September 4, 2012
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.
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March 7, 2012
Clojure Berlin - March 2012 # In today’s Clojure meetup Stefan Hübner gave an introduction to Cascalog - a Clojure library based on Cascading for large scale data processing on Apache Hadoop without hassle.
After a brief overview of what he is using the tool for to do log processing at his day job for http://maps.nokia.com Stefan went into some more detail on why he chose Cascalog over other project that provide abstraction layers on top of Hadoop’s plain map/reduce library: Both Pig and Hive provide easy to learn SQL-like languages to quickly write analysis jobs.
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February 14, 2012
HowTo: Meetups in Berlin # I get that question once in a while - and need the list below myself every now and then: How to actually setup a meetup in Germany. Essentially it all boils down to three questions: Which channels to use for PR? Where to do the meeting? What other benefits to offer to attendees?
When it comes to PR there are several options: Announce the meetup on relevant mailing lists
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February 2, 2012
Clojure in Berlin # Though I had the chance to tinker with some Clojure code only briefly it’s programming model and the resulting compact programs do fascinate me. As the resulting code runs on a JVM and does integrate well with existing Java libraries migration is comparably cheap and easy.
Today I finally managed to attend the local Berlin Clojure meetup, co-organised by Stefan Hübner and Fronx. Timing couldn’t have been much better: In this evenings event Philip Potter from Thoughtworks introduced Overtone - a library for making music with Clojure.
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January 22, 2012
Teddy in Chicago # Last week I spent several days in Chicago mainly to attend a few meetings at the local Nokia/Navteq office. Though the schedule was pretty packed, a few hours remained to explore the then frosty and windy city:
Top three images: Some impressions of the city. Bottom left: Teddy’s new friend. Bottom right: Situation at ORD when flying out - fortunately both, the airport as well as the airline (Swiss) have quite some experience with challenging weather conditions so that we could leave without too much delay.
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December 30, 2011
#28c3 # Restate my assumptions. One: Mathematics is the language of nature.
Two: Everything around us can be represented and understood through numbers.
Three: If you graph the numbers of any system, patterns emerge. Therefore, there are patterns everywhere in nature.
The above is a quote from today's "Hackers in movies" talk at 28c3 - which amongst others also showed a brief snippet of the movie Pi. For several years I stayed well away from that one famous Hackers' conference in Berlin that takes place annually between Christmas and New Year.
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December 9, 2011
Berlin Tech Meetups # Berlin currently is of growing interest for software engineers, has a very active startup scene and as a result several community organised meetups. Listed below is a short, “highly objective” selection of local user groups - showing just the breadth of topics discussed.
Berlin Hadoop Get Together
Berlin DevOps
Berlin Buzzwords (conference, no meetup)
Berlin Scrumtisch
Java User Group Berlin/Brandenburg
Berlin Google Technology User Group
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October 23, 2011
GoTo Con AMS - Day 2 # Day two of GoTo Con Amsterdam started with a keynote by former Squeak developer Dan Ingalls. He introduced the Lively kernel - a component architecture for HTML5 that runs in any browser and allows easy composition, sharing and programming of items. Having seen Squeak years ago and being thrilled by its concepts even back then it was amazing to see what you can do with Lively kernel in a browser.
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October 22, 2011
GoTo Con AMS - Day 1 # Last week GoTo Con took place in Amsterdam. Being a sister conference to GoTo in Aarhus the Amsterdam event focused on the broad topics of agile development, architectural challenges, backend and frontend development, platforms like the JVM and .NET. In addition the Amsterdam event featured a special Apache track tailored towards presentations focusing on the development model at Apache and the technologies developed at Apache.
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October 21, 2011
Night Trains # It was several years ago that a frequent traveller told me about it being more comfortable and time saving to travel mid-sized distances (e.g. from Berlin to Amsterdam) by train - night train that is - instead of flying. Back then without decent knowledge of which combination of booking early and discount card make prizes of trips by train somewhat comparable to those offered by airlines that wasn’t really an option for me.
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