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. ...
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. ...
Video up: Dragan Milosevic on “Robust Communication Mechanisms” # Dragan Milosevic: "Robust Communication Mechanisms in zanox Reporting Systems" from David Obermann on Vimeo.
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. ...
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. ...
FrOSCon - Git Goodies # In his talk on Git Goodies Sebastian Harl introduced not only some of the lesser known git tooling but also gave a brief introduction as to how git organises its database. Starting with an explanation of how patches essentially are treated as blobs identified by SHA1 hashes (thus avoiding duplication not only in the local database but allover the git universe), pointed to by trees that are in turn generated and extended by commits that are in turn referenced by branches (updates on new commits) and tags (don’t update on new commits). ...
FrOSCon - Robust Linux embedded platform # The second talk I went to at FrOSCon was given by Thilo Fromm on Building a robust embedded Linux platform. For more information on the underlying project see also projec HidaV on github. Slides of the talk Building a robust Linux embedded platform are already online. Inspired by a presentation on safe upgrade prodedures in embedded devices by Arnaut Vandecappelle in the Embedded Dev Room FOSDEM earlier this year Thilo extended the scope of the presentation a bit to cover safe kernel upgrades as well as package updates in embedded systems. ...
FrOSCon 2012 - REST # Together with Thilo I went to FrOSCon last weekend. Despite a few minor glitches and the “traditional” long BBQ line the conference was very well organised and again brought together a very diverse crowd of people including but not limited to Debian developers, OpenOffice people, FSFE representatives, KDE and Gnome developers, people with background in Lisp, Clojure, PHP, Java, C and HTML5. The first talk we went to was given by JThijssen on REST in practice. ...
Video: Stefan Hübner on Cascalog # Stefan Hübner: "Introducing Cascalog: Functional Data Processing for Hadoop" from David Obermann on Vimeo.