November 13, 2012
ApacheConEU - part 04 # The second talk I went to was the one on the dev@hadoop.a.o insights given by Steve Loughran. According to Steve Hadoop has turned into what he calls an operating system for the data center - similar to Linux in that it’s development is not driven by a vendor but by its users: Even though Hortenworks, Cloudera and MapR each have full time people working on Hadoop (and related projects), this work usually is driven by customer requirements which ultimately means that someone is running a Hadoop cluster that he has trouble with and wants to have fixed.
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November 12, 2012
ApacheConEU - part 03 # Tuesday started early with a plenary - run by the sponsor, not too many news there, except for the very last slide that raised a question that is being discussed often also within the ASF - namely how to define oneself compared to non-ASF projects. What is the real benefit for our users - and what is the benefit for people to go with the ASF.
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November 11, 2012
ApacheCon EU - part 02 # For me the week started with the Monday Hackathon. Even though I was there early the room quickly filled up and was packed at lunch time. I really liked the idea of having people interested in a topic register in advance - it gave the organisers a chance to assign tables to topics and put signs on the tables to advertise the topic worked on.
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November 10, 2012
ApacheConEU - part 01 # Apache Con EU in Germany - in November, in Sinsheim (in the middle of nowhere): I have to admit that I was more than skeptical whether that would actually work out very well. A day after the closing session it’s clear that the event was a huge success: Days before all tickets were sold out, there were six sessions packed with great talks on all things related to Apache Software Foundation projects - httpd, tomcat, lucene, open office, hadoop, apache commons, james, felix, cloud stack and tons of other projects were well covered.
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October 29, 2012
Teddy in London # While I was at the conference – Teddy spent some time exploring the surroundings of the conference hotel. Looks like in particular Hyde park was attractive:
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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October 24, 2012
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:
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