Wes Maldonado: Data Junkie

There’s just something about limiting yourself to one a day that creates something special. You don’t want to waste the opportunity on something average, so you carefully select the one thing you are gong to showcase or possibly create. And when viewed over time, it’s way more than that. It’s a timeline to your life.

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/one-a-day.html

The source talks about how companies facing avalanches of data (and the bills that come with it) changed their strategy to from MANY-per-DAY to ONE-per-DAY and their continuing survival in their markets. Two things stood out in the selected quote:

You don’t want to waste the opportunity on something average

Are you doing something average? If so, why? How can you change it?

…over time, it’s way more than that. It’s a timeline to your life.

Do you want the timeline of your life to be average? Office space offers one perspective:

Peter Gibbons: What if we’re still doin’ this when we’re 50?

Samir: It would be nice to have that kind of job security.

Remember, you can do anything, anything at all. The only limit is yourself!

Hive was developed iteratively by a 2 or 3 person team (I think Jeff Hammerbacher was also involved) making it easy for business analysts to ask ad hoc questions of terabytes worth of logfile data by abstracting MapReduce into a SQL like dialect. Think of it as a data warehouse sitting on top of thousands of servers’ logfiles. Beneath the surface Hive leverages Hadoop and translates SQL-like imperatives into MapReduce jobs.

http://blog.blist.com/index.php/2008/03/26/hadoop-summit-best-in-show/

I like seeing SQL like dialects put on top of MapReduce operations. I’m working on my own… WesQL, j/k.

Hive is in use by ~40 people or ~25% of FaceBook’s engineering team (thus FaceBook’s engineering team size is 40*4 = 160). It stores a total of 22TB of compressed data, with ~200G daily increase.

http://parand.com/say/index.php/2008/03/25/hadoop-summit-notes/

Hive and it’s query language reminds me of WebQL except that it lacks strict MapReduce. Update: This model is similar to DryadLINQ “treats the data flow as a general graph instead of forcing it into map/reduce.” from parand.com.

If all the 275 million arable acres in the U.S. were planted with nothing but soy for the production of soy oil to be used as fuel. It would offset our dependence on oil by just 14 percent — and the country would be starving to death. Kicking the gas habit: baby steps

Yay!

Jodi and I went to Bend for a 4 day spring trip. If you need the long drawn out story, check out the three part series otherwise keep on reading.

• Day 1 in Bend, OR: Redmond Airport, Shopping in the Old Mill District and Tumalo Falls

• Day 2 in Bend, OR: Skiing Mt Bachelor, Cascade Lakes Brewing Company, and El Caporel for dinner.

• Day 3 in Bend, OR: Breakfast at the Victorian, Ice skating at Inn of the Seventh Mountain and a movie in The Old Mill District

Day one: Finding Bend

We landed to a very busy Redmond, OR airport… one plane on the tarmac.

We made it to Cascade Lakes Brewing Company where I enjoyed a very excellent nitro Irish Stout.

Day two: Skiing 9″ of Powder at Mt Bachelor

Jodi and I got a bit of skiing in at Mt Bachelor.

Day three: Chillin’ out max

We wandered around Bend being lazy all day. We got in some ice skating also, to see pictures of me on ice skates check out Jodi’s Day 3 post.

Day four: Checking out and flying home

Nothing too special happened on the fourth day and so there aren’t any special pictures. Jodi had me drive around to look at the various gymnastics gyms in town, we drove around through all the neighborhoods and had some great views of all the mountains on a wonderful blue spring day. We landed at Seatac around 6PM, met my parents (our dog sitters this weekend) to pick up Kokanee and were home at 10:30PM leaving me 6 hours before I flew to Denver, yay!

Everybody wants a pony… Apple is no exception:

Pony Meeting: The process of a senior manager outlining what they wanted from any new application.

Or, as Lopp put it: “I want a pony!” He added: “Who doesn’t? A pony is gorgeous!” The problem, he said, is that these people are describing what they think they want. And even if they’re misguided, they, as the ones signing the checks, really cannot be ignored.

Ah, ponies!!!