Thursday, December 26, 2013

Hadoop cartoon - Hadoop books

It used to be that Hadoop books (good or bad) were far and few in between. Now, however, it's different. In the words of a wise man, "And furthermore, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh." There are many Hadoop books (good and bad), and anyone reviewing them will be quite busy.

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Hadoop at Dell World 2013

One bright morning I found myself in Austin, at the Dell World 2013.

Austin is a great and fun place.

But at the conference they all talk about Hadoop! I met so many new Hadoop friends. And what awesome servers!






Monday, December 9, 2013

A little boy who loved computers

Once there was a little boy who loved computers. He loved them all: electronic calculators, his grandpa's totaling cashier machine, and of course the PC. Once he got into a plant that made computers and saw the assembly line. How he wanted to play with them all! But he realized that it did not make sense. Was he going to walk from one to the other, and do the same thing on each one?

And then the boy grew up, became a software developer, and he found Hadoop. Now he had what he wanted! Clusters of computer, all his! He could start the clusters and shut them down at will.

But Hadoop was a hairy animal, hard to control, and maintaining it was a real skill. So the boy decided to write a book, "Big Book on Running Hadoop."

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Rice tech forum report, presenting SHMsoft, FreeEed and Hadoop Illuminated


Reporting live!

Introduction by the Rice business school president.







Stafford high school students in the back. One needs to change to the audience.







The rests of the audience: investors, entrepreneurs and company representatives.

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

VC speed dating, Rice Alliance conference, reporting live :)

The famous entry, leading from the Shepherd School of Music to the McNair building where speed dating with venture capitalists is taking place.


All ready, in anticipation.









And now, dating is in progress :)










But what is better than this fountain?

Sunday, December 1, 2013

Hadoop in healthcare, illuminated

What are the Big Data / Hadoop use cases in healthcare? To name just a few

  • Bringing all patient data from different sylos together into one cloud
  • Genome processing and DNA sequencing
  • Healthcare quality and cost: integrate patient data, clinical data and financial records - to find patterns leading to better, more proactive healthcare
  • Clinical product recommendation using using Big Data graphs.
Here is our artist's view of it.

Sunday, November 24, 2013

The battle for Hadoop's attention, illuminated

Everybody vies for Hadoop attention, and everyone wants to invite Hadoop to take a rest on its cloud. You would think that Google, being the inventor of it, would have the final say!? - But that is not so, Hadoop is a community project, and a democracy (rule of the people), meritocracy (rule of the committers), or croudsourcing (rule of I-don't-know-who) decides it. Here is our artist's view of this.

Monday, November 11, 2013

Houston Hadoop Meetup - Accumulo by Ravi Mutyala

Here is the Meetup link.

Ravi, as it turned out, is a contributor to Accumulo. He is delivering his lecture to eager Houston Hadoopers.

Tuesday, November 5, 2013

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Building FreeEed in online IDE

Just can't resist telling the world how I am building eDiscovery project, FreeEed, in an online compiler (IDE). See the picture. Now more people can work on it together, from all parts of the world.

And, by the way, doing this and posting it from a new Chromebook.

Wednesday, October 9, 2013

How to configure metadata collection with FreeEed

Sometimes you may be lacking some of the metadata fields, or you may want them called a different name, or you may want a different alias. Here is how to do it.

Say, for example, that you cannot find the "Creation Date" for regular documents (this has been added to the default, but we here we use it only as an example).

Live reporting from the HTC IC&S show


Left to right: Alexander Burnett, Pat Kerr and Serge Findling.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Getting ready for IC&S show tomorrow

Last year, we were a winner of the Goradia startup competition, hosted by HTC, and this time we will be an exhibitor.

See you there tomorrow, more pics to follow...

Sunday, September 29, 2013

SHMsoft, Inc. Adds Review Capabilities to its Open Source eDiscovery Software FreeEed

September 25, 2013, Houston – SHMsoft, a leader in open source software for eDiscovery, is pleased to announce the latest additions to its FreeEed family of eDiscovery applications. The software is capable of indexing terabytes of documents for subsequent legal review, at speeds of over 100 GB/hour, and at costs of under $1/GB, on Amazon EC2 cloud, on a local workstation or on a cluster made out of spare capacity of the office PCs. Thus, one can safely claim that ”My data never leaves my office.” The newest capabilities include OCR, internationalization and browser-based first-look review. Simplified documentation is now part of the source code on GitHub.

