Inductive Bias

Fourth #Recsys Stammtisch Berlin # This evening the 4th #recsys Stammtisch (German for “a meetup involving beer”) was kindly organised by Alan Said, Zeno Gantner and Till Plumbaum.

Teddy in Meißen # Taken earlier this year in Meißen the picture shows a detail of the beautiful cathedral: Teddy after a busy day:

Note to self: Basic R operations # After searching for that all too often and for too long (in particular the “add a column as index” bit): To read a file: d <- read.table(’/home/isabel/input’, sep=’,’, header=T, quote=’’) Useful for getting an overview of

Note to self - link to 3D maps # After searching for the link the third time today - just in case I happen to be again looking for Nokia’s 3d maps: http://maps3d.svc.nokia.com/webgl/index.html is the non-plugin link that works in Firefox.

Some thoughts on a conf taxonomy # One common way for open source developers to meet face-to-face is to attend conferences relevant to their subject of interest.

Speaking at ApacheCon EU 2012 # I’ll be at ApacheCon EU in November.

Learning German # For some reason I got that question multiple times now from people that moved to Germany but work in companies where English is the language to use for communication - how to best learn German (in addition finding people to talk to).

Moving to a new domain # Executive summary: This is to warn those of you who are subscribed to this blog - the domain to reach this blog w/o redirects will soon change to by isabel-drost-fromm.de - you might want to adjust your rss subscription accordingl…

Video up: Dragan Milosevic on “Robust Communication Mechanisms” # Dragan Milosevic: "Robust Communication Mechanisms in zanox Reporting Systems" from David Obermann on Vimeo.

FrOSCon - on teaching # The last talk I went to during FrOSCon was Selena’s keynote on “Mistakes were made”.

FrOSCon - understanding Linux with strace # Being a Java child I had only dealt with strace once before: Trying to figure out whether any part of the Mahout tests happens to use /dev/random for initialisation in a late night debugging session with my favo…

FrOSCon - Git Goodies # In his talk on Git Goodies Sebastian Harl introduced not only some of the lesser known git tooling but also gave a brief introduction as to how git organises its database.

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.

FrOSCon 2012 - REST # Together with Thilo I went to FrOSCon last weekend.

Video: Stefan Hübner on Cascalog # Stefan Hübner: "Introducing Cascalog: Functional Data Processing for Hadoop" from David Obermann on Vimeo.

Video: “Accessing Hadoop data with HCatalog and PostgreSQL” # Manuel Meßner, Stephan Friese, Dr.

Open Source Meetup Berlin # This evening the (to my knowledge first) Berlin Open Source Meetup took place at Prater (Bier-)garten in Berlin.

Spotted this morning… # in front of my office: Ever wondered how accurate navigable map data for your Garmin, your in-car navigation system (most likely), or maps.nokia.com are created?

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin - August 2012 # Despite beautiful summer weather roughly 50 people gathered at ImmobilienScout24 for the August 2012 edition of the Apache Hadoop Get Together (Thanks again for hosting the event and sponsoring drinks and…

Data Scientists - researchers’ persectives # “Data scientist” as a term has caught quite some attention as of late (together with all the big data, scalability and cloud hype).

On Reading Code # “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time or the tools to write.”

Apache Con returns to Europe # In November Apache Con will come back to Europe.

FrOSCon 2012 # On August 25th/26th the Free and Open Source Conference (FrOSCon) will again kick off in Sankt Augustin/ Germany.

O’Reilly Strata coming to London # O’Reilly Strata is coming to London.

Book: Search Patterns # I got the book months ago during FOSDEM - the O’Reilly book table always is a pretty dangerous place as a meeting point for me: Search Patterns - Design for Discovery is one of those small, deceivingly beautiful books that manages…

Teddy in Sweden # Some picture taken all the way up in northern Sweden: Those picture were taken mid-June.

Recsys meetup Berlin # Planning a meetup in Berlin: 8 people register, a table for 14 people is booked, 16+ people arrive - all of that even if no pre-defined topic or talk is announced.

Apache Hadoop Get Together Berlin # As seen on Xing - the next Apache Hadoop Get Together is planned to take place in August: When: 15.

Need your input: Failing big data projects - experiences from the wild # A few weeks ago my talk on “How to fail your big data project quick and rapidly” was accepted at O’Reily Strata conference in London.

Note to self: Clojure with Vim and Maven # Steps to get a somewhat working Clojure environment with vim: Install the current vimclojure plugin.

Apache Sling and Jackrabbit event coming to Berlin # Interested in Apache Sling and/or Apache Jackrabbit?

Preparation done - clock is ticking # The clock is ticking - only one more weekend to go before Berlin Buzzwords opens its doors for the main conference (check out the Wiki for the Sunday evening Barcamp and the Sunday Movie Hackday).

Last minute Getting Around information for Berlin Buzzwords # I’ve been sharing information on how to get around in Berlin more often than I’d like to type it out - putting it here for future reference.

Teddy in Zürich # A few beautiful sunny though windy days in Zurich late April: View from the path between Ütliberg and Adliswil/Felsenegg: Strolling through the city and sitting next to Zürichsee enjoying the sun afterwards: A boat trip to Rapperswil - s…

Teddy in Poznan # Some images taken in Poznan after GeeCon - big Thanks!

GeeCon - Testing hell and how to fix it # The last regular talk I went to was on testing hell at Atlassian – in particular the JIRA project.

GeeCon - Solr at Allegro # One particularly interesting to me was on Allegro’s (polish Ebay) Solr usage.

GeeCon - managing remote projects # In his talk on visibility in distributed teams Pawel Wrzeszcz motivated why working remotely might be benefitial for both, employees (less commute time, more family time) as well as employers (hiring world wide instead…

GeeCon - failing software projects fast and rapidly # My second day started with a talk on how to fail projects fast and rapidly.

GeeCon - TDD and it’s influence on software design # The second talk I went to on the first day was on the influence of TDD on software design.

GeeCon - Randomized testing # I arrived late during lunch time on Thursday for GeeCon – however just in time to listen to one of the most interesting talks when it comes to testing.

GeeCon 2012 - part 1 # Devoxx, Java Posse, Qcon, Goto Con, an uncountable number of local Java User Groups – aren’t there enough conferences on just Java, that weird programming language that “makes developers stupid by letting them type too much boiler p…

Presentation shortening # In an effort to make more room for more talks in our schedule for this year’s Berlin Buzzwords we’ve asked quite a few people to shorten their presentation from 40min down to 20min.

Traveling to Berlin in June?

Berlin Buzzwords Schedule online - book your ticket now # As of beginning of last week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is online.

Berlin Hadoop Get Together (April 2012)- videos are up # Sebastian Schelter: Introducing Apache Giraph for Large Scale Graph Processing Dr.

Second steps with git # Leaving this here in case I’ll search for it later again - and I’m pretty sure I will.

Music in Berlin early June # A little bit of inspiration on what to do the weekend before and after Buzzwords in Berlin: Ballet in June at the Staatsballett Berlin Concerts in June at <a href=“ http://www.konzerthaus.de/programm/?

Berlin Buzzwords scheduling - behind the scenes # Since roughly a week the Berlin Buzzwords schedule is available online.

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.