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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
Teddy in Down Under # The last two September weeks Teddy was in Down Under. He spent the first few days exploring Sydney: Taking the ferry from Manly to the city each morning, followed by beautiful sunny weather, warm enough to already go swimming. The following days took him to the Blue Mountains and into Kangaroo Valley for some hiking, animal watching and kayaking: Of course Teddy also made some new friends: ...
Fourth #Recsys Stammtisch Berlin # This evening the 4th #recsys Stammtisch (German for “a meetup involving beer”) was kindly organised by Alan Said, Zeno Gantner and Till Plumbaum. The event was hosted by Aklamio with beers and drinks provided by Plista. They had three talks: @AlanSaid gave an overview of the topics covered in this year’s RecSys conference in Dublin. Instead of going into too much technical detail the presentation gave a whirl-wind tour of the topics that are currently under discussion, the competitions to participate in and links to people relevant to the topic to follow up with. ...
Teddy in Meißen # Taken earlier this year in Meißen the picture shows a detail of the beautiful cathedral: Teddy after a busy day:
Note to self: Basic R operations # After searching for that all too often and for too long (in particular the “add a column as index” bit): To read a file: d <- read.table(’/home/isabel/input’, sep=’,’, header=T, quote=’’) Useful for getting an overview of the data:summary(d); head(d); tail(d) For sorting some data frame: s <- d[order(d[,2]),]; For adding a column to a data frame: s$idx <- seq(0, nrow(s) - 1, 1) ...
Note to self - link to 3D maps # After searching for the link the third time today - just in case I happen to be again looking for Nokia’s 3d maps: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html is the non-plugin link that works in Firefox.
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. ...