Monday, September 23, 2013

Houston Hadoop Meetup: Hybrid Big Data Solutions, presented by Victor Cintron

Even though both organizers were out of town, but this was not not an issue: Victor Cintron (of Wisemen Consulting) took control, provided pizza and projector and started at 6 PM. That was good, because the hadoopers had to adjourn at 7 sharp since the other group was waiting.

Everyone in attendance (about 15) was very nice and introduced themselves to everyone else. Next month presenters (from PROS) were in attendance also. We will verify the START (our venue) schedule, and make sure that at least on organizer or his appointee is there.

Here is a link to Victor's slides: Hybrid Big Data Solutions.

Thursday, August 8, 2013

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Celebrating the relentless pace of Hadoop innovation

Three weeks ago, presenting to my colleagues at Deloitte a short exposé on Shark and Spark from Berkeley, I mentioned that new things come up in Hadoopland all the time. For example, if within the next month something really new and unexpected happens again, I promised them to buy an "I told you so" cake.

It did happen, with the Cloudera's introduction of secure Hadoop with Sentry. So tomorrow we will all eat cake.

Hadoop coloring book for kids

While daddy or mommy is hard at work on Hadoop, or is perhaps training at the Hadoop Illuminated training course, what are the kids to do?

Now there is an option. When the tired developer comes home in the evening, he can tell his kid what he was doing at work - in pictures.

The Hadoop Coloring Book for Kids was created by our talented illustrator and can be downloaded right here.

Your suggestions are welcome.

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

Houston Hadoop Meetup celebrates its 200th member

Narayanan just joined Houston Hadoop Meetup Group!

You now have 200 members in your Meetup Group!      

Too funny to miss

 “Let’s face it - English is a crazy language. There is no egg in eggplant nor ham in hamburger; neither apple nor pine in pineapple. English muffins weren’t invented in England or French fries in France. Sweetmeats are candies while sweetbreads, which aren’t sweet, are meat. We take English for granted. But if we explore its paradoxes, we find that quicksand can work slowly, boxing rings are square and a guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

First Houston Hadoop hackathon and more...

Let's take a quick look at what happened at SHMsoft lately:


  1. Hadoop Hackathon in Houston this Wednesday, see here http://www.meetup.com/Houston-Hadoop-Meetup-Group/events/102954462/ for details - simulating a smart power utility;
  2. Starting a number of initiative in using SHMcloud for back-end eDiscovery processing, stay tuned;
  3. Putting the Hadoop Namenode on a Kove memory device - project started with our partner Kove, hosted in Chicago.

Thank you and best regards from the SHMsoft team.
04.29.2013


Sunday, April 14, 2013

SHMsoft News - First full Hadoop training for developers delivered


Let's take a quick look at what happened at SHMsoft lately:

  1. Congratulation to Sujee Maniyam, for successfully delivering “Hadoop training for developers,” a four-day hands on course, at an important company in San Francisco.
  2. SHMcloud eDiscovery:  we are now offering processing service, with the export into a review tool of your choice, such as Concordance.
  3. Dell has given us a cluster of excellent servers for a 90-day evaluation - for our development of eDiscovery. The machines are hosted in Champaign, IL. Let the fun begin! - Thank you, Dell!


Thank you and best regards from the SHMsoft team.
04.15.2013

Monday, April 8, 2013

Houston Hadoop Meetup - How do I get the data in?

Steve Byrnes gave an excellent presentation on "Hadoop for DevOps, including OpenTSDB, Flume, and Scribe."

He also uploaded the slides and the materials using some fancy tools. In his own words,

"Hi, I've finally gotten the presentation pushed out to Github. See http://erewhon.github.io/hadoop-devops-prezi/ for the HTML w/presentation notes. The source for the presentation and the examples are at https://github.com/erewhon/hadoop-devops-prezi  (Some of those examples might have a hard coded user or host in them, so probably shouldn't be run as is.)

Thanks, Steve!

March 2013

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Houston Hadoop Meetup - 'Hadoop for Execs'

It was a bit of a try-out, for everything: Hadoop illuminated LLC as a host, new office on One Riverway for meetups and training, and 'Hadoop for Execs' presentation.

And it all went great: the audience, the accommodations, the materials (mostly composed by Sujee Maniyam), and surely the questions and answers.



It is clear: Houston is thirsting for Hadoop knowledge, and we are going to help: we will host monthly 'Hadoop for Execs' seminars. We only need to decide on the format: should we make it a one-hour whirlwind tour, two-hours overview, or a half-day actual training. Tough question, but nice to have.

