Hadoop Summit Amsterdam # About a month ago I attended the first European Hadoop Summit, organised by Hortonworks in Amsterdam. The two day conference brought together both vendors and users of Apache Hadoop for talks, exhibition and after conference beer drinking. Russel Jurney kindly asked me to chair the Hadoop applied track during Apache Con EU. As a result I had a good excuse to attend the event. Overall ...
GoTo Con AMS - Day 2 # Day two of GoTo Con Amsterdam started with a keynote by former Squeak developer Dan Ingalls. He introduced the Lively kernel - a component architecture for HTML5 that runs in any browser and allows easy composition, sharing and programming of items. Having seen Squeak years ago and being thrilled by its concepts even back then it was amazing to see what you can do with Lively kernel in a browser. ...
GoTo Con AMS - Day 1 # Last week GoTo Con took place in Amsterdam. Being a sister conference to GoTo in Aarhus the Amsterdam event focused on the broad topics of agile development, architectural challenges, backend and frontend development, platforms like the JVM and .NET. In addition the Amsterdam event featured a special Apache track tailored towards presentations focusing on the development model at Apache and the technologies developed at Apache. ...
Night Trains # It was several years ago that a frequent traveller told me about it being more comfortable and time saving to travel mid-sized distances (e.g. from Berlin to Amsterdam) by train - night train that is - instead of flying. Back then without decent knowledge of which combination of booking early and discount card make prizes of trips by train somewhat comparable to those offered by airlines that wasn’t really an option for me. ...
Teddy in Amsterdam # On his trip from SFO back to Europe teddy spent a few days in Amsterdam. He brought back the following pictures of bikes, cheese and the canals: Going to Amsterdam usually is pretty darn dangerous: I tend to return with some toys added to my collection of puzzles. Somehow I tend to be drawn to the shop called Gamekeeper selling them even when I do not remember the exact address or even just the street name:
Apache Mahout Meetup Amsterdam # Last week I was honoured to be invited as one of the two speakers on Apache Mahout at the Mahout meetup in Amsterdam at JTeams offices. After free beer, cola and pizza Frank Scholten gave an overview of Mahout's clustering capabilities. After a brief introduction to Mahout itself he went into a little more detail on how clustering works in general. After that with a selection of Seinfeld scripts he used a fun data set to guide the audience through the process of choosing the right data preparation steps, coming up with good training parameters and finally evaluating clustering quality. ...
Apache Mahout in Amsterdam # On February 7th there will be an Apache Mahout meetup in Amsterdam kindly organised by JTeam. There will be two presentations - one by myself on classification with Apache Mahout as well as a second one by Frank Scholten on clustering with Apache Mahout. Time: 18:00 Location: Frederiksplein 1, 1017XK Amsterdam, The Netherlands Looking forward to a few days in Amsterdam.
Teddy in Amsterdam Schiphol # Caught Teddy just before the plane took off: