September 21, 2011
Talking people into submitting patches # In November I am going to attend Apache Con NA. This year I decided to do a little experiment: I sumitted a talk on talking people into contributing to free software projects. The format of the talk is a bit unusual: Drawing from my - admittedly limited and very biased - experience explaining free software to others and talking people into contributing patches this talks tries to initiate a discussion on methods to get awesome developers to consider contributing their work back to free software projects.
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November 29, 2010
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.
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November 28, 2010
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.
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November 27, 2010
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.
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November 26, 2010
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.
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November 25, 2010
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.
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November 24, 2010
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.
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November 23, 2010
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.
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November 22, 2010
Travelling # Currently on my way back from a series of conferences in the past three weeks in the IC from Schiphol. After three weeks of conferences, lots of new input and lots of interesting projects I learned about it is finally time to head back and put the stuff I have learned to good use.
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As seems normal with open source conferences I got far more input on interesting projects than I can expect to ever get applied in on a daily basis.
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March 29, 2009
Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 3 # Friday was the last conference day. I enjoyed the Apache pioneers panel with a brief history of the Apache Software Foundation as well as lots of stories on how people first got in contact with the ASF.
After lunch I went to the testing and cloud session. I enjoyed the talk on continuum and its uses by Wendy Smoak. She gave a basic overview of why one would want a CI system and provided a brief introduction to continuum.
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