From the QWANtify Blogs
BarCampMilwaukee2 starts tomorrow morning at 10am. I’ll be up long before the crack of dawn to finish getting all my stuff together and drive over to Milwaukee.
If my health holds out (of course I’d come down with a nasty cold the afternoon before the event!) I’ll remain semi-coherent and be able to give some presentations, enjoy some food, good company, and learn lots.
I’m going to attempt to either semi-liveblog here or on Twitter. It depends upon whether I can find time to fix my command-line Ruby Twitter sending program so that I don’t have to use the Twitter website to post.
There’s still time to come on out. It runs until Sunday at 4pm. The official website is www.barcampmilwaukee.com. If you’re not pre-registered you’ll have to show up during the day to get registered, otherwise you won’t be able to get into the venue in the evening.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 1barcampmilwaukee2
I’ve been a big fan of Google for many years. Their research seems to be top notch and they come up with some amazing things. What I’m less thrilled about is their data capacity and yen to index everything. I’m not too cool with that. I like their online apps, but I don’t want them to be storing all my data.
That said, I actually started to use the Google Calendar. It’s rather handy, can email me notifications, and has a slick as vegetable oil webtastic 2.0 interface. I can choose to share my entire calendar with the world, share with people that I list, or keep everything private while sharing single calendar items.
Too much fun.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
The location for BarCampMilwaukee2 has changed. It will now be held at the Schlitz Park Center in Milwaukee. The new Bucketworks location was not going to be finished in time for the BarCamp. Check out the video link on the front page of the BarCamp website (http://www.barcampmilwaukee.com) to see the new location. It looks real nice.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I was checking out the Hibernate website (http://www.hibernate.org) and saw something called Hibernate Shards. I thought it sounded interesting so I investigated further.
It seems that some engineers at Google started a project in their 20% time to add functionality to Hibernate to deal with sharding.
It’s an interesting idea. Shards is just Google-speak for horizontal data partitioning. Typical vertical data partitioning will group data rows together in the same table based on some kind of criteria. The theory being that by grouping the data together based upon what you’re searching for, the database will be more efficient when performing the search and returning the data.
Horizontal partitioning is similar except that the data is spread across multiple tables with the same layout.
Hibernate Shards is great in that it abstracts out behind the scenes the strategies for which tables to search when performing a query and which table to insert new data into based upon the strategy you’ve chosen. It will automatically union all the returned rows together if it needs to retrieve data from multiple shards (tables).
It’s an interesting concept. I wonder if we’ll see it in use more and more as a data partitioning scheme.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 4java
For those not in the know, Twitter seems to be the “next new thing” in the social connectivity realm of the interweb. I’m more than a little skeptical of the usefulness of the tool. The gist of it is that you can post small messages (160 characters or less) to Twitter for your friends (and the world if you so choose) to see. In the great interconnectedness of the world, everyone can stay up-to-date to what you are doing. You can hook up your IM programs and your SMS phone to send to Twitter.
I decided to setup a Twitter account just to see what I think about it (http://twitter.com/sfradkin). I haven’t actually started to post anything on there yet, but I’ve noticed a few things. Twitter seems to work really well if you’re able to update during most of the day. I’m not the kind of person who is going to do this. I don’t use IM for anything, nor do I use SMS messaging on my cell phone. I don’t see myself posting updates while I’m at work since that seems rather unprofessional, and I’m usually away from my computer for the vast majority of the rest of the day.
But, I’ll give it a go and see what happens. It may prove to be more interesting than my first impressions have made it.
Filed in: Team Member Blog
BarCampMilwaukee2 will take place on October 13 and 14 at Bucketworks in Milwaukee. I had a great (albeit abbreviated) time at BarCampMadison earlier this year, so I’m planning on being at BarCampMilwaukee2 as much as possible that weekend.
I’ve been running some thoughts through my head about what I’d like to lead some sessions about, but nothing solid has appeared yet.
It’ll be a fun time. Check out the new and improved BarCampMilwaukee website at http://www.barcampmilwaukee.org
Filed in: Team Member Blog
If it’s good enough for Wil (http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/wwdnbackup/2007/08/the-coolest-thi.html) and Cory (http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/13/dailylits_library_of.html) then it’s good enough for me.
DailyLit (http://www.dailylit.com/) is actually pretty slick. They send you snippets of books that are in the public domain or Creative Commons licensed. These snippets are sized to take about 5 minutes to read and can be sent to you on a regular (or slightly irregular) schedule. If you choose you can read over an RSS feed instead.
While I have yet to try it out, this certainly seems pretty darn cool. They don’t have an enormous selection of books yet, I can only assume that they will. They should be able to take the entire Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/wiki/Main_Page) library and put it on their website.
I’m still a big fan of the printed word, though. There’s just something about having the hard copy of a text in front of you.
Now if only someone rigged this up but with audio books…
Filed in: Team Member Blog
I was poking around the interweb for some interesting technical books to purchase. I decided to head on over to the Pragmatic Programmers website because I’ve purchased their books in the past and have, in general, been quite happy with the books they put out. One of the most recent books they’ve released is called “Programming Erlang: Software for a Concurrent World” (http://www.pragmaticprogrammer.com/titles/jaerlang/index.html). I was intrigued, so I bought the book.
It came in the mail the other day and I started to read it. I’m not that far into it, but a few things really strike me about the language.
- It’s been around for awhile. The Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_%28programming_language%29) indicates that it first appeared in 1987 and was created at Ericsson, the cell phone company.
- It’s designed for concurrent, highly parallel, and fault-tolerant systems.
- Syntactically, it feels somewhat like Ruby and Scheme (or Lisp).
- It’s a functional language. It feels more purely functional than Ruby does.
- Arbitrary length integers. Ahh… finally, no need to worry about overflows!
- Variables are single-assignment. You cannot change the value of a “variable” once it has been assigned a value.
- The equals operator (=) is NOT an assignment operator. It’s a pattern matching operator. But, when used with a variable that has not been assigned a value, the value gets assigned. This one got a “Whoa” (insert Keanu Reeves here) from me.
I really think that I’m starting to enjoy dynamically typed, functional languages. It’s quite a departure from standard object-oriented imperative programming. It’s really interesting to not have to deal with objects all the time and to work with the elegance that functional programming brings to the table.
The little devil on my shoulder that likes to keep me programming in Java keeps asking me “But what is it good for?” to every new and old language that I encounter. It’s a question that I like to keep in mind when evaluating different languages.
I can’t answer that question about Erlang yet. I’m not that far into the book. But, it’s definitely an interesting language.
Filed in: Team Member Blog 8languages