Poem : A Poets Life

I read and wrote and joked and pondered
Inevitably I found myself occasionally wandered
Those who wander are not always lost
And so I consoled my earthly Faust

Sometimes the good guys win and place first
In an uncharectristic improbable late blooming burst

Predicting God‘s plan for yourself
Is like predicting who and if there is a God
No dearth of contradictions,
Self doubting logic brought.

Thanks for reading, hope it was worth your time
I am medium sized poet, with a mediocre chime
And sometimes you yourself may feel blue
Its your own time to waste, and remember that’s true.


Before I leave or you have left
Ponder once more what this moment brought
Summarizing once more a poets life
In an age of blogs, tweets and promotional strife

I am dying of a disease called life
Friends and Family are protective still
My medication helps but will only stall the end
My stubborn body awaits my soul upwards to send

I have lived not too long nor too short it will be
Fought battles some planned some momentarily
Made friends and loved ah so well
On the whole it was rather interesting to dwell







BI Software

Here is the brand new release from Jaspersoft at a groovy price of 9000$. Somebody stop these guys!

It’s a great company to watch for buyouts as well- given their expertise in REPORTING and clientele- especially for anyone looking to im prove thier standing in both open source world and reporting software branding.

From AOL owned Arrogantion’s site http://www.crunchbase.com/company/jaspersoft

 

Total $24.5M
Series D, 8/07 1
Scale Venture Partners
SAP Ventures
Doll Capital Management
Partech International
Morgenthaler Ventures
$12M
Unattributed, 12/08 2
Adams Street Partners
Red Hat
Morgenthaler Ventures
Doll Capital Management
Partech International

 

 

The news-

Announcing JasperReports Server Professional

More Resources

Webinar: Introducing JasperReports Server Professional

Thursday October 14

In this live webinar, learn how a new solution from Jaspersoft combines the world’s favorite reporting server with powerful, mature report server functionality—for about 80% less.

  • Date: Thu, Oct 14
  • Time: 10:00 AM PDT
  • Duration: 60 minutes

The World’s Most Powerful and Affordable Reporting Server

Limited Time Introductory Offer: Starting from $9,000 (restrictions apply)

JasperReports Server is the recommended product for organizations requiring an affordable reporting solution for interactive, operational, and production-based reporting. Deployed as a standalone reporting server or integrated inside another application, JasperReports Server is a flexible, powerful, interactive reporting environment for small or large enterprises.

Powered by the world’s most popular reporting tools in JasperReports and iReport, developers and users can take advantage of more interactivity, security, and scheduling of their reports.

Key Benefits:

  • Affordable: Unlimited reports for unlimited users starting at $9,000
  • Powerful: Report scheduling and distribution to 1,000s of users on a single server
  • Flexible: Web service architecture simplifies application integration
  • Secure: Centralized repository authenticates report access
  • Interactive: Easy to interact, self-serve parameterized-based reports
  • Visual appeal: Flash-based charts and maps engage users and enhance applications
  • Open: Access to any data source including relational, XML, Hibernate, EJB, POJO, and custom

 

Speaking of videos -here is a great video on BI from good ol Tennessee-a great 27 min tutorial on BI for newbies

 

HP goes GPU, Will software people follow

A graphics processing unit on an Nvidia GeForc...
Image via Wikipedia

One more addition to the GPU stack that adds up power when combined with CPU and GPUs. For numeric computing, it may be essential to have GPU- CPU mixed software as almost all hardware people now have offered GPU-CPU products. Maybe software companies can get inspired for new kind of GPU-CPU blade server software again.

