Big Data Summit

DISCLAIMER: I work at Aster.

If you are interested in Big Data, you should check out the Big Data Summit.

Big Data Summit

What is it about?

The informal evening event, colocated with Hadoop World: NYC, will highlight advancements in
data warehousing and big data management. Similar to ScaleCamp, Big Data Summit will showcase
some of the most innovative uses of MPP data warehousing and other complementary solutions like
Hadoop to harness the power of Big Data.

The Bay Bridge Project

If you live in the Bay Area, you have no doubt been reminded countless number of times in the past few weeks — on radio, television, road signs and bill board etc — that the Bay Bridge is closed over the Labor Day weekend. For a long time I was under the impression that the closure was for some routine maintainance. But when I found out about the actual reason for the closure, I was intrigued. The more I learnt about the Bay Bridge, and this project, I was more and more impressed by the sheer amount of engineering involved in the whole enterprise.

Bay Bridge closure

The Transbay blog has a great post on the closure. Of course, baybridgeinfo.org is the go-to site for the all things Bay Bridge related, including live construction cams, videos and a lot lot more.

Here is some trivia about the Bay Bridge:

  • It is the first construction project to be showed in Google Earth.
  • The tunnel through Yerba Buena Island is the largest bore tunnel in the world: 76-feet wide x 58-feet high.
  • Depth of deepest pier on existing East Span—the deepest pier of its time!: 242 feet—70 feet water and 170 feet mud.
  • Amount of wire: 18,500 tons
  • Amount of paint: 200,000 gallons
  • Daily average number of vehicles that use the Bay Bridge: 280,000
Bay Bridge in Google Earth
Bay Bridge in Google Earth

Bay area traffic visualization

Ever wondered how traffic in the bay area evolves during the course of a day? Here is a video that captures traffic in a part of the bay area on Friday, August 14th. The video starts sometime before the midnight of August 13th, and ends shortly after the midnight of August 14th.

Credits:

The video above is not the most interesting. But now that I have all the code in place, I’m looking forward to capturing the traffic during some more interesting events, and covering some more area.

VEE 2010 Call for Papers

I am on the program committee for the 2010 International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments (VEE ’10). What is this conference on? From the website:

Virtualization, broadly speaking, is a recognition of the adage that any problem in computer science can be solved through the introduction of an additional layer of indirection.  The technique is applied to modern systems at many interfaces, from hardware (Xen, VMware), to OS system calls (VServers, Jails), to high-level language run times (Java, Python).  While these approaches differ dramatically in implementation, they provide similar benefits and often must tackle related challenges.

The 2010 ACM SIGPLAN/SIGOPS International Conference on Virtual Execution Environments brings together researchers across the many applications of virtualization in today’s systems.  We invite original papers on topics relating to virtualization — especially those that will have broad appeal across these approaches. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following areas:

  • Design and implementation of the virtualization layer,
  • The use of virtualization to provide novel functionality, such as high availability, enhanced security and dependability,
  • Challenges in applying virtualization in new environments, such as unusual architectures, real-time constraints, and very large scales,
  • Novel virtualization techniques to support cloud computing,
  • Development and debugging for virtual environments, such as record/replay debugging and omniscience,
  • I/O concerns specific to virtualization,
  • Experience reports from deployments of virtualized environments,

In short, the conference is broadly interested in lessons from virtualization that will apply to a wide range of researchers as well as the novel use of virtualization techniques to solve practical problems.

Here are the important dates:

Submission   : November 9, 2009
Notification : February 5, 2010
Camera Ready : March 4, 2010

Detailed submission guidelines and instructions are available on the conference website (http://vee2010.cs.princeton.edu/).

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Google (Contacts, Mail, Talk) confusion

Image representing Google Talk as depicted in ...
Image via CrunchBase

When Gmail first introduced the ability to import Contacts, I prompty exported my addressbook from KAddressbook. And then I mostly forgot about it, until recently. In the meantime, Google happily kept adding “suggested” contacts to my addressbook.

I decided to revisit my Google Contacts after reading some blog posts about new functionality. Sure enough, Contacts now even has its own URL (google.com/contacts). I figured this was a good time to clean out the contact and start from scratch with a clean list not polluted by the automatic suggested contacts. So I went ahead and deleted all the contacts and re-imported them from my desktop address book.

Surprisingly, there are weird interactions between my Google Contacts, and my Google Talk buddy list. A lot of people on my buddy list silently disappeared, without any kind of message or confirmation from either GMail, Talk or Contacts. And since then, my attempts to add back all the deleted buddies has failed miserably. Every time I add someone to my list, they show up just fine, but if I log out and log back in, they are usually not there.

What is even worse, this behavior is non-determinstic. Some additions persist across multiple sessions, while others are more ephemeral. I still don’t know exactly what the interaction between these three properties is, but it is very confusing. Google should clarify this more — what exactly is the impact of modifying my Contacts on things like Google Talk etc?

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