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Today I have released a new application, OllamaChat. This is a lightweight native Ollama client for macOS. It allows to easily use a GUI to chat with any LLM installed on your local (or if you want, remote) Ollama instance.

This is a project I started because I wanted my team at IBM to learn more about how AI works and allow them to easily perform demonstrations of IBM’s Granite models even when an Internet connection is not available or can’t be trusted (which is frequently the case at customer sites or during public events).

OllamaChat doesn’t just support regular or reasoning models. It works also with vision models (just drag and drop an image to start chatting with it). You can also use embedding models to understand how text is converted into vectors.

Finally, OllamaChat also supports MCP. This is actually the reason I built this app because I couldn’t find an easy way to demonstrate Agentic AI on my computer without having to install a lot of bloated software. Right now OllamaChat works with local STDIO MCP servers or remote (TCP/IP) unsecured servers. I plan to support secure servers in the future but I have decided to release this version because it is already very useful at this stage.

You can download OllamaChat here

I was invited by the National Autonomous University of Mexico toggle the keynote speech of their first AI international congress. It is always a pleasure to work with universities and share points of view of where the industry is moving. On this occasion, my talk wasn’t technical, it focused on the global effects we may witness in the close future.

You can watch the conference here.

I have been extremely fortunate to join Informix Software in 1997, back when Data Management was still an emerging discipline and Data Warehousing was in its infancy. That has allowed me to see the evolution of Data Analytics and understand why the structured and unstructured data explosion have created hard to solve challenges that have been addressed by multiple groundbreaking technologies like No-SQL databases and architecture decisions that have allowed us to handle vasts amounts of data.

However, younger architects and IT Specialists do not always grasp the whole picture and therefore do not always understand how we finally got to this point.

That is why I gave a series of seminars to my LA technical team back in early 2024. Eventually I decided that since there wasn’t much information available on this subject (in Spanish), I would record a video about it.

You can watch the video here.

I just released a new video on my YouTube channel to explain (in Spanish) how to freely use IBM’s Granite-code with VS Code. Since it is a fairly simple process, the video is quite short. Granite-code is a fairly simple completion model with no reasoning capabilities, and therefore is quite limited in its functionality, but it still helps achieving increased productivity and supports over 100 programming languages. For a FREE model it is hard to ask for more.

Watch it here

Artificial Intelligence is changing our daily lives and will transform our lives in less than a generation (hopefully for the better). Everyone knows it. However, I have found that many of my developer friends do not know exactly where to start when it comes to infuse AI in their apps. That is why I published a video on YouTube (in Spanish) explaining all the basic concepts.

In this video I talk about transformers and how to represent complex data into vectors which can then be stored in a vector database. In my case I use SingleStore, a product that I really enjoy and recommend. I have developed all the demo apps in Swift so that they can run nicely on my laptop with few dependencies. It was also a great excuse to sharpen my Swift and SwiftUI skills.

Watch it here.

A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Meta to discuss IBM’s point of view about the Metaverse. While I don’t believe the technology is fully ready for prime time, the opportunities are intriguing and certainly worth exploring. From a back-end developer perspective, AR/VR are simply new channels that companies can enable to keep in touch with their customers wherever they are. While I do not believe that customers will spend many hours continuously wearing AR/VR headsets (at least the ones currently available), there are certainly tasks that will be best executed in a VR or mixed reality environment. That is where IBM will provide the technologies and tools to enable companies build realistic worlds that will appeal to their customers, using all kind of technologies such as scalable micro services, avatars, AI and new generations of chatbots. You can listen to the complete interview (in Spanish) in Episode 10 of the “Hablemos del Metaverso” podcast.

Speaking of public speaking, I have recently been invited by DaCodes, a Mexican company specialized in software development, to participate in their podcast to discuss my career. You can find the interview (in Spanish) on most podcast platforms. Here is the link to Spotify if you want to listen to the episode:

I haven’t written much in this blog over the last few years but I have been very active working with schools and universities as part of my current role at IBM. This is something that I enjoy quite a bit and it has allowed me to meet a lot of wonderful people devoted to education which is a subject that has always fascinated me, starting in the mid-80s when I wrote Teacher’s Wizard, an early courseware app for the Apple II.

Universities are eager to get help from the leading companies like IBM to talk about industry trends and hot new technologies. Over the last two years those topics include Digital transformation, Cloud Computing, Quantum Computing, AI, Kubernetes / OpenShift, etc. I have been fortunate enough to be invited by many leading Mexican universities to discuss these and other topics with their students and faculty members.

Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, most of the presentations I have given over the last two years have been remote. On the bright side, some of those can now be found on YouTube (all in Spanish):

• Future Thinking: ¿se puede predecir el futuro?
• 5 predicciones tecnológicas para los próximos 5 años
• No es magia, es ciencia de datos: infusionar inteligencia artificial para mejorar la experiencia del cliente y reducir costos
• El ABC de cómo implementar DevOps en las organizaciones

A couple of months ago I returned to my parents home in Madrid, Spain and was able to find some of the early code I wrote for the Apple II. I wasn’t very confident my 5 1/4” floppy disks could have survived 30 years in storage but I decided to send them to my friends Antoine Vignau (from Brutal Deluxe Software) anyway. Some of the disks were damaged but I had enough backup copies that eventually both Teacher’s Wizard and G.A.P.E. could be fully recovered. I was quite amazed to be able to load these products I created over 30 years ago on my Mac and run them in an emulator.

G.A.P.E. (Global Applesoft Program Editor) was an Applesoft editor much like Call A.P.P.L.E.’s G.P.L.E. based on an editor I used on a PR1ME micro-computer when living in Geneva in the early 80’s. I submitted this program in 1985 to a contest organized by Philips in Europe called the Holland Prize (now European Union contest for young scientists) ). Although I didn’t win, it was a great experience and G.A.P.E became my first “professional quality” software title.

Teacher’s Wizard was a tool for teachers that allowed them to easily create courseware. It was quite sophisticated for the time because it could be used with a mouse and incorporated many of the same concepts that would later be made popular by Hypercard. This program was originally developed for Edelvives, a Spanish book editor that worked closely with many schools. I later sold the rights for the rest of the world to Britannica Software.

Both programs can now be freely downloaded.

A couple of months ago, Antoine Vignau helped me recover the contents of my old HD 20SC hard drive. The disk was in very bad shape but he was still able to image it and most of the contents could be recovered. What really surprised me was that I was able to recover two programs I wrote in the late eighties.

Among the many interesting things that I found on that disk was an old NDA (New Desk Accessory) that I wrote back in 1988. If you have been using your IIGS with a French keyboard and hoped for better support for accented characters, AZERTY may help you.

The other product I was able to rescue was Jigsaw Deluxe, an improved version of my first Apple IIGS game, Jigsaw! This new version adds several new features that make it more fun.

Download and enjoy!