December 2010
11 posts
Java Lives →
Congratulations to my Excella colleague (and fellow JMU alum) Mike McGarr on the publication of his Java article in Linux User. Great job Mike!
Article: Java Lives
3 tags
Initial Impressions of JQuery Mobile
I’ve been using JQuery Mobile since roughly a week after its initial alpha 1 release back in October. I really like what I see so far and I wanted to share my initial impressions on both the alpha 1 and alpha 2 releases. Also keep in mind that some of the gripes I list could be due to my own lack of understanding while reading parts of the documentation since it’s such a new framework...
What are the best blogs on data? →
Quora keeps coming up in my big data searches as a place to find well thought out answers to interesting questions. This Quora post has several answers on the best data blogs on the Internet. Many of the blogs are not specific to big data, but overall they provide a comprehensive overview of the ways businesses are currently using data.
Article: What are the best blogs on data?
CAP Theorem Overview →
The Consistency, Availability, and Partition Tolerance (CAP) Theorem is critical for understanding how NoSQL solutions trade off SQL database features we expect in order to achieve greater performance or fault tolerance. This article is a great overview on the subject and a must read for technical workers who want to cut through the hype on NoSQL solutions.
Article: CAP Theorem Overview
O'Reilly's 3 Big Data Trends for 2011 →
On the O’Reilly Strata website, Edd Dumbill describes three big data trends for 2011:
The continuing emergence of marketplaces for data sets
Better real-time big data analysis due to frustrations with batch processing using Hadoop and related technologies
Increasing demand for developers with data analysis skills
I agree with #1 and #3, but #2 is shaky to me. Real big data of tera-,...
Wanted: Data Scientists →
A person who “can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning.”
Leading companies with massive data sets are already exploring, understanding, and using information locked away in their data stores to drive their businesses. Look for this trend to move into the mainstream over the next several years as companies outside of the...
5 Lessons Netflix Learned During Their Transition... →
This is a great blog post from Netflix on the mind shift they had to undergo while moving from their traditional data to Amazon Web Services. I found this paragraph particularly interesting:
One of the first systems our engineers built in AWS is called the Chaos Monkey. The Chaos Monkey’s job is to randomly kill instances and services within our architecture. If we aren’t constantly testing our...
Venture Capitalists Investing Millions in Big Data... →
Andreessen Horowitz is investing $25 million in the open database service Factual. This comes after numerous other investments made in the big data space by this firm and others. Some firms, such as Cloudera, appear to have solid business models to build upon. What will be interesting is what new models come out of this space in the next several years.
Google Scientist Jumps To LinkedIn To Work On Big... →
LinkedIn has the most up to date data set about people’s current and former jobs in the world. That career information along with the connections among colleagues, provides a compelling project for the best data scientists to work with. Unsurprisingly, LinkedIn was able to recruit a top data scientist from Google to move the company’s initiatives ahead.
Hopkins to Build Data Analysis Super Machine →
Johns Hopkins’ researchers are building a supercomputer optimized for peak Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS). This architecture is in contrast to the machines on the Top 500 supercomputer list that are designed for peak floating point operations per second (FLOPS). The increasing importance of big data will continue to divide supercomputers into different camps because the hardware...
Hooking a Spring Roo Generated GWT Project Up to a...
I spent several hours last night trying to figure out why the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) project I created with Spring Roo would not work with an existing MySQL database I created with the Django object relational mapper. It turns out there were two reasons:
Spring Roo generated GWT projects use a java.lang.Long type for the primary key id, which is expecting an int(19) MySQL type when Django will...