Inductive Bias

Probably not too unusual for people working on free software mostly (though no longer exclusively) in their spare time, the number of items that appear in my private calendar have increased steadily in the past months and years:

• Every three months I am organising the Apache Hadoop Get Together in Berlin.
• I have been asked (and accepted the offer) to publish articles on Hadoop and Lucene in magazines.
• There are various conferences I attend - either as speaker or simply as participant: FOSDEM, Froscon, Apache Con NA, Devoxx, Chemnitzer Linuxtag - to name just a few.
• For Berlin Buzzwords I did get quite a bit of time for organisation, still some issues leaked over to what others would call free time.
• I am mentoring one of Mahout’s GSoC students which is a lot of fun.
• At least I try to spend as much time as possible on the Mahout mailing lists keeping up with what is developed and discussed there.

There are various techniques to cope with increased work load and still find enough time to relax. Some of them involve simply remembering what to do at the right time, some involve prioritization, others deal with measuring and planning what to do. In this tiny series I’ll explain the techniques I employ - or at least try to - in the hope of getting your feedback, and comments on how to improve the system. After all, the most important task is to constantly improve ones own processes.

Freetime, Hacking, Scrum Free Software, Getting things done, Scrum, Software Foundation

After using Mandrake for quite a while (still blaming my boyfriend Thilo for infecting not only my computer but also myself first with that system, then with the more general idea of Free Software - but that’s another story.) after finishing my master’s thesis I started using GNU Debian Linux (back then in the version code-named Woody). Since I always had a GNU Debian on my private box as my main operating system - even installed it on my MacBook following the steps in the Debian Wiki.

As I am also an Apache Mahout committer, closely related to the Apache Hadoop project, I always found it kind of sad that there were no Hadoop packages in the official Debian repositories. I tried multiple times to find some time to get into Debian packaging myself, I learned what “debian/rules” is all about and discovered some of the intricacies of packaging Java based software. However I have to admit that I never was able to find enough time to really finish that task.

A few weeks before this year’s FOSDEM I learned on the Apache Hadoop as well as on the Debian Java lists that a guy called Thomas Koch was working on solving bug 535861 - ITP to package Hadoop. We met at FOSDEM where I tried to raise some attention in the audience for Thomas’ plans (back then he was in need for help with a few last missing pieces). In addition I invited him for Berlin Buzzwords to get in touch with other Hadoop developers and users for further input.

I am really happy that by now Hadoop has made it into the official Debian package repositories - as soon as Debian Squeezeapt-get install [Hadoop component you need]: Debian package search.

If you want to speed up the process of Squeeze being released as stable version: Help fixing the remaining bugs in that distribution. There are various Debian Bug Squashing Parties being organised around the world. Next one in Berlin is on next Monday, the one for Munich is running this weekend. Just got the information that Fefe posted in his blog a link to the Mozilla bug bounty:

The packages are based on the upstream Apache Hadoop distribution, being comparably new they are intended for development machines at the moment. If you are using Debian and want to work with Hadoop - this is a great opportunity to help making the packages more stable by simply using them and reporting your experiences back to the Debian community.

In addition Debian now also provides packages for Zookeeper as well as HBase - though the HBase version is not yet production ready as the HDFS-append patch is still missing.

To follow the general state and progress of these packages feel free to follow the packages pages for Hadoop, HBase, Zookeeper respectively.

Thomas currently plans to work more closely with upstream e.g. to tidy up the chaos in the start-up scripts and other minor glitches. So watch out for further improvements.

In addition I just saw another interesting ITP in the Debian bugtracker: Wishlist: katta. I am sure there are quite a few others as well.

Hadoop Debian, Hadoop, hbase, Zookeeper

Just read on the Apache community mailing list that inspired by our Apache Dinner Berlin people in Porto are organising an Apache Lunch event. As with the dinner here in Berlin, anyone who is interested in Apache is welcome to join - no need to be a committer or even ASF member

If you are living close to Porto, or always wanted to visit the city - after all it’s a very beautiful place, there is a beach close by, there are many tasty restaurants - don’t hesitate to get in touch with the organisers:

My xmpp is: fdmanana@gmail.com. Feel free to add me.

People interested in coming, let us known your availability during the 2
first weeks of August.

So, if you are interested in Apache head over to Filipe - I’d love to be there, however my summer vacation ended one week ago. Wish you guys a lot of fun.

Software Foundation Software Foundation

During the past two weeks my teddy was on vacation. As destination he chose to fly to Portugal. One day was reserved for a visit to Lisboa, the capital city of the country. He also took a few really nice pictures there:

On his return, he was no longer alone. Seems like he found a cute little portugese girl friend:



In addition he brought the following image. However he promised that he was not in California, but explained that the bridge actually does exist in Lisboa, being constructed by the same company according to the same blue prints that already were used for Golden Gate bridge:

Freetime Lisboa, teddy, vacation