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. ...
Speaking at ApacheCon EU 2012 # I’ll be at ApacheCon EU in November. Looking forward to an interesting conference on all things Apache that is finally returning back to Europe. Go there if you want to learn more on Tomcat, Hadoop, httpd, HBase, Camel, Open Office, Mahout, Lucene and more. Now on to prepare the two talks I submitted: “Choosing the right tool for your data analysis task - Apache Mahout in context” ...
Learning German # For some reason I got that question multiple times now from people that moved to Germany but work in companies where English is the language to use for communication - how to best learn German (in addition finding people to talk to). When thinking about how I got started with English there were a few things that helped: As a child I got some “made for learning English” crime stories to read. ...