Spotted this morning… # in front of my office: Ever wondered how accurate navigable map data for your Garmin, your in-car navigation system (most likely), or maps.nokia.com are created? One piece of the puzzle is the car above collecting data for Navteq, a subsidary of Nokia.
Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - August 2012 # Despite beautiful summer weather roughly 50 people gathered at ImmobilienScout24 for the August 2012 edition of the Apache Hadoop Get Together (Thanks again for hosting the event and sponsoring drinks and pizza to ImmoScout as well as to David Obermann for organising the meetup. Today there were three talks: In the first presentation Dragan Milosevic (also known from his talk at the Hadoop GetTogether and his presentation at Berlin Buzzwords) provided more insight as to how Zanox is managing their internal RPC protocols in particular when it comes to versioning and upgrading protocol versions. ...
Data Scientists - researchers’ persectives # “Data scientist” as a term has caught quite some attention as of late (together with all the big data, scalability and cloud hype). Instead of re-hashing arguments seen in other sources I thought it might make more sense to link to a few of the thought provoking posts I came across recently. In his post Mikio Braun analyses the factors motivating research in academia vs. ...
On Reading Code # “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.” –Stephen King Quite a while ago GeeCon published the video taped talk of Kevlin Henney on "Cool Code". This keynote is great to watch for everyone who loves to read code - not the one you encounter in real world enterprise systems - but the one that truely teaches you lessons: ...
Apache Con returns to Europe # In November Apache Con will come back to Europe. The event will take place in Sinsheim inviting foundation members, project committers, contributors and users to meet, discuss and have fun during the one week event. Several meetups will be held the weekend before the main conference kicks off, watch out for announcements on your favourite project mailing list. ApacheCon is still open for submissions until August 3rd - head over to the Call for submissions for more information. ...
FrOSCon 2012 # On August 25th/26th the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) will again kick off in Sankt Augustin/ Germany. The event is completely community organised, hosted by the FH Sankt Augustin. It covers a broad range of free software topics like Arduino microcontrollers, git goodies, politics, strace, open nebula, wireshark and others. Three highlights that are on my schedule: I’ll make sure I do not miss Thilo Fromm’s presentation on building a platform project on top of Open Embedded. ...
O’Reilly Strata coming to London # O’Reilly Strata is coming to London. The first edition of Strata back in 2011 brought Big Data developers, designers, scientists and decision makers together to discuss all things scalable. This year in October the conference comes to Europe: O’Reilly Strata EU will take place in London. Date: October 1st - 2nd 2012 Venue: Hilton London Metropole, 225 Edgware Road, London W2 1JU, UK ...
Book: Search Patterns # I got the book months ago during FOSDEM - the O’Reilly book table always is a pretty dangerous place as a meeting point for me: Search Patterns - Design for Discovery is one of those small, deceivingly beautiful books that manages to explain effective search engine design by focusing on the end user needs but going into some detail concerning the basics of search engine backends as well. ...
Teddy in Sweden # Some picture taken all the way up in northern Sweden: Those picture were taken mid-June. That means what looks like Teddy sitting in the afternoon sun actually was taken 20min before midnight some 40km south of the arctic circle at Camp Frevisören - an incredible spot to start the day on a canoo: View Larger Map (That little half-isle that stretches into the ocean.) If you ever travel that far north, make sure to stop by at Hulkoff. ...
Recsys meetup Berlin # Planning a meetup in Berlin: 8 people register, a table for 14 people is booked, 16+ people arrive - all of that even if no pre-defined topic or talk is announced. Seems like building recommender systems is a hot topic currently in Berlin. Thanks to Zeno Gantner from MyMedialight for organising the event - looking forward to the next edition.