Source-

http://www.hpcwire.com/features/HP-Adds-New-HPC-Server-with-GPGPU-Option-104381494.html

But for “true” supercomputing applications, the SL390s G7 is the go-to server. Like its sibling, the SL390s comes with Xeon 5600 processors, but the option to pair the CPUs with up to three on-board NVIDIA “Fermi” 20-series GPUs puts a lot more floating point performance into this design. Customers can choose from either the M2050 or M2070 Tesla GPU modules, the only difference being the amount of graphics memory — 3 GB of GDDR5 for the M2050 versus 6 GB for the M2070. Each GPU module is served by its own PCIe Gen2 x16 channel in order to maximize bandwidth to the graphics chips. At the maximum configuration with all three Fermi GPUs and two Westmere CPUs, a single server delivers on the order of 1 teraflop of double precision performance. “So this is very much a server that has been designed for HPC,” said Turkel.

With GPUs on board, the SL390s fill out a 2U half-width tray, so up to four of these can be packed into a 4U SL6500 chassis. A CPU-only version is also available and takes up just half the space (half-width 1U), enabling twice as many Xeons to occupy the same chassis. This configuration will likely be the server of choice for the majority of HPC setups, given that GPGPU deployment is really just getting started. Pricing on the CPU-only model starts at $2,259.

And

, the ProLiant SL390s G7, provides more raw FLOPS per square inch than any server HP has delivered to date, and is the basis for the 2.4 petaflop TSUBAME 2.0 supercomputer currently being deployed at the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The SEO mess on joining blog aggregators

 

Mug shot of Paris Hilton.
Image via Wikipedia

 

If you are an analytics blogger who writes, and is aggregated on an analytical community- read on- Here’s how blog aggregation communities can help you lose 30% of all future traffic long term, while giving you a short term.

The problem is not created by Blogging Communities (like R-Bloggers, or PlanteR, or Smart Data Collective or AnalyticBridge or even BeyeBlogs )

It is created by the way Google Page Rank is structured- you see given exactly the same content on two different we pages- Google Page Rank will place the higher Page Rank results higher. This is counter intutive and quite simple to rectify- The Google Spider can just use the Time Stamp for choosing which article was published where first (Obviously on your blog, AND then later to the aggregator).

How bad is the mess? Well joining ANY blog aggregation will lead to an instant lift of upto 10-50 % of your current traffic as similar bloggers try and read about you. However you can lose the long term 30% proportion which is a benchmark of search engine created traffic for you.

So do you opt out of blog aggregation? No. It’s a SEO mess and it’s unfair to punish your blog aggregator, most of whom are running on ad-supported sponsors or their own funds on dry fumes to publish your content. Most of the fore mentioned communities are created by excellent people I interacted with heavily- and they are genuinely motivated to give readers an easy way to keep up with blogs. Especially Smart Data Collective, Analyticbridge and R-bloggers whose founders I have known personally.

You can do one thing- create manual summaries in the excerpt feature of your blog posts- it’s just below the WordPress page. And switch your RSS feed to summary rather than full. It avoids losing keyword rank to other websites, it prevents the Blog Aggregation from gaining too much influence in key word related searches, and it keeps your whole eco system happy, Best of All it helps readers of Blog Aggregators- since most of them use a summary on the front page anyways.

An additional thought on Google Page Rank- something I have sulked over but not spoken for a long long time.  It ignores the value of reader- If Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and 500 ceos from Fortune 500 companies read my blog but do not link to it- it will count daily traffic as 500. Probably it will give more weightage to Paris Hilton fans.

A suggestion-humbly- you can use IP Address lookup of visitors to see if traffic is coming from corporate sources or retail sources -Clicky from GetClicky does this. Use it as feedback in Google Analytics as well as Google Trends.

And maybe PageRank needs to add quantity and quality of visitors as additional variables . Do a A/B test guys some Chi Square juice- its not quite Mad Men Adverting but its still good fun.

 

PageRank
Image via Wikipedia

 

and the world is one big community as per xkcd


Dataists shake up R community with a rocking contest

Flipboard
Image by Johan Larsson via Flickr

Newly created Dataists are creating waves on Hacker News and beyond with their innovative contest- A Recommendation Engine for R Packages.

Not only is the contest useful, it is likely to teach R Users some data hacking skills, as well as the basics of creating a GitHub Project.

