Inductive Bias

The event itself featured 306 talks - so pretty hard to choose what to watch on two days. This time, not only the main tracks were awesome, but also several dev rooms featured very interesting talks by well known FOSS developers.

Saturday started with a FOSDEM birthday dance done by all attendees. The first keynote speaker Brooks Davis explained his experiences promoting open source methods at a large company. After that Richard Clayton gave an amazing talk on the evil on the internet. He explained not only how phishing works on a technical level but also included an explanation of the economics behind these attacks, explained how the money flow from victims to attackers works.

On the afternoon Bernard Li gave an introduction to the cluster monitoring tool Ganglia. Directly after that Lindsay Holmwood gave an overview of the monitoring and notification tools flapjack and cucumber-nagios.

The evening was filled with the speakers dinner. Thanks for the organisers for providing that. We had a really nice evening together with some of the organisers, Andrew Tanenbaum and Elena Reshetova at our table.

Free Software, Freetime, General Brussels, Fosdem

Another picture that was taken before the first session early in the morning:

Freetime Fosdem, Twingo

Four years ago I was working in Saarbrücken. From there it is a very short ride over to FOSDEM (little more than 300km). So I decided - hey, why not stay there for a weekend. I found a very nice Brussels bed and breakfast hotel called Rovignon - featuring not only comfortable rooms at reasonable prizes but also cats in the house.

Back then, I barely knew anyone at the conference. However the lineup of speakers including St Peter from XMPP and Georg Greve from FSFE was impressive.

As a result it became a loved tradition of Thilo and myself to drive over to Brussels, attend FOSDEM and watch great talks. Over time there were more and more familiar faces, e.g. at the FSFE booth, among the Debian people…

Last weekend I had an awesome time in Brussels at FOSDEM for the fourth time in a row. I am honoured to have been invited by the FOSDEM organisers for a main track talk on Hadoop in the scalability slot (in Janson…).

We arrived on Friday afternoon, however being awefully tired we unfortunately could not join the Friday evening beer event (though, as I am not drinking beer, I would probably have missed quite a bit of the fun).

Free Software, Freetime, General Brussels, Fosdem

The final schedule of FOSDEM 2010 is up: Looks like bad news - 306 interesting talks within just one weekend. Lots of interesting talks in the main track including Greg Kroah-Hartman on “Write and Submit your first Linux kernel Patch”, David Recordon from Facebook on “Scaling Facebook with OpenSource tools”, Bernard Li on “Ganglia: 10 years of monitoring clusters and grids”, Andrew Tanenbaum with his “MINIX 3: a Modular, Self-Healing POSIX-compatible Operating System” talk, Benoît Chesneau on “CouchDB! REST and Database!” and many, many more.

In addition there will be many interesting DevRooms, including one on NoSQL, one on Free Java, the Mono DevRoom featuring a talk by Miguel de Icaza…

Looks like a weekend packed with interesting talks and discussions. If you are going there and are interested in an ad-hoc Hadoop-Beer-drinking meetup, make sure to contact me before the event.

Free Software, General, Mahout

Recently I received this mail from Christophe Bisciglia on Cloudera Hadoop trainings. Thought it might be interesting to the Hadoop Berlin community:

Hadoop Fans,

Over the next year, you’ll see new options for Hadoop training and
certification from Cloudera. One of the first things you’ll see will
be live sessions outside the US, tentatively planned for the April /
May time frame.

We’ve seen strong interest in Hadoop on all of our international
trips, so we’d like to ask for community input as we decide exactly
which cities to visit next. For cities we come to, we’ll offer our 3
day developer training + certification, and with sufficient interest,
we may also include a 1 day training + certification program for
system administrators.

If you are interested in attending one or both of these sessions,
please fill out a brief survey (link below). If you’re using Hadoop at
work, and it’s time to train more of your team, you can let us know
how large of a group you have. Survey responses aren’t a commitment to
attend, but we may reach out to respondents before we schedule a
session to get a better understanding of actual attendance.

You can fill out survey here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/MKGZHG9

If you have any trouble with the survey, or are interested in a
private training session, please don’t hesitate to reach out directly.

Cheers,
Christophe

Get Together, Hadoop Hadoop, Trainings

Some weeks ago, Thilo had a tiny little gadget not to be missed in an average geek’s appartment: A server - admittedly a little old and a bit slow, but still usable for playing around. He installed Ubuntu server on it. At the evening we got it configured to run Hadoop. Little later we found out that some friends of us probably, maybe have some usable hardware left as well - we’ll see on Monday.

However having a server on your dinner table is not really practical: There’s always some danger of spilling tea over it… However last week, one of my colleagues posted a link to the Lack Rack wiki page in the eth-0 Wiki on one of our mailing lists.

So yesterday was one of the (very rare) days, when I got Thilo to join me on a trip to Ikea. The result can be seen in the images above. Looks like elephants invaded our living room

Hacking, Hadoop Hadoop, LackRack, Server