmmm, at this point you think this might be a brain teaser. There may be another 2-3 ways to access data from a similar concepts.
If inspecting the HttpContext on the server side is a nightmare, managing headers and contextual http request elements on the client is even worse if your client is using the generated WCF contracts from VS. Here you are either setting something called ‘OutgoingMessageHeaders’ on an http request (like there is something that can be ‘incoming’ during a request), or you are implementing a custom IClientMessageInspector and altering the request before it is sent to the server: what is this the Police Academy (Inspector, pffff)? Why do I need to inspect a message I built? Or why am I forced to do this kind of crap?

This is so frustrating I cannot cope with the unnecessary layers of engineering and noise the WCF team threw over such a simple concept. I have nothing against new and different ways to solve problems, but please don’t call it the same as something that already exists and it’s well defined by the HTTP protocol specification (RFC 2616). PLEASE. DON’T.

I’ll try working around it with Rick Strahl’s post. If I keep having problems, I’ll move out to a different framework, implement my IHttpHandler, or downplay WCF’s capabilities.