Teddy in Lisbon # After Apache Con I spent a few days in Lisbon for Codebits. The conference is not developers-only. It is more of a mixture of hacking event, conference, exhibition. Though the location was not optimal for giving presentations (large exhibition hall with now a rather noisy presentation area) the whole event brought quite an interesting mixture of people together in one place in the capital of Portugal. ...
Mahout in Action # Flying to Atlanta I finally had a few hours of time to finalize the review of the Mahout in Action MEAP edition. The book is intended for potential users of the Apache Mahout, a project focussing on implementing scalable algorithms for machine learning. Describing machine learning algorithms and their application to practioners is a non-trivial task: Usually there is more than one algorithm available for seemingly identically problem settings. ...
Apache Con – Wrap up # After one week of lots of interesting input the ASF’s user conference was over. With a focus on Apache software users quite a few talks are not too well suited for conference regulars but more or less targeted at newbies who want to know who too successfully apply the software. As a developer of Mahout with close ties to the Lucene and Hadoop community what is of course most interesting to me are stories of users putting the software into production. ...
Christmas Scrumtisch # Today the last Scrumtisch Berlin in 2010 took place in Friedrichshain. Thanks to Marion Eickmann and Andrea Tomasini for organising the Scrum user group regularly for the past years. Though no presentation had been scheduled ahead of time the Scrumtisch was well attended by over twenty people, mostly from companies based in Berlin who are either using Scrum already or are currently in a transition phase. ...
Teddy in Atlanta # While I was happily attending Apache Con US in Atlanta/GA my teddy had a closer look at the city: He first went to the centennial olympic park, took a picture of the world of coca-cola (wondering what strange kinds of museums there are in the US. After that he headed over to Midtown having a quiet time in the Piedmont park. And finally had a closer look at the private houses still decorated for Halloween. ...
Apache Con – last day # Day three of Apache Con started with interesting talks on Tomcat 7, including an introduction to the new features of that release. Those include better memory leak prevention and detection capabilities – the implementation of these capabilities have lead to the discovery of various leaks that appear under more or less weird circumstances in famous open source libraries and the JVM itself. But also better management and reporting facilities are part of the new release. ...
Apache Con – Mahout, commons and Lucene # The second day the track interesting to me provided an overview of some of the Apache commons projects. So seemingly small in scope and light-weight in implementation and dependencies these projects provide vital features not yet well supported by the Sun JVM. There is a commons math implementation featuring a fair amount of algebraic, numeric and trigonometric functions (among others), the commons exec framework for executing processes externally to the JVM w/o running into the danger of creating dead-locks or wasting resources. ...
ApacheCon - Keynotes # The first keynote was given by Dana Blankenhorn – a journalist and blogger regularly publishing tech articles with a clear focus on open source projects. Focussed on the evolution of open source projects with a special focus on Apache. Coming from a research background the keynote given by Daniel Crichton from NASA was very interesting to me: According to the speaker scientists are facing challenges that are all to known to large and distributed corporations. ...
Apache Con – Hadoop, HBase, Httpd # The first Apache Con day featured several presentations on NoSQL databases (track sponsored by Day software), a Hadoop track as well as presentations on Httpd and an Open source business track. Since its inception Hadoop always was intended to be run in trusted environments firewalled from hostile users or even attackers. As such it never really supported any security features. This is about the change with the new Hadoop release including better Kerberos based security. ...
Apache Con – Hackathon days # This year on Halloween I left for a trip to Atlanta/GA. Apache Con US was supposed to take place there featuring two presentations on Apache Mahout – one by Grant Ingersoll explaining how to use Mahout to provide better search features in Solr, one by myself with a general introduction to what features Mahout provides, giving a bit more detailed information on how to use Mahout for classificaiton. ...