Pernicious Trends Of Society

These days one of the most overrated music is produced and recorded. Are people's tastes changed so much compared to the past where quality music actually meant something. People have slowly rescinded to listening to rubbish music. Is this in some way influenced by what their peers listen to as a way of following the crowd. Perhaps, the young generations of today have become the follow the crowd sort, giving into the craze mentality of acceptance. It seems uniqueness is meaningless if it is not acknowledged by peers. Perhaps, this is what is breeding dangerous cultural ground in schools. This also develops into crowd mentality of shared beliefs and values which essentially implies bigotry, materialism, and the need for fame and popularity take on a completely new transformation. Such so called artists like Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran and so many others are at top of the billboard charts even when their so called music is just terrible. Legohouse is possibly one of the lamest songs. What exactly is a Legohouse, is that a passive way of saying a gingerhouse? We used to have such quality songs in past decades. However, the music industry of today, is more interested in making money than making good music while treating people in the limelight as commodities of the recording trade. And, as such individuals take on the limelight the really good music takes a back seat on music stations. The same can be seen of the lack of quality programmes broadcast on any given TV network or channel. These days materialism and chase for fame have become the main goal of our younger generation. And, to what levels they may go to achieve it also has shocking realities. Lives being dictated by peers becomes extremely difficult for the parents as one might imagine through managing the existence of social networks. It seems the world we are living in slowly disintegrating into a hole of nothingness where more people are without hope and love, but as shallow as the next person. Life for many is changing on any typical day. And, yet we all continue to dream about a better existence in some time in future. Everyone from time to time desires something. Perhaps, some more than others. The disintegration of societies in our midst is all becoming a big reality as the world gets colder by the day and the conceptualization of happiness becomes an even more complex abstraction.  

England vs Italy

A fairly predictable game. An outstanding but a slow effort by Italy. We may just see Super Mario changing his mohawk hair color at each game if we are lucky. This sort of a meandering and effortless play could be expected from the hype of England. Instances of good plays by England are usually only few and far between and almost rare on most occasions. The players are often overpaid at premier level and pampered way beyond what is necessary. Even after going through scores of climate training and conditioning they still struggled to score goals or at least win the game. Even, as per the press conference, the grass pitch was also perfect to play on. No matter what any one says, effort alone is not enough. It is the winning the game that counts. After all, it is a competition and it has been long awaited for time when England bring home the World Cup. Unfortunately, haphazard and brain-dead plays by England leaves little hope and an eventual defeat. One can imagine that even USA will be able to beat England at their own game. Why is it that English suck at all the major sports that they have so historically developed and formalized over the generations. Apart from, the usual games that simply adapt to the visit to a bar or pub. It seems for much of the new generation the will to fight to the end has seemingly been lost through sympathetic and humanistic ideals. Even materialistic values have overshadowed the patriotic drive which is often necessary in international competitions. The fighting spirit and the competitive mindset is what is seriously lacking in England players. 

Spain vs Netherlands

What a sheer level of thrashing and demolition derby came in full force from the Netherlands in an immense 5-1 victory against Spain. Pretty much leaving Spain in their tracks and dumbfounded. Yes, dumbfounded is an exactness. Cheating has been the cornerstone of the game play of Spain for much of the past World Cup events. But, not anymore will they overtake the gaping pool of talent and achievement woven in the fabric of Netherlands football over the years. World Cup almost always brings a sheer amount of surprise and excitement. And, this game was no different in surprises. The quality of play on display was spectacular, possibly even better than Brazil from day before. The first couple of goals in many respects left a jolt through Spain for much of the game. While, Netherlands were relentless on the field and finished with a very fruitful result.