Read more here-http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/using-data-tools-to-find-data-tools-the-yo-dawg-of-data-hacking/

For that reason, we’ve settled on the more manageable question, “which packages are most often installed by normal R users?”

This last question could potentially be answered in a variety of ways. Our current approach uses a convenience sample of installation data that we’ve collected from volunteers in the R community, who kindly agreed to send us a list of the packages they have on their systems. We’ve anonymized this data and compiled a set of metadata-based predictors that allow us to predict the installation probabilities quite well. We’re releasing all of our current work, including the data we have and all of the code we’ve used so far for our exploratory analyses. The contest itself will go live on Kaggle on Sunday and will end four months from Sunday on February 10, 2011. The rules, prizes and official data sets are all described below.

Rules and Prizes

To win the contest, you need to predict the probability that a user U has a package P installed on their system for every pair, (U, P). We’ll assess your performance using ROC methods, which will be evaluated against a held out test data set. The winning team will receive 3 UseR! books of their choosing. In order to win the contest, you’ll have to provide your analysis code to us by creating a fork of our GitHub repository. You’ll also be required to provide a written description of your approach. We’re asking for so much openness from the winning team because we want this contest to serve as a stepping stone for the R community. We’re also hoping that enterprising data hackers will extend the lessons learned through this contest to other programming languages.

Extract from-http://www.dataists.com/2010/10/using-data-tools-to-find-data-tools-the-yo-dawg-of-data-hacking/

Read the full article there

Revolution R for Linux

Screenshot of the Redhat Enterprise Linux Desktop
Image via Wikipedia

New software just released from the guys in California (@RevolutionR) so if you are a Linux user and have academic credentials you can download it for free  (@Cmastication doesnt), you can test it to see what the big fuss is all about (also see http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/benchmarks.php) –

Revolution Analytics has just released Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, a significant step forward in enterprise data analytics. Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 is built on R 2.11.1, the latest release of the open-source environment for data analysis and graphics. Also available is the initial release of our deployment server solution, RevoDeployR 1.0, designed to help you deliver R analytics via the Web. And coming soon to Linux: RevoScaleR, a new package for fast and efficient multi-core processing of large data sets.

As a registered user of the Academic version of Revolution R Enterprise for Linux, you can take advantage of these improvements by downloading and installing Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 today. You can install Revolution R Enterprise 4.0.1 side-by-side with your existing Revolution R Enterprise installations; there is no need to uninstall previous versions.

Download Information

The following information is all you will need to download and install the Academic Edition.

Supported Platforms:

Revolution R Enterprise Academic edition and RevoDeployR are supported on Red Hat® Enterprise Linux® 5.4 or greater (64-bit processors).

Approximately 300MB free disk space is required for a full install of Revolution R Enterprise. We recommend at least 1GB of RAM to use Revolution R Enterprise.

For the full list of system requirements for RevoDeployR, refer to the RevoDeployR™ Installation Guide for Red Hat® Enterprise Linux®.

Download Links:

You will first need to download the Revolution R Enterprise installer.

Installation Instructions for Revolution R Enterprise Academic Edition

After downloading the installer, do the following to install the software:

  • Log in as root if you have not already.
  • Change directory to the directory containing the downloaded installer.
  • Unpack the installer using the following command:
    tar -xzf Revo-Ent-4.0.1-RHEL5-desktop.tar.gz
  • Change directory to the RevolutionR_4.0.1 directory created.
  • Run the installer by typing ./install.py and following the on-screen prompts.

Getting Started with the Revolution R Enterprise

After you have installed the software, launch Revolution R Enterprise by typing Revo64 at the shell prompt.

Documentation is available in the form of PDF documents installed as part of the Revolution R Enterprise distribution. Type Revo.home(“doc”) at the R prompt to locate the directory containing the manuals Getting Started with Revolution R (RevoMan.pdf) and the ParallelR User’s Guide(parRman.pdf).

