Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Metadata according to Judge Shira Sheindlin

In her recent decision, Judge Shira Sheindlin did one more service for eDiscovery - she outlined the standard metadata fields to be produced. That was a joy - these fields went straight into FreeEed.

Now it has standard fields from this list, and all the non-standard, or application-defined fields, following the standard ones.

I had a spare hour (not really, I should have been working on the book), but okay, and I added these fields. It never stops surprising me how fast you can add features if only you use the right tools. Look up the code :), it is committed. Now I only need to fill the fields out, but that too should be a breeze.

The first Houston Hadoop Meetup

It was definitely a success, all due to the wonderful and colorful people who came.

Nick Popov described how using a super-size database like HBase could have helped his previous company, a mortgage conglomerate, that needed to process thousands of events per second - not foreclosures:) as one of those present suggested, but all sorts of event.

Edward Wiener wanted to know what Hadoop and BigData is all about.

Helen Jiang sees definite opportunities for BigData at her current company, Structure Group, and is looking for ways to deepen her knowledge and also to introduce those ideas to the management.

Hal Martin came all the way from Clear Lake, and found that Montrose Library is a good compromise location for everybody. He is an experienced software contractor, and wants to expand his horizons.

Ron Chichester's appearance was a pleasant and welcome surprise: Ron is a lawyer, a legal expert, a forensics expert, an open source expert, and a software expert. Oof! Ron's opinions on politics and education (he also teaches law at the UH) were so fascinating that the group kept asking him and listening when we were forced out of the meeting room by the next group - for another half hour.

Pat Kerr is a pleasant and overall good fellow, and he will go anywhere where his friends' interests are.

The remaining members of the group - we missed you and hope to see you next time.

Oh, and what was the meeting about? We discussed what BigData is - each guest giving his or her example, how Hadoop and his friends can help, and were entertained by some anecdotal evidence about the BigData explosion.

Art: Waltner Charles Albert - The Pickwick Club

Cancer center builds Texas-sized cloud

As researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center work at "making cancer history," they're doing so with the help of compute power and storage capacity from a private cloud.

But this is no ordinary cloud.

After all, when you're researching something as complex as the human genome you tend to think big, and MD Anderson's cloud reflects that type of ambition and scale. We're talking 8,000 processors and a half-dozen shared "large memory machines" with hundreds of terabytes of data storage attached, says Lynn Vogel, vice president and CIO of MD Anderson, in Houston.

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