August 23, 2009
Flying back home from Cologne # Last weekend FrOSCon took place in Sankt Augustin, near Cologne. FrOSCon is organized on a yearly basis at the university of applied sciences in Sankt Augustin. It is a volunteer driven event with the goal of bringing developers and users of free software projects together. This year, the conference featured 5 tracks, two examples being cloud computing and the Java track.
Unfortunately this year the conference started with a little surprise for me and my boyfriend: Being both speakers, we had booked a room in Hotel Regina via the conference committee.
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July 10, 2009
AMQP Erlang user group talk # Last Wednesday at the Erlang user group Berlin Matthias Radestock from the RabbitMQ project gave a talk on RabbitMQ, AMQP and messaging in general. Slides are available online.
First Matthias motivated the need for an open standard for messaging: So far, their are a few provides of middleware systems like Tibco and IBM. But those solutions are usually closed, expensive, cumbersome to handle. In short they do not fit into a world where people rely on open standards for communication, free software for development and lightweight implementations.
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July 2, 2009
Solr at AOL # Grant Ingersoll has posted a very interesting interview with Ian Holsman on Solr at Relegance, now AOL. It describes the business side of the decission to switch to an open source solution, provides some inside on the size of the installation and details which technological reasons have driven the decission to switch from a proprietary implementation to Solr:
http://www.lucidimagination.com/Community/Hear-from-the-Experts/Podcasts-and-Videos/Interview-Ian-Holsman-Relegence</ a>
June 23, 2009
Large Scalability - Papers and implementations # In recent years the Googles and Amazons on this world have released papers on how to scale computing and processing to terrabytes of data. These publications have led to the implementation of various open source projects that benefit from that knowledge. However mapping the various open source projects to the original papers and assigning tasks that these projects solve is not always easy.
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June 21, 2009
Open Street Map @ FSFE meetup # At the last meeting of the local FSFE group here in Berlin Sabine Stengel from cartogis gave a presentation on Open Street Map. But instead of focussing on the technical side she described the legal issues and showed the broad variety of commercial projects that are possible with this type of mapping information.
It was interesting to learn of how detailed and high quality the information provided by volunteers really is.
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May 21, 2009
Open Source Development is good for you # GSoC (Google summer of code) - one of the open source programs of Google - has started again in 2009. Students come to work for open source projects during the summer and on success are paid by Google a fair amount of money.
This program is an ideal oportunity for students to get into open source projects: You get a mentor, you have pre-defined task to work on with a goal you set yourself.
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May 21, 2009
Tomcat Tuesday talk # Since several months at neofonie we have a talk given by external or internal developers on various subjects each Tuesday. Usually these presentations are a nice way to get an overview of new emerging technologies, to get an overview of current conference topics or to gain insight into interesting internal projects.
This week we had Apache Tomcat Committer and PMC Peter Rossbach here at neofonie to talk about the Tomcat architecture and Tomcat clustering solutions.
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May 5, 2009
Back from Zürich # I spend the last five days in Zurich. I wanted to visit the city again - and still owed one of my friends there a visit. I am really happy the weather was quite nice over the weekend. That way I could spend quite some time in town (got another one of those puzzles) and go for a hike on the Ütli mountain: I took the steep way up that had quite a lot of stairs.
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April 8, 2009
Announcing Apache Mahout 0.1 # This morning I received Grant’s release mail of Apache Mahout. I am really happy that after little more than one year we now have our first release out there to test and scrutinate by anyone interested in the project. Thanks to all the committers who have helped make this possible. A special thanks to Grant Ingersoll for putting so much time into getting many release issues out of the way as well as to those who reviewed the release candidates and all the major and minor problems.
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March 29, 2009
Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 2 # Thursday morning started with an interesting talk on open source collaboration tools and how they can help resolving some collaboration overhead on commercial software projects. Four goals can be reached with the help of the right tools: Sharing the project vision, tracking the current status of the project, finding places to help the project and documenting the project history as well as the reasons for decisions along the way.
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