NoSQL meeting report

So I went to a NoSQLSummer meeting yesterday night. Upon entering the deathly empty MINC complex, I thought “startups never sleep?”, but I found most of Neo’s staff in a cosy war-room called “Innovation Lab”. No coffee, but soda bottles. Copies of the paper were spread around the large table.

We met. We hung out. And, walked through the *Dynamo paper*, which was released in 2007, and is quite self-contained. That makes it “a NoSQL classic”. Good paper with which to open a reading circle. Now we have some pre-understanding for upcoming papers.

Photo by kalavinka

Other content

Neo4J’s Peter Neubauer, riffed on on Google’s data hugeness, which led us further afield: Google / Big Data; Crowdsourcing — WordNet; Concept: Discard 99% of the data, using the top 1%.

Thoughts on format

We’re currently toying with new/different perspectives/formats:

  • “Developer Perspective”
  • “Infrastructure/Scaling Perspective”
  • “Arch. Perspective”
  • “Apps/Ops Perspective”

Polyglot cases: How do you work with several multi-database setups?

Event bus usage: Some people use NoSQL stuff for the event buses. What are pros and cons here?

Do you need anything else there? I really enjoy this peek behind the scenes, implementation problems, etc. It is not something I can bring directly to my workplace and use, but I like the challenge of understanding large concepts together. The current format suits me well.a

Some hints and tips I picked up:

Google’s research end-of-level boss Peter Norvig’s talk at Berkeley (YouTube you-feel-lucky) — summarizing all the fields of research. (His official title is Director of Search Quality.)

A question: Is Stepanov’s Elements of Programming any good? Is it for me? (C++, math, beautiful type-setting.)

Next paper?

Google’s Bigtable? Cassandra? I cheated, and begun reading the Cassandra one. Let’s see how that goes.

Posted on 2010-06-17 by olleolleolle
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A regular Tuesday at the Forsk

Tuesday Forsk yesterday, it was awesome.

Just great. People were their normal selves, but everyone just had that extra edge of greatness that night.

It begun with a minor planning meeting in one corner. Pragmatic. Anna F came by and planned her workshop.

StG had worked on his Rbox project, and murmured “Do you want to help program this beast?” and muttered something about the eZ80 programming environment. Suddenly, there’s a noise “yeah, it’s the MOD player I built in” and later there were graphics. “It works!” he cried, at one point, and everybody rushed to, to see the greatness. There was greatness. I won’t spoil the greatness, you can witness it at Hacknight this Saturday.

In one corner, a PHP discussion group formed, as I had installed crisis mapping software Ushahidi — which is written in PHP. “Why do they tell me to program everything in Java?” a confused PHP user asked me. I answered. “What’s a class, really?” someone else asked. I answered. “Does PHP have to be so bad?” a third person asked, and me and qzio answered, by displaying how magic methods __call, __set and __get work. qzio also showed a PDO class wrapper, which might well see action at someone’s workplace.

Some film-makers were present, scouting the location, fitting the images in their heads. It will be a glorious documentary.

A great time was had by all.

Posted on 2010-06-16 by olleolleolle
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Someone else’s presentation which has Robots in there

Ah! Via the Umeå design school blog, I found this nice presentation which has robot pictures in it.

The Human Interface
Posted on 2010-06-7 by olleolleolle
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Malmö tech city

A summer’s rainy morning in Malmö.

I’ve just hopped off the morning train from Copenhagen, clutching a crumpled paper that I just finished. I got wind of it through the NoSQL Summer reading club’s Malmö instance.

On the way into the office, I saw my FOSS friend T, waiting for a car. Handing him the printed copy of the paper, I enjoyed a few minutes of database banter before heading into the building.

This is how I want my tech community to be like. Present, alive, and friendly. Thanks!

You can follow nosqlsummer on Twitter. Below is their pitch.

A seasonal, worldwide reading club for databases, distributed systems & NOSQL-related scientific papers.

A NOSQL Summer is a network of local reading groups, that will decipher & discuss NOSQL-related articles, from late June to early September 2010. Each group sets its own meeting pace (usually once a week or once every two weeks) and select which papers are up for discussion.

At every cycle, members read the selected paper at home and then meet up for an hour or so to discuss, debate and answer their own questions.

We then encourage you to produce an annotated version of the paper, or short summary that we can then publish here for the rest of world to peruse.

Please note that, in most cities, you do not need to sign up to attend NOSQL Summer meetings. You just need to have read the paper planned for the week by your local chapter and show up at the designated meeting place!

Feel free to skip a meeting or jump in at any time. We’re trying to make this low-maintenance and flexible, for everybody to get a chance to learn more about a fuzzy concept that’s here to stay.

Posted on 2010-06-7 by olleolleolle
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Good marketing




Good Rules to Keep in Mind

Originally uploaded by reinvented

Think of those rules. Of what they mean.

Posted on 2010-06-2 by olleolleolle
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Upcoming meetup poster: active redesigning and customizing

Prettify your web apps

Indulge me. I allowed myself to make a little poster.

Öresund JavaScript Meetup #10 on June 14, in Malmö, at Hypergene’s offices.

I guess there are a couple of things wrong with it. The date and time are lacking. Monday June 14. At 19.00. The URL says those things. (But people looking at a poster can’t click it.)

These guys would disapprove.

Update: Now, I went and added that stuff.

Still, the workshop will be great.

Posted on 2010-05-26 by olleolleolle
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dojo.beer() – you have to go

I can not attend this awesome meetup on Saturday, May 22. You have to go. OK?

dojo.beer("Copenhagen");

Posted on 2010-05-10 by olleolleolle
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Outsider architects

Watts Towers, (yes, that Watts) built by an Italian immigrant (to the USA).

In Europe, same weirdness appears:

1879 – 1912
33 years of struggle
10 000 days
93 000 hours

Ferdinand Cheval was a French postman, who built “Le Palais Idéal” by working in his spare time. Here’s a Wikipedia picture:

Le Palas Idéal

Here is a large portrait of the artist who had the slogans: “The work of one man” and “Let those who think they can do better try”.

“Discover the postman’s palace” says the website Facteur Cheval. His work is now a protected cultural legacy.

Impressed.

Posted on 2010-05-8 by olleolleolle
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Penrose: end-of-level math boss, or raving weirdo?

Roger Penrose, math rockstar, who later in life began to write longer and longer works. In new areas. Ever read any of his stuff?

I never did. I did read Neal Stephenson’s Anathem, and the plot contains tiling problems, quite clearly modeled on the idea of Penrose being a bad-ass math person. Anathem‘s the kind of work which makes fans create wikis about it. They want to stay in that land. I felt that the story about the “mathic world” was the strongest one in the book, and I was a little put off when the plot began to move (at the latter half of this brick of a book).

At FSCONS, someone made a simile with monastic life and working with the Open Source Ecology project. Kyrah whispered “Did you read Anathem, yet?” I nodded. A moment of geek-to-geek friendship.

Posted on 2010-04-29 by olleolleolle
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Etching nametags, collection of resources

Looking around for etching stuff. People with machines have a lack of taste.

Explanation of what I want to do. Make signs, one for each engineer.

I admire his technical skill

Envious of these machines

a Polish website on laminates have pictures. They mention Rowmark (“Great people, great plastic”. Amazing.)

Do you have any thoughts or ideas on this matter? Done anything? Ever had a good nametag? Ever bought one? Do you have picture links to good ones?

Posted on 2010-04-29 by olleolleolle
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