Inductive Bias

This evening a bunch of Apache committers and friends gathered in Berlin Kreuzberg at “Goodmorning Vietnam” for tasty food, nice drinks - or put another way, for a very nice evening. Simon had booked the table - we were expecting no more than eight people. However, as with any user group these meetup tends to grow. Shortly after the appointed time we had to move to another table to fit everyone around. See below for a quick shot taken while eating (Thanks to Eric for taking the picture):

There were people from Lucene, from SVN, Cocoon, CouchDB, HttpComponents and various other projects. Even one potential future Mahout committer Counting attendees quickly I guess we were about fifteen people.

Looking forward to the next meetup that will be scheduled to take place shortely after Buzzwords. Please talk to Torsten Curdt if you want to get notified or simply subscribe to our mailing list.

Apache Dinner Berlin Berlin, Dinner, Software Foundation

A few hours ago, Jan Lehnardt posted a link on How to organise a nerd conference - joking that this is how we planned Berlin Buzzwords. Well, it is not exactly that easy - however the comic actually is not so far from the truth either:

About two years ago, after having started Apache Mahout together with Grant Ingersoll, Karl Wettin and others, several Apache Hadoop user groups, meetups and get togethers started to pop up all around the world. The one closest to me was the Hadoop user group UK. Back in 2008 I was pretty envious to all these user groups - being so distributed, there was no way I could ever attend all of them, though talks were certainly interesting. So the naive thought of a back then naive free software developer was: Let’s have that in Berlin. To have initial talks I called Stefan Groschupf. His answer was very positive: Oh yeah, let’s do this. I am in Germany for another two weeks, so it should be at about that timeframe. We agreed that if no-one showed up, we could still have some pizza together and share insights from our projects.

For the venue I knew from regular meetups of the Free Software Foundation Europe - read FSF*E* - that newthinking store was available for free for meetups for devs of free software. On I went, calling Martin from the store, booked the room. After that some mails went to the usual suspects, mailing lists and such. At the first meetup two years ago, more than 15 attendees - with two more people who had prepared slides. Pizzas obviously had to wait a little.

If you are wondering what that looked like back then - Thanks to Martin for taking the image back then and putting it online.

We (as in all attendees) decided to repeat the exercise three months later*, talks for the next time were proposed during that first session. Noone objected to having it in Berlin again - everyone knew this was the only way to avoid having to do the organization next time.

The meetup grew steadily in size, talks started being proposed three to six months in advance. I ended up creating not only a mailing list for the meetup but also a blog so I could publish news on Jan’s CouchDB talk and Lars George’s HBase talk back then. We got video sponsoring from Cloudera (Thanks Christophe), StudiVZ (Thanks Nils), and Nokia (Thanks Matt). Late last year I did the first European NoSQL meetup together with Jan Lehnardt - 80 attendees, lots of potential for more, the newthinking store obviously a bit too small for that

If you are wondering what NoSQL and Hadoop meetups looked like last time:

During that meetup the idea was born for a larger NoSQL conference in Berlin in 2010. First ideas were tossed around together with Jan and Simon Willnauer during Apache Con US in Oakland. The topic Hadoop got added there. In January 2010 finally Lucene was added to the mix. We contacted newthinking for support - got a very warm welcome.

Now - two years after the first Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin we are proud to host Berlin Buzzwords - focussed on NoSQL, Apache Hadoop and search as in Apache Lucene.The conference is co-organised by newthinking communications, Simon Willnauer, Jan Lehnardt and myself. A big thanks to neofonie for supporting me by making it possible that I could do most of the organisation during my regular working hours.

The speaker lineup looks fantastic. Registration is going very well - exceeding expectations (did I mention that registration is still open, group and student tickets still available?).

I am really looking forward to an amazing conference on 7th and 8th of June. We will have a NoSQL barcamp in newthinking store Sunday evening before the conference. Keynote speaker packages have been sent out and were well received. Hotel rooms for speakers are booked. We are about to pull together the last loose ends in the coming days. Happy to have so many guys (and a few girls) interested in scalability topics here in town at the beginning of June. Looking forward to seeing you in Berlin.

* The second meetup turned out to be the first and so far only one that took place w/o the organiser - I broke my leg on my way to newthinking by getting hit by a BMW X5… *sigh* Note for other meetup organizers: Always have a backup moderator - in may case that was my neofonie manager Holger Düwiger who happened to attend that meetup for the first time back then.

Berlin Buzzwords, Get Together, Hadoop, Lucene, Mahout General, Hadoop, Lucene, Meetups, NOSQL, Solr

Meet me in two weeks at Berlin Buzzwords. As you may have noticed, together with Simon Willnauer, Jan Lehnardt and newthinking communications I am organising Berlin Buzzwords - a conference on scalable search, data analysis and storage.

There are a few regular tickets left, so don’t wait too long to register. If you want to bring your friends, check out our group tickets with up to 50% discount. If you are a student bring your student ID and register for 100,- Euro.

Berlin Buzzwords Berlin Buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL, Software Foundation

Like most software developers I like tasks that involve solving more or less complex problems analytically. Most developers I know love puzzles - either those that involve dis-entangling metal rings, or those involving putting wooden pieces back into order, or even solving Rubik’s cube:

Working on the schedule for Berlin Buzzwords, I noticed that coming up with a good schedule actually has a lot more in common with solving puzzles that one is usually aware of: First of all talks on similar or related topics should not take place at the same time. Presentations should be grouped according to common topics so attendees don’t have to switch room after each and every talk. In addition some speakers have a tight schedule themselves and can only be at the conference for a day.

It gets even more interesting if after having put up a draft of the initial schedule you start filling the gaps, publishing those talks that were confirmed later than others or could be accepted only after freeing a spot somewhere else.

