September 4, 2009
Apache Con drawing closer # By November I will be traveling to Oakland - for me it is the first Apache Con US ever. And the first Apache Con I will be giving a talk in one of the main tracks:
I will be presenting Apache Mahout, give an overview of the project, of our current status and explain which problems can be solved with the current implementation. The talks will conclude with an outlook to upcoming tasks and features our users can expect in the near future.
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September 2, 2009
gnuplot tutorial link # As I am happily watching myself searching for the gnuplot tutorial over and over again - the direct link stored here to save future searching:
http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/index-e.html
August 17, 2009
Converting a git repo to svn # Pretty unlikely though it may seem, but there are cases when one might want to convert a git repo to svn and still keep all revisions intact. There is a nice explanation online on how to do that in the Google Open Source blog.
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
Keeping changesets small # One trick of successful and efficient software development is tracking changes in the sources in source code management systems, be it centralized systems like svn or perforce or decentralized systems like git or mercurial. I started working with svn while working on my Diploma thesis project in 2003, continued to use this systems while researcher at HU Berlin. Today I am using svn at work as well as for Apache projects and have come to like git for personal sandboxes.
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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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March 29, 2009
Apache Con Europe 2009 - part 1 # The past week members, committers and users of Apache software projects gathered in Amsterdam for another Apache Con EU
and to celebrate the 10th birthday of the ASF. One week dedicated to the development and use of Free Software and the Apache Way.
Monday was BarCamp day for me, the first BarCamp I ever attended. Unfortunately not all participants proposed talks. So some of the atmosphere of an unconference was missing.
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March 12, 2009
Books I found particularly helpful # During the last few years I have quite a few books that one could easily file under the category “Hacking books”. Some of them were particularly interesting to me and have influenced the way I write code. The following list certainly is not complete at all - but it is a nice starting point.
Effective C++ - I have comparably little experience with C++ but this book really helped understand some of the particularities.
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