Designing An Ontology

An ontology defines a common vocabulary and a shared means of understanding concepts. These concepts invariably also have attributes and properties as well as their models set of constraints. An ontology often has associated context to the concepts that is being defined. Ontological models utilize the idea of domains and relations. Concepts are defined as classes. They also have a set hierarchy in a subclass and superclass relationship. They also have associated attributes and properties with defined constraints. They may even have individuals which provide for such attributes and property values. What one gains from an ontology is knowledge represented in embedded formal logics which can be accessible to a computer and not just a human. Such knowledge can allow for intelligent agents to understand and interpret structure to reason about information. They also allow for reuse of domain knowledge that can be transferable and interoperable. They also allow for explicit generalizations and assumptions to increase understanding. One might then ask, what the difference is between Object-Oriented Modeling and Ontology Engineering. An ontology often reflects structure of the direct world whereas in OO the structure of data is in the code. Ontologies deal with concepts whereas OO is about behavior defined through methods. Ontologies provide physical representations whereas OO describes representation of data. To define an ontology one can follow a set process.

Determine the scope and the domain :
Build a set of 'what' questions within a particular domain in context. The ontology should be engineered to provide answers for the questions.

Knowledge acquisition :
Collect, organize, define and diagram terms in an informal way

Refine the requirements :
Build a formal way to refine the informal requirements

Implementation :
Develop the schema in a normalized manner through a prototype. Then attempt to scale up.

Evaluate and provide quality assurance :
Measure the implementation against set criteria and goals. Formalize a set of tests through regressions and probes.

Maintenance and Evolution :

Check for compatibility with different versions within same ontology and between instance data

Tabulate visually the concept and properties hierarchy using self-standing, modifiers, relations, and definable trees. One can then use the process of curating the data and model the relationships using various tools. One will also face the conundrums of entanglements when designing ontologies. Generalization is key to ontologies as not everything needs to be defined - leaving reasoning and inferences to handle the rest. One can start out small then increase complexity as experience and knowledge in the domain grows over time. Often an ontology editor is used by a working ontologist to formalize the ontological concepts. One can even use direct programmatic bindings in similar respects to object mapping via domains to skip such formal steps and combine a more developer friendly process through third-party libraries. It is also easier to use existing XML representations to evolve into more formal ontologies. Modeling ontologies is a hard science one that requires a logically sound representation approach of contextual knowledge. However, experience and learning from other ontology models can reduce such overbearing complexities in time. 

Selecting A NoSQL Solution

There is a mind-boggling amount of resources and tools available for the developer. NoSQL options are also an ever growing variety. Context in most cases is at the heart of any business decision process. One must evaluate the needs of the business cases for application in order to understand the requirements and then to weigh them out in terms of their importance. This is often not an easy matter as it not only requires communication and convincing to stakeholders, but also to the wider team. Choosing the right database solution is crucial. It can mean start of a successful application for a competitive advantage or could mean nightmare later on. 

A general trade-off process can be applied in reaching a constructive decision for a database architecture:

• Introduce the process to the business and teams
• Gather the respective requirements
• Narrow down the requirements that are most applicable to the business
• Select a set of NoSQL architectures
• Evaluate by way of Use Cases
• Estimate the level of complexity for training and implementation
• Apply specific weighted scores against all the different cases
• Produce a documented set of results of the findings
• Lastly, communicate the results to justify and reason to both stakeholders and team members

This is a similar approach that was introduced by Carnegie Mellon ATAM in order to evaluate how a new solution fits into an existing architecture and weighs the specific risk factors.

One then has to apply a decomposition in form of a set of quality trees to formulate a solution through divide and conquer in order to break the complexity into smaller chucks of functional components. Here again defining granular use cases and scenarios comes in handy. An architectural choice could have associated quality trees defining a set of target attributes. These attributes would usually be in form of all the relevant abilities one can think of as a formal criteria for evaluation:

• Scalability
• Availability
• Supportability
• Portability
• Sustainability
• Security
• Searchability
• Agility/Modifiability

When evaluating hybrids they should be done separately on their own so as to avoid any incorrect analysis. Once a set of quality trees has been conceived, one can then relay them to stakeholders in form of navigational maps and clearly display the specific project risks. After this stage, one can prototype or pilot a project. However, even at this stage there is a set process involved:

• The likely duration of project
• Technology transfer process and willingness
• Finding the right data to use
• Finding useful data to use
• Defining a key set of success measures

Lastly, one has to be aware that often introduction of new databases especially NoSQL means a careful analysis. Many teams have to be sold on the idea and benefits of moving away from a relational database into a NoSQL option. Change is not always an easy aspect to adopt or convince especially with lack of organizational willingness to accept it. Atleast, following a constructive approach attempts to alleviate apprehensions and provide insights into the merits of such a business decision for change.