I spent the past few day re-arranging the Berlin Buzzwords schedule a bit. I added Christophe’s talk on Apache Hadoop from an industry perspective. After adding it, I had 45min left in the NoSQL track - on the other hand there was a speaker from the Lucene community that we very much liked to have in. So off I went, sorting and shifting around until finally the Lucene talk ended up in the Lucene track and a Hadoop talk that was formerly there ended up in the Apache Hadoop track, resulting in one NoSQL talk from the Apache Hadoop track moving over to the NoSQL track…

To cut a long story short: The schedule is final now - unless changes need to be made last minute.

Berlin Buzzwords, Freetime Berlin Buzzwords, puzzles, schedule

I love taking fotos, like being outdoors and like animals. Living in a large city, it is not exactly easy to get in touch with donkeys or sheep. A very simple way to combine all three preferences here is to visit Tierpark Berlin. Being larger than your average zoo, most bawns are rather roomy with lots space outside and inside.

Little more than one year ago I received a great birthday present from Thilo: It is possible to purchase a one year ticket for that park. Since we’ve been there pretty often. In spring when most animal babies are born, in summer to escape heat in town, in winter when all paths are white of snow.

One attraction we usually do not want to miss are the pelicans (Thanks to p_h_o_t_o_m_i_c who took the picture below):

If you are wondering “What’s that thing hanging ’round her neck?” Whenever I have some spare time left, I usually take my camera with me. It’s not particularly new, not even a digital one. My parents already used it during vacation before I was born. It’s a Praktika Nova 1 - capable of taking breathtakingly beautiful images:

There’s just one catch: The camera is not self focussing, nor does it come with an internal exposure meter. Instead the one I have is to be used separately before taking the picture.

However even after reading just a tiny little bit about f-numbers, exposure times initial pictures I took four years ago were astonishingly beautiful. Since I regularly tend to go out just for taking pictures.

Freetime camera, free time

With DSL contracts getting ever cheaper in recent years in Germany – even outside larger cities – my mom decided to get a faster internet connection (compared to the former 56k modem) including a telephone landline flatrate.

As sitting in the garden while surfing the internet is way cooler than only having a dedicated computer in an office we decided to get a notebook while at it. As both Thilo and myself are very familiar with Linux, the plan was to get a Linux-compatible netbook, install Ubuntu on it, get wireless up and running, pre-configure the necessary applications and hand it over after a short usage introduction.

Well – first idea: Mom is living close to Chemnitz, so we drove to the Media Markt in Chemnitz Center. They had a nice, not too small and not too large Acer netbook. Only question that was open: Does that thing perform well with Linux? Easily solved: We had a bootable USB stick with the latest Ubuntu version with us. We asked one of the shop assistants for permission to boot Linux from the netbook – telling him that we wanted to buy the notebook, only making sure everything works fine. Answer: “No, sorry, that is not possible. There could be a virus on that stick.” Knowing from my favourite Mac shop in Berlin that there are hardware suppliers that allow testing their products, we went out of Media Markt – disappointed, but with the plan to repeat the experiment at various other suppliers in Berlin.

Monday afternoon the following week Thilo went to a MediMax in Berlin. Experience was way different: The assistant was most helpful, offering various machines to try out – unfortunately none of them had an Intel graphics card – that is, none could be run with a free graphics driver.

End of the same week we went to Media Markt in Steglitz: Asking the assistant there for permission to boot linux from our USB stick actually made him happy. As the machine not only matched our target specifications but was even cheaper than the one in Chemnitz and did work well with Ubuntu we finally bought the notebook (Acer Timeline 3810T). Yeah: Finally not only a working machine (with 8 hours of battery time) but also a shop that cares about its custormers.

For two weeks now mom is now happy user of the Ubuntu netbook edition – step by step learning how to write e-mails, chat and use the internet. As usual first thing we tried out was searching for vacation destinations, but also for at least my name. The latter searches seemed to be most interesting – at least at Google, YouTube, flickr …

Free Software, Freetime Laptop, Ubuntu

The Berlin Buzzwords schedule was published a few days ago. There are tracks specific to the three tags search, store and scale. We have a fantastic mixture of developers and users of open source software projects that make scaling data processing today possible.

There is Steve Loughran, Aaron Kimball and Stefan Groschupf from the Apache Hadoop community. We have Grant Ingersoll, Robert Muir and the “Generics Policeman” Uwe Schindler from the Lucene community.

For those interested in NoSQL databases there is Mathias Stearn from MongoDB, Jan Lehnardt from CouchDB and Eric Evans, the guy who coined the term NoSQL one year ago.

The schedule has been published online. Visit the webpage and register for the conference - looking forward to seeing you in Berlin this summer!

Regular tickets are available online. In addition we offer student tickets: If you have a valid student ID, you are eligible for one of these tickets. Each costs 100,- Euro. We also have a special group ticket available: If you buy four tickets or more you are eligible for a discount of 25%, when purchasing 10 tickets or more the discount is 50%. Learn more at http://berlinbuzzwords.de/content/tickets

One day before the conference we are having a Berlin Buzzwords Barcamp in town. In addition, directly after the conference, Cloudera will be hosting Apache Hadoop trainings - registration is separate from Berlin Buzzwords.

So just in case you need a good excuse for a long term trip to Berlin: You can spend the weekend in town, attend the Barcamp on Sunday evening, visit Berlin Buzzwords on Monday and Tuesday. The rest of the week could be used to take part in Apache Hadoop trainings. Finally you have one weekend left for a city tour.

Thanks to Jan Lehnardt, Simon Willnauer and newthinking communications for co-organising the event.

Berlin Buzzwords buzzwords, Hadoop, Lucene, NOSQL