Our Geek Space

Our main tradition, heritage and passion: The beat of the “Uruguayan” drums.

It doesn’t matter if you listen to the drums once a month, everyday, or once a year.  When it comes to local music, there is nothing more Uruguayan than the sound produced by rhythmically striking a drum, and especially when playing Candombe, a unique way of percussion, which will make your hair stand on its end.

Team building activities can range from treasure hunts to Safari trips, though this time, we have decided to do one which people could easily identify with, and which does not require sophisticated skills, but the desire to unwind, switch off and connect. Drumming workshops come first, the bonding is just a consequence.

Last week we had our first percussion workshop. Pablo Leites, an excellent musician and percussionist, also known as “Gancho” has been our instructor.  He has also been Martin Cabrera’s (Moove-IT cofounder) best friend for a long time.

Please have a look at the following pictures…

Why percussion

Why is percussion so important to us? Being a country of immigrants, Uruguay was formed by people from all over the world. And like it always happens, music has played a tremendous positive role in bringing people together and creating stronger, more significant bonds. We connect with our basic instincts, we forget about language barriers, cultural differences, rank, and we just let ourselves feel and relax.  Just listen to a few strikes and you will feel multicolor, ageless and energized.

You may have heard of Las Llamadas (The Callings), a popular annual event during Carnival here in Uruguay, which gathers thousands of people from all over the world. The drums are the main stars, and the African music roots brought by the people once made slaves in this country (and happily freed more than 150 years ago) are now our truly genuine and local music.

I personally love this rhythm, and even though I am not a music expert I will recognize its pace wherever I go. I am not sure if it is the adrenaline than runs through your body, or the inseparable link to human nature, but percussion makes your body shake, like toddlers instinctively struggling to move their bodies to the rhythm of the music.

Team Building !!

For part one, click here…

What do they have in common and what makes them different?

Even though it’s hard to come up with a comparison table between all four alternatives, mainly because I can’t claim to have personal experience with all of them, the Internet has a lot of information on the subject, so I went ahead and did a bit of research on the matter.

Another point of interest to consider is that though on the long run, all four solutions provide very similar services; they do it a bit differently, since they can be categorized into two places:

• Full text search servers: They provide a finished solution, ready for the developers to install and interact with. You don’t have to integrate them into your application; you only have to interact with them. In here we have Solr and Sphinx.
• Full text search APIs: They provide the functionalities needed by the developer, but at a lower level. You’ll need to integrate these APIs into your application, instead of just consuming it’s services through a standard interface (like what happens with the servers). In here, we have the Lucene Project and the Xapian project.

Taking all of this into account, we can now proceed into a more in-depth discussion about our options:

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Hi everyone !

I have this issue / trouble several times. I would love share this tips with the JBoss coomunity … particularity JBoss Application Server (AS) developers.

Problem:

I have a scenario to access certain key values from a config file. I need Access to this properties file from a Java application (WAR or JAR) deployed in a JBoss AS

Solutions

1- Hard Code the path (no please !!)

Hard Code the path and create a Properties instance.

InputStream inStream = new FileInputStream(PATH_CONFIG+"config.properties");
Properties instance = new Properties();
instance.load(inStream);

//access to a property
String value = instance.getProperty(key);

2- Using JBoss System Properties (almost)

Avoid to Hard Code … use a tool from JBoss. System.getProperty()

JBoss allows access to a standard set of properties. For instance: jboss home dir (“jboss.server.home.dir). Here I share some piece of code to make an instance of this properties file.

String path = System.getProperty("jboss.server.home.dir")+"/conf/config.properties";
InputStream inStream = new FileInputStream(path);
Properties instance = new Properties();
instance.load(inStream);

//access to a property
String value = instance.getProperty(key);

3- Using Resource bundle (the best !)

JBoss AS add to the classpath a lot of folders and jars. One of them is the “config” folder into the server domain. eg. “server/default/conf”

ResourceBundle objects contain an array of key-value pairs. You specify the key, which must be a String, when you want to retrieve the value from the ResourceBundle. The value is the locale-specific object.

When you create a ResourceBundle this properties file must be in the classpath.

Then we could:

ResourceBundle instance = ResourceBundle.getBundle("project.config");

//access to a property
String value = instance.getString(key);

In this example the file “config.properties” must be inside a “project” folder declared in the classpath, for instance: “config”

That’s all folk !

Writing about these things makes my day.

Today:  Damian Arrillaga’s ROBOT story.

Damian is a very young and clever System Engineering student from the State University of Uruguay; he is also an important member of our team. He is simply brilliant. I have no other words to describe him.

His interest in Robotics started in 2009 when he and his friends heard about a contest in which everyone has to program a Robot which would have to compete one-on-one against another Robot. This is called “Sumo.UY” (Sumo Fight Contest).

Once Damian found out about these Robot’s contests, he couldn’t help but falling in love with them. This is why he has decided to study System Engineering (aka Computer Science) and to major in Robotics.

In 2009, he and his friends Ismael, Nacho, Marcos and Anael decided to take part in the annual Sumo Fight Contest.  After long hours of programming and hard work, they enrolled in the competition and won the contest. It was a fantastic experience for the whole team.

Last year, they did it again. Won again.

This year they decided to take this contest to the next level. They built a Robot from scratch, using tape, paper, mouse pads’ pieces and basically anything they came across.

“CachaBot” the Robot.  Look at these pictures:

And they got the 4th place!  For some reason “CachaBot” consumed more energy than they had expected. The funniest part was when Damian had to run away in the middle of the competition in order to buy new batteries for their robot … so it would not get rid of energy to finish the fight.

They didn’t win this time, but it was definitely worth it.  It was a wonderful experience. A new challenge, though an old passion…

Today I want to write about Sebastian Borrazas and the programming contest he is taking part in.

Sebastian Borrazas is a talented developer, member of an exclusive group of developers which makes Moove-IT a big company – I’m not talking about quantity, I’m talking about greatness -.

Last week, he together with his team, won the Programming Contest organized annually by the ORT University of Montevideo, Uruguay.

The contest was basically about Programming Algorithms and Algorithm Design Techniques. Each group of contestants had to apply techniques like Backtracking, Dynamic programming, Divide & Conquer, Knapsack, Dijkstra, etc.

The challenge was clear: to successfully do the greatest number of exercises in no more than 4 hours. Then the jury would evaluate the execution time of the Algorithm and have a winner.

Next step will be to travel to Buenos Aires, Argentina on November 5 to take part in the regionals. This will be hard. More than 500 teams from all over Latin America will be there too.

We are very proud to have Sebastian as our Geek Ambassador in this contest!

Good luck Moovetiano!

When it comes to data storage and data handling, we developers, are quite used to working with database engines (MySQL, Oracle, SQLite, etc) and database query languages.

Depending on the application being developed, one of these solutions can be more than enough to meet our needs and that is what we usually end up using.

But there are times, when the amount of information to be handled is so big (we’re talking about millions of rows of information) and the needed response times are so low (we’re talking about a few milliseconds time) that we need solutions designed specifically for searching large amount of information instead of generic data handling ones.

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