December 31, 2012
Thanks for all the help # This year was a blast: It started with the ever great FOSDEM in Brussels (see you there in 2013?), an invitation to GeeCon in Poznan (if you ever get an invitation to speak there - do accept, the organisers do an amazing job at that event). In summer we had Berlin Buzzwords in Berlin for the third time with 700 attendees (to retain the community feel to the conference we decided to limit tickets in 2013, so make sure you get your’s early).
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December 30, 2012
RecSys Stammtisch Berlin - December 2012 # Earlier this month I attended the fourth Recommender Stammtisch in Berlin. The event was kindly hosted by Soundcloud - who on top of organising the speakers provided a really yummy buffet by Kochzeichen D.
With Paul Lamere the evening started with a very entertaining but also very packed talk on why music recommendation is special - or put more generally why all recommender systems are special:
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October 28, 2012
Strata EU - part 4 # The rest of the day was mainly reserved for more technical talks: Tom Wight introducing the merits of MR2, also known as YARN. Steve Loughran gave a very insightful talk on the various failure modes of Hadoop – though the Namenode is like the most obvious single point of failure there are a few more traps waiting for those depending on their Hadoop clusters: Hadoop does just find with single harddisks failing.
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October 27, 2012
Strata EU - part 3 # The first Tuesday morning keynote put the hype around big data into historical context: According to wikipedia big data apps are defined by their capability of coping with data set sizes that are larger than can be handled with commonly available machines and algorithms. Going from that definition we can look back to history and will realize that the issue of big data actually isn’t that new: Even back in the 1950s people had to deal with big data problems.
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October 26, 2012
Strata EU - part 2 # The second keynote touched upon the topic of data literacy: In an age in which growing amounts of data are being generated being able to make sense of these becomes a crucial skill for citizens just like reading, writing and computing. The speaker’s message was two-fold: a) People currently are not being taught how to deal with that data but are being taught that all that growing data is evil.
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October 25, 2012
O’Reilly Strata London - part 1 # A few weeks ago I attended O’Reilly Strata EU. As I had the honour of being on the program committee I remember how hard it was to decide on which talks to accept and which ones to decline. It’s great to see that potential turned into an awesome conference on all things Big Data.
I arrived a bit late as I flew in only Monday morning.
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September 16, 2012
Some thoughts on a conf taxonomy # One common way for open source developers to meet face-to-face is to attend conferences relevant to their subject of interest. A common way to have one near you if there ain’t none yet is to go and organise one yourself. The most obvious stuff to resolve for that task:
Most likely there will be some financial transactions involved - sponsors wanting to support you, attendees paying for their tickets, you paying for the venue and for food.
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September 12, 2012
Moving to a new domain # Executive summary: This is to warn those of you who are subscribed to this blog - the domain to reach this blog w/o redirects will soon change to by isabel-drost-fromm.de - you might want to adjust your rss subscription accordingly.
Longer version: This blog post is scheduled to go live some time after lunch-time on September 12th 2012. You might have heart rumors before - that date Ms.
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September 9, 2012
FrOSCon - on teaching # The last talk I went to during FrOSCon was Selena’s keynote on “Mistakes were made”. She started by explaining how she taught computer science (or even just computer-) concepts to teachers herself - emphasizing how exhausting teaching can be, how many even trivial concepts were unknown to her students. After that Selena briefly sketched how she herself came to IT - emphasizing how providing mostly the information she needed to accomplish the current task at hand and telling how to get more information helped her make her first steps a great deal.
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September 6, 2012
FrOSCon - understanding Linux with strace # Being a Java child I had only dealt with strace once before: Trying to figure out whether any part of the Mahout tests happens to use /dev/random for initialisation in a late night debugging session with my favourite embedded Linux developer. Strace itself is a great tool to actually see what your program is doing in terms of system calls, giving you the option to follow on a very detailed level what is going on.
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