Cooperating with Dell



I like flying for lunch to Austin, and here I had just such an opportunity, to meet with the great people at Dell. We have found whole five ways in which we can cooperate! Awesome, nice.

Tuesday, February 26, 2013

Announcing open access Hadoop book, "Hadoop illuminated"

Friends, we would like to tell you about an open source book on Hadoop, called "Hadoop illuminated." You can find it here.

We want to make learning about Hadoop and its ecosystem fun and engaging. The book is accompanied by its project on GitHub. The book is work in progress, we consider it in alpha stage. We will be updating and adding to it. Your feedback is welcome.

Please enjoy.

Sincerely yours,
Mark Kerzner and Sujee Maniyam
Hadoopilluminated.com


Monday, February 11, 2013

Wednesday, February 6, 2013

Largest turnout for Houston Hadoop Meetup




Our turnout for this event was the record twenty-two people. David Smith did a wonderful job outlining R and Revolution Analytics. Here are some pictures from the meeting.

Caroline Collective (SHMsoft working space) where the Houston Hadoop Meetup takes place is a combination of startup and artistic communities, so in the photo you see both.

Sunday, February 3, 2013

Houston Technology Center Champs

This past Friday I was presenting at the HTC Champs meeting. Really, I wanted to present this vision, but they convinced me that it was too far out into the future, so I had to limit to the practical today.

However, I was extremely impressed with what I heard there. The scope and the shear size of the Houston's startup atmosphere was hitherto unbeknownst to me.


Look at BioHoston. Jacqueline Northcut told about the effort to bring multiple development biotech companies to Houston, the services of 1,500 advisers provided to them, and in the case of cancer research-related companies, these services are provided for free! The SURGE accelerator (bringing to Houston tech startups that deal with energy, and paying them for it!), the TiE Houston - these were all awesome. So was the feedback. Thank you all, guys!


Tuesday, January 29, 2013

SHMsoft News - SHMsoft and Dell

Let's take a quick look at what happened at SHMsoft lately:

  1. Last week at SHMsoft was all about Dell. We presented in in Dell’s headquarters in Round Rock, TX, and we were profiled on the website of Houston Technology Center.
  2. Here are the impressions of our CEO of his trip. 
  3. We are adding processing of Lotus Notes to the SHMcloud platform.


Thank you and best regards from the SHMsoft team. 01.27.2013

Monday, January 28, 2013

My impressions from Dell's Tech Innovator Day

Some friends emailed me their support just when I saw starting out on a three-hour drive, and I was grateful to them. The night trip was mystical but flawlessly easy. I especially liked hearing the GPS telling me "And now go straight for the next seventy-five miles." That's Texas for you, and there are two such stretches on the way from Houston to Austin (and back).

What they showed us at Dell was exciting and inspiring. This included their world-wide support center and their social media control center, but they also made us sign an NDA :)

Then came the time for the presentations, and I was awed by the nine other startups that show-cased their achievements and plans. The team at Dell that put the event together told us that it all started a year ago with the top management at Dell, and was coming to fruition on that day, and the team was amazingly instrumental in doing that.

Last but not least my gratitude goes to the senior Dell management, who sat through the two hours of presentations, at the end of their busy day, and asked questions that not only helped the management clarify the picture about the startup, but also helped the presenter herself better define her goals and the ways to get there.

Again, thank you very much everyone.

Sunday, January 20, 2013

SHMsoft at Dell’s Tech Innovators Day

Let's take a quick look at what happened at SHMsoft lately:

1. SHMsoft is one of the ten companies selected for Dell’s Tech Innovators Day. In Dell’s own words, “As part of the Dell Innovators Credit Fund we have created Tech Innovators Day specifically to give companies like yours the chance to present your idea to decision makers. Over the past years, companies like KACE, Boomi and SecureWorks were acquired by Dell to further complement the offerings Dell brings to its customers. Could the next company be yours?” SHMsoft’s CEO is excited to present his vision.

This is an important Dell initiative, which is already greeted by enthusiastic response. The event is limited to the invited participants, but there will be press coverage from Austin, Silicon Valley, and Huffington Post. To track the conversation, please use #DellEIR.

2. We are doing a pilot eDiscovery project for an ongoing litigation. This gives us a chance to help a client in an important case while further improving our search and culling capabilities;

3. SHMsoft is bringing the power of invention and Big Data tools to pilot projects for select enterprise clients.

Thank you and best regards from the SHMsoft team. 01.20.2013