I attended four papers (you can check the abstracts of Friday papers here): paper 304, 323, 538, and 434. On of the paper has nobody to present it. There were quite a bunch of interesting ideas. I just want to mention one of them. Two papers presented several methodologies to model SOA. Another interesting approach was the claim (papers 304 and 434) that SOA can be used for modeling business processes, and have little to do with information technologies. They claimed that such a connection to information technologies should be done once the SOA business processes are well defined. This may sound quite estrange if you are coming from a technical background. However, it is not far fetch. It just sound like a reincarnation of the late nineties hype on business reengineering via functional designs—which SAP rided so successful. Interestingly Jorge Cardoso also hinted this direction during the morning panel. ...

The hotel finally got the wireless system rebooted, so I am finally back up. I found quite unusual to open the ICEIS 2008 conference with a panel form by the four invited speakers: Moira Norrie (Global Information System Group, ETH), Jorge Cardoso (SAP), Jean-Marie Favre (UFR, IMA), Ricardo Baeza-Yates (Yahoo! Research Barcelona). Each of them did a short introduction of their invited talks, and just three questions were asked. Since the conference started at 11am, after the panel, lunch break :D ...

Are you familiar with threading in Java and looking for a crash course in Python? If the answer is yes, I just found an article written by Peyton McCullough that may help you. The “Basic Threading in Python” article can take you from no clue to writing your threaded Python code in a few minutes. See the example below, extracted from his article, to see if that rings a bell :D ...

Walking the streets of Barcelona—oops didn’t I mention I am on vacation?—I run into a bookstore near las Ramblas. Meandering around the narrow stacks, I found the newly released Catalan translation of Amélie Nothomb’s “Jornal d’Hirondelle” (Diary de l’oreneta/Diary of the swallow). The first book I read from her was “Méthaphysique des tubes”, and she got me at the first line. I need to speed up with Ulam’s autobiography—extremely addictive—so I can move on to this one. ...

Yesterday I was reading an interview to Brian Aker (MySQL director of technology) I found via Slashdot when something caught my attention. On the second side of this which may actually be more exciting is the issue of–instead of the structured data world of the relational database but the semi–the semi-structured world. You look at what is being done today with CouchDB, you look at Amazon ScaleDB, to a lesser extent but to a similar extent you–not ScaleDB, SimpleDB–to a lesser extent or a similar extent Tokyo Cabinet, those databases are really kind of fascinating because those databases are redefining really how we access data and how we are going to be searching and using data. So there’s a whole world out there that’s just starting to open up in that direction. ...