suncec2008

A week ago i left the desert of Nevada ... in the last night the winter came to northern germany ...

We had an Hadoop presentation in the Emerging Technology track at CEC 2008. While it gave an good insight of the technology to the uninitiated, it left out one important thing: How to use to sell it. I talked to some colleagues, who were a little bit perplexed about the use cases in the real world.

Of course it´s a technology that found it´s birth in the web, but when you really think about it, more use cases will come into your mind. It´s about processing data with simple means.

The customers have already the resources to build a hadoop cluster. Often they have dozens of servers, not all are equally loaded. So: Startup the Fair Share Scheduler of Solaris, give the hadoop 10% of your system and 90% for it´s real application. You have already the storage for the hadoop file system. An Solaris or Linux takes 5-10 GB at max, but you have 73 to 146 GB disks in your systems. That´s perfect ...

What are matching loads for such an construct? Everybody has such loads. For example scanning for logfiles for certain patterns (think about getting situational awareness about the data from all your intrusion detection sensors around your network). Or think about optical character recognition of scanned quotes, bills and receipts. You have to do an an mass convert job (old format of your scanned paper to a new one). Let´s use already existent resources for it at first. Processing all this process data from your automated test tools. Well ... implement this process in Java or Pig and let it run on you hadoop cluster. Analysing database informations by a sequence of hadoop jobs to find patterns. And thats just the ideas i´ve got in a few mintes. And it´s really easy to write such jobs with Pig

There are really reasons to do such stuff in a distributed manner. Instead of hours you could process a multiple TB logfile within minutes by distributing the job to many nodes. And, dear colleagues, when the admins and developers of a company get more and more fluent to work with such an environment like hadoop, they doesn´t want to use the residual computing time of existing servers, they want new servers

It´s called Valley of Fire for a reason ...

The CEC2008 is over since yesterday, but my flight schedule gave me the opportunity to stay an additional night in Las Vegas. I used this additional afternoon to visit the Valley of Fire. Just one word: Impressive ... no .. that´s the wrong word ... fsking awesome .... i will upload some photos when i´m home in Germany.

But now i´m really glad, that my flights will bring me back to Hamburg in not much more than 5 hours from now. I wan´t my own bed, i want my own apartment, i want an german breakfast (abaked croissant with ham is not really style). I want to ask my doc about my sinuses. I want my own timezone.

Hmm ... i used to write more about the CEC the last time. But this CEC is quite different to last one ... i would call it Customer Engineering Training ... it´s not really an conference. I must admit, that the last CEC in 2007 was a more effective event for me. But others milage may vary ...

I´m not in the CEC presentations at the moment. Not because of laziness or gambling ... a sinusitis striked me. That´s so typical ... i travelling around the world to the city of sin, to an huge event .... and i´m in my bed to get rid of an illness. I could have this at home as well ....

Disclaimer: I wrote the text yesterday while waiting for my flight to Las Vegas

I´m sitting at the airport of Chicago. It was a pleasurable flight so far, even when it started a little bit in a hurry. My brother was so kind to drive me to the airport. He was even kinder, as he saw that the mobile was in the ashtray of my car. Okay, leaving the "Non-Schengen" area, leaving the security area. Getting my mobile. But at the end i was able to enter my plane without much hassle.

Well, not entirely without hassle. I was joking with friends, that there must be a marker like "do not place any women near of Joerg" at the airlines. Almost 170 flights, and just 5 or so sitting left or right of a women. But after the flight from Hamburg to Zuerich: Leave this marker there ... this must be the most bitchy women of the western hemisphere. Because of the measureable disturbance in the atmosphere i switched to "idle and ignore" just a few nanoseconds recognizing that this person would be my neighbour for the next hour (i was really reliefed when she asked a male flight attendant about a flight to new york in an unfriendly manner). She argued with the flight attendants about the garlic in the meal, about the fact, that one of them wasn´t able to directly within a second answer to her question, when the aircraft would arrive. It arrived early ... so no reason to insult the flight attendant.

The flight from Zuerich to Chicago was really good. Got an acceptable LCML (rice with turkey and spinach). The films in the Inflight Entertainment were excellent: The Dark Knight (had the chance to look the movie on english ... much better) and my personal favourite .... "Eternal Sunshine of a spotless mind" ... Kate Winslet and Carey were never better than in this movie ... it´s one of this underestimated pearls. Okay, Hancock is isn´t a good example ... you can look it and forget it. And i almost forgot it ... had to think quite a while about the name of this movie ...

On the other side: The US Airways flight from O´Hare to Las Vegas was less enjoyable. Over three hours flight time and no coffee or water, except you pay for it ...

But the best was the inflight entertainment on this round SuperHD monitors called windows ... there were some gaps in the clouds right above Greenland. The view was simply breathtaking. The rendering of the small islands covered with ice within the atlantic ocean was excellent

I arrived well and healthy in Las Vegas. Was a smooth flight to Vegas, no "assumed" destruction of the tarmac by the pilot at the landings like at my trip to NYC. But i will write more about it in the next few days. I drove with three colleagues to the Death Valley today. You would think that this is a terrible dry and hot place. At least i expected something like that. Miles awaz from this. But my "personal misfortune" generator was in full action today. It was just 15 degrees celsius there and it even rained there. But the Death Valley and the surrounding geological formations are just breathtaking: The dunes ... Zabriskie Point ... Badwater ... there is a sign "sea level" there. The point: It's roundabout 80 metres above you. \

Well ... it was worth every mile (it were round about 400 at the end) we drove for this. Only one issue: The mobile reception could be better in Death Valley . BTW: I shoot almost 600 photos today so expect some updates to my flickr account.

Hey people, leaving the public SunRays screenlocked is somewhat antisocial ...

There is an old saying: "Every journey begins with the first step". My first step today s the step out of bed. And somehow this one is harder than usual today. My bed is warm, the world outside is cold and it´s fscking early. Maybe they should load my bed in a container and put me in a cargo bay

Weather in Las Vegas looks good.

KLAS 070656Z 22004KT 10SM CLR 13/M07 A3031 RMK AO2 SLP260 T01281067

No clouds, 13 degrees and just 4 knots wind.