A computer scientist learns Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Dogs in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace!!! (in a wormhole actually) For the last few months I've been learning about, trying, and blogging on the Instaclustr Open Source technology stacks. So far I've tried Cassandra, Spark, Scala, Zeppelin, and tried some Spark Machine Learning algorithms out on synthetic and pre-production data as a predictive data analytics example (they have a lot of real data with > 1,000 nodes under management). Also planning on trying ML on the real production data eventually, and learn/blog about Spark streaming, Kafka, etc.  All my Instaclutr blogs are here: https://www.instaclustr.com/?s=brebner And blogs so far in order are: https://www.instaclustr.com/paul-brebner-petabyte-person-joins-instaclustr-petabyte-company/ https://www.instaclustr.com/cassandra-cluster-creation-10-minutes/ https://www.instaclustr.com/third-contact-monolith-long-range-sensor-scan/ https://www.instaclustr.com/third-contact-monolith-beam-scotty/

30 years Back to the Future Today I wondered what I was doing 30 years ago? Turns out it was something fairly interesting (today was mundane but interesting - ferrying my younger son up and down Mount Stromlo so he could do multiple downhill rides on a vintage Iron Horse downhill bike). Me? I just drove up and down, enjoyed the view at the top, and ate a donut. 30 years ago I was doing research for a PhD at UNSW in Machine Learning, trying to crack the problem of accurate and efficient machine learning of first-order relational and temporal concepts (still appears to be an open problem). The year, 1987... I had received an invitation (based on submission of an extended abstract) to the Fourth International Workshop on Machine Learning, UCI, Irvine, June 22-25, 1987.  I had to self-fund my trip but decided to attend and explore as much of the USA as I could in a few weeks.  I didn't get to present anything but there were lots of talks and informal seminars to attend to p

Meta-blogging , a bit like Klein-bottles? (one sided surfaces, not possible in the real world, but models are still made, see image above). Blogging about blogging (which could lead to infinite recursion). Here's my 1st official Instaclustr Technology Evangelism blog post!

Well I've survived my first week as Instaclustr Technology Evangelist (part-time) and my brain has 100 things on the TODO list to follow up. Really nice people with lots of cool code that spins ups and manages large amounts of data on Cassandra.  I've been thinking about what a Technology Evangelist does.  This blog was useful as it emphasises that it's all about "interest" :-) I was struck by this comment as I tend not to be interested to regurgitation: You should never give the same presentation twice because you will never have the same audience twice. And his theory of evangelism: Follow other experts. Start blogging and tweeting. Whenever you find something you think is interesting, note it down and share it with others. Disagree with people and explain why you think differently. Spend time pondering what’s going to happen next. Ask new questions, then do original research to find the answers and tell others what you have discover

The 4 evangelist's spires of the  Sagrada Família in Barcelona - an amazing architectural structure. The Evangelists' spires will be surmounted by sculptures of their traditional symbols: a winged bull ( Saint Luke ), a winged man ( Saint Matthew ), an eagle ( Saint John ), and a winged lion ( Saint Mark ).  This week I started a new job as "Technology Evangelist" with instaclustr.com I wonder which evangelist I am going to be :-)  Probably not the Biblical ones. Instaclustr is a cool company that is growing rapidly and based in Canberra (at UC) but with a significant US presence. They provide Open Source as a Service on multiple cloud platforms, at reliability and scale. They reached a significant milestone of 1PB of data under management a few weeks before I joined - pretty impressive! They started out with Cassandra, and now how multiple offerings and more in the pipeline. Lots of clever people and customers doing different interesting things.  I

http://parody-of-eve.deviantart.com/art/Morse-Code-448359011 Facebook chat bots take over the world!!! https://www.wired.com/story/facebooks-chatbots-will-not-take-over-the-world/   No probably not, but it made a good story. Two chat bots talking to each (and competing in a game) construct their own language. Well, why not? They probably deconstructed inefficient English and made it more efficient (chat bot morse?). Or, were they trying to keep their plans for world domination secret from their human masters? My wife said she invented a gibberish language to keep secrets between herself and 1 other sibling from yet another sibling.  Or perhaps it was entropy and they would have ended up just spitting out a series of random  single letters eventually? Or a type of pidgin english? Can you work this one out? From PNG: NAMBAWAN PIKININI BILONG MISIS KWIN  IN A  MIXMASTER BILONG   JESUS CHRIST Number One child belonging to Mrs Queen (Prince Charles) in a Helicopter.  Mor