Code Automation

Code Automation is the ultimate frontier in software development. Where developers build to models as opposed to hand coding and testing everything. Models should drive every aspect of what one creates even through metadata. Agile stresses code quality through tests. But, why do we need to code and test anyways when we can build models and automate the whole process. Just test the model logics and let computers handle the rest. Since computers are better at calculations and mathematical rigor, they may also be better at coding things out through logical abstractions. Model checking and automated reasoning are already being used as part of knowledge representation techniques in many domains. However, applying such principled approaches may provide newer ways of defining constraints of logic especially in building better concurrent systems in a distributed environments such as the web. At one point, the computer itself was a complex domain. Then came the personal computer providing more individual needs as a desktop. We are now in a phase where desktops are more and more adaptable to the distributed systems approach in connecting us to the wider world view. However, computers are still very much dumb and dull in terms of hardware instruction sets. Model logics and DNA could be the ultimate answer towards building more robust systems for business oriented applications.

Akka Monitoring

Akka is a relatively new approach defined in functional programming by way of Actors and implemented through Java and Scala. Unfortunately, Akka lacks many stable monitoring libraries or points of such integration. One has to ordinarily define their own customization to suit the unique application needs and requirements. Not only does one need to understand the Actors model in a distributed context but, also the implementation approach being used in the application. This is necessary in context so as to provide insight into bottlenecks, root cause, as well as state of services at any given time. There is an insurmountable metrics that could be measured and adapted from existing monitoring tools. But, overhead is more on the application-level and the way such measures isolate reactive event cases without having a disruptive repercussions to the wider production process.

Akka monitoring is invariably implemented from the view of either instrumentation or sampling which are fairly standard metrics approaches to dashboards. The discontinued Typesafe Console used the instrumentation approach. The below are a few approaches that could be used:

• AspectJ weaving of components at load-time so one does not have to re-create the Actors.
• Akka agent to access the supervisor for monitoring as a way of tracing the Actors
• Use of monitoring annotations in specific cases of service implementations
• JMX monitoring for messages
• Reflections to access Actors
• Attach traits rather than intercept on Actors
• External modules such as statsd/graphite with application-level to build a workflow monitoring 

Useful Libraries:
Kamon
AkkaTracing
RestCommander
Logstash
EigenMonitor 
SimonJava
Stajistics
Metrics
Gatling
Ostrich

letitcrash

Brazil World Cup 2014

As preparations are under way to a start to a blazing new World Cup one can undoubtedly expect the unexpected. And, with that a series of exciting events through the nationalist passions and triumphs of what can only be uniquely reflected in a sport of football, especially at such sheer global scale. Also, an interesting aspect of the World Cup is the representative mascot and the face painting that is adorn by fans and football art on women, in particular. Often such aspects bring their own sense of identity to the games. New talented players will also emerge to glorify their country on the field. With the richness of the Brazilian culture there are bound to be a massive hoopla of a party every single night. Unfortunately, British fan expectations might just test the patience of the Brazilian security during the after hours. For most, the ultimate teams really are Argentina, Germany, and Brazil. Those are the three teams that truly make the World Cup so unique and for whom the domination is so clearly displayed in the spectrum of their successes and within their consistency of game plays. And, one can yet only hope for the best for the England national team. Unfortunately, many pundits are well aware that the betting odds are usually stacked against them.  And, as many await in anticipation, it is only in time when the pubs and bars globally will be set alight with football fans willing and eager to watch the games on the big screen and over many a cold pint of beer. No sports game has yet conquered the world as football has and the way it can grab so much solidarity, fervor, and move people to the depths of their core.

Brazilian World Cup Mascot 
Brazil World Cup 2014 Stadium