Xor News

Yesterday I attended the first-ever Hadoop World, sponsored by Cloudera and held in The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. I took an early Amtrak train up to the big city and a late train back that same night. The conference was well attended, over 500 big-data heads were there and the organizers did a fantastic job.

Some of the best stuff was just hearing about how other folks are using Hadoop. I also enjoyed hearing about the sizes of other people’s big-data problems. There were three tracks, so I only heard 1/3 of what took place, but here are some notes on what I did hear after the break.

It was a great day, a long day, glad I went. (more…)

And be it ever remembered that Christians are not members of a club, of a sect or of an association; they are members of a body, each connected with allo, and all connected by the fact of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit with the risen and glorified Head in Heaven. This is an immense truth, and the practical carrying out of it will cost us not only all we have, but all we are. There is no place in all the universe where self will be so pulled to pieces as in the Assembly of God. And is it not well? Is it not a powerful proof of the divine ground on which that Assembly is gathered? Should we not be glad to have our hateful self thus pulled to pieces? Shall we or ought we run away from those who do it for us? Are we not glad–do we not often pray to get rid of self? And shall we quarrel with those who are God’s instruments in answering our prayers? True, they may do the work roughly and clumsily, but never mind that. Whoever helps me to crush and sink self does me a kind turn, however awkwardly he may do it. One thing is certain, no man can ever rob us of that which, after all, is the only thing worth having, namely Christ.

–C.H.M., Short Papers, Self Surrender, p. 18, Believers Bookshelf, pub 1995.
(capitalization his, emphasis mine)

I have probably read that several times before. It’s interesting how the experiences we go through color how (and how much) we understand a thing like that.

Cindy and I went downtown to the Sculpture Garden of the National Gallery of Art for a concert in their series featuring local jazz artists. The weather was kind of doubtful that day and the concert was moved into the pavilion cafe. That looked like a bad decision during the first set, since the weather was partly sunny, the cafe was very crowded and kind of hit. During the second set and part of the third it poured rain, so then we were thinking that they looked like geniuses for having it inside. DC weather is like that.

The big draw for us was the Tom Williams Quintet. I never really got a good picture of all five guys, but here’s some flavor, featuring the man himself.

We had been wanting to go and hear Tom play for quite some time, but this time the scheduling and baby-sitting just worked out and we were off. Tom, Cindy and I all went to high school together, were all in band, lived through the marching, playing in the rain and snow, and the other vagaries of high school. Some others from the old high school band group were there too: Betty (who tipped us off about this gig in the first place, Darren, and Jim. It was great to see everyone and several other folks in the audience figured out that we all knew each other and were asking questions about it. Lots of fun.

The TWQ was the event for the evening though and they played three very nice sets. The music was just great and they were really connecting with the crowd in the close quarters of the pavilion cafe. There was a very nice blend of tunes from “The Theme”, to Miles Davis, to a couple of Tom’s own compositions. Every set had a nice flow and we stayed for the whole deal.

Here’s a picture worthy of reminiscing over. Thinking about how “local guy makes good” and “we knew him back when…”. But truth be told, Tom “made good” a long time ago. If you don’t have his CDs, zip on over to amazon and check out Straight Street and Introducing Tom Williams, both of which are very nice.

Here is yesterday’s haul of 100% organic home-grown raspberries. That is 7 lb 11 oz of pure deliciousness.

raspberry harvest

We have been getting a tremendous harvest from our little row of raspberries this year.

Upgrade to WP 2.8 broke the comments permalinks, 2.8.1 didn’t help. The user would get an error page after posting a comment (comment was posted) and clicking on any of the links to a comment went to the-url-for-the-post/comments-page-1#comment-id which would get you a 404. In the admin settings discussion area there is a (new?) setting to break comments up into pages of 50. Turning this off fixed the problem. I’ve never had 50 non-spam comments so that shouldn’t hurt too much. Plus I don’t think I ever turned it on in the first place.

Mamacita made paella last night and it was truly fantastic. It was very authentic, real spanish short grained rice, chorizo, jamon, shrimp, scallops, chicken, smoked Spanish paprika, saffron. There is a certain kind of pepper that true Valencian paella would have that we didn’t find in time, but I’m thinking that just gives us an excuse to have it again pretty soon, right? Right?

Paella de Valencia

So here it is, probably enough paella for 12 people. My new favorite food has displaced Maryland crab-cakes from the top of the list.

The boy wonder graduates! Way to go, d00d!

The Boy Wonder Graduates

This screen cast covers Scaling Rails apps using Rack and Metal and is an execellent tutorial on both subjects. Jason Pollack, one of the Rails Envy guys, does a superb job explaining how rack and metal work in Rails 2.3.

Last night we concluded watching the DVD of the Does God Exist? debate between William Lane Craig (affirm) and Christopher Hitchens (deny). The debate was sponsored by the Biola University apologetics department and took place on the Biola campus in Southern California. The debate format was classical and some questions were taken from the student section of the audience at the end.

I have read several of Dr. Craig’s books before and have enjoyed them, especially on Jesus Resurrection, Fact or Figment?, a debate in book form with Gerd Ludemann.

We appreciated many of the points made during the debate on both sides. One can particularly sympathize with Mr. Hitchens comments on the banality of man-made religion and the damage, heart-break, and destruction it has caused. It is sad that so many have done so much evil in the name of Christianity. The earthly church attempting to gain political power and be able to “tell people what to do in the name of God” we find a particularly repugnant form of man-made addition to true Christianity. But as Dr. Craig concludes, we ultimately believe Christianity and that there is a God because it is true, not because of the potential or actual benefits to society from holding this world-view.

Debate video highly recommended.

Reading an interesting paper on d-Left Hashing (pdf link) by Bonomi, Mitzenmacher, et. al. This is a space and effeciency improvement on Bloom filters. Wondering how it could be incorporated into a Hadoop mapfile to avoid scanning compressed blocks for keys that aren’t present. Maybe the work in hbase on o.a.h.hbase.io.BloomFilterMapFile would provide good clues. Need to understand the dynamic bit reassignment stuff first though.