Installation Instructions for RevoDeployR (and RServe)

After downloading the RevoDeployR distribution, use the following steps to install the software:

Note: These instructions are for an automatic install.  For more details or for manual install instructions, refer to RevoDeployR_Installation_Instructions_for_RedHat.pdf.

  1. Log into the operating system as root.
    su –
  2. Change directory to the directory containing the downloaded distribution for RevoDeployR and RServe.
  3. Unzip the contents of the RevoDeployR tar file. At prompt, type:
    tar -xzf deployrRedHat.tar.gz
  4. Change directories. At the prompt, type:
    cd installFiles
  5. Launch the automated installation script and follow the on-screen prompts. At the prompt, type:
    ./installRedHat.sh
    Note: Red Hat installs MySQL without a password.

Getting Started with RevoDeployR

After installing RevoDeployR, you will be directed to the RevoDeployR landing page. The landing page has links to documentation, the RevoDeployR management console, the API Explorer development tool, and sample code.

Support

For help installing this Academic Edition, please email support@revolutionanalytics.com

Also interestingly some benchmarks on Revolution R vs R.

http://www.revolutionanalytics.com/why-revolution-r/benchmarks.php

R-25 Benchmarks

The simple R-benchmark-25.R test script is a quick-running survey of general R performance. The Community-developed test consists of three sets of small benchmarks, referred to in the script as Matrix Calculation, Matrix Functions, and Program Control.

R-25 Matrix Calculation R-25 Matrix Functions R-Matrix Program Control
R-25 Benchmarks Base R 2.9.2 Revolution R (1-core) Revolution R (4-core) Speedup (4 core)
Matrix Calculation 34 sec 6.6 sec 4.4 sec 7.7x
Matrix Functions 20 sec 4.4 sec 2.1 sec 9.5x
Program Control 4.7 sec 4 sec 4.2 sec Not Appreciable

Speedup = Slower time / Faster Time – 1   Test descriptions available at http://r.research.att.com/benchmarks

Additional Benchmarks

Revolution Analytics has created its own tests to simulate common real-world computations.  Their descriptions are explained below.

Matrix Multiply Cholesky Factorization
Singular Value Decomposition Principal Component Analysis Linear Discriminant Analysis
Linear Algebra Computation Base R 2.9.2 Revolution R (1-core) Revolution R (4-core) Speedup (4 core)
Matrix Multiply 243 sec 22 sec 5.9 sec 41x
Cholesky Factorization 23 sec 3.8 sec 1.1 sec 21x
Singular Value Decomposition 62 sec 13 sec 4.9 sec 12.6x
Principal Components Analysis 237 sec 41 sec 15.6 sec 15.2x
Linear Discriminant Analysis 142 sec 49 sec 32.0 sec 4.4x

Speedup = Slower time / Faster Time – 1

Matrix Multiply

This routine creates a random uniform 10,000 x 5,000 matrix A, and then times the computation of the matrix product transpose(A) * A.

set.seed (1)
m <- 10000
n <-  5000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (B <- crossprod(A))

The system will respond with a message in this format:

User   system elapsed
37.22    0.40   9.68

The “elapsed” times indicate total wall-clock time to run the timed code.

The table above reflects the elapsed time for this and the other benchmark tests. The test system was an INTEL® Xeon® 8-core CPU (model X55600) at 2.5 GHz with 18 GB system RAM running Windows Server 2008 operating system. For the Revolution R benchmarks, the computations were limited to 1 core and 4 cores by calling setMKLthreads(1) and setMKLthreads(4) respectively. Note that Revolution R performs very well even in single-threaded tests: this is a result of the optimized algorithms in the Intel MKL library linked to Revolution R. The slight greater than linear speedup may be due to the greater total cache available to all CPU cores, or simply better OS CPU scheduling–no attempt was made to pin execution threads to physical cores. Consult Revolution R’s documentation to learn how to run benchmarks that use less cores than your hardware offers.

Cholesky Factorization

The Cholesky matrix factorization may be used to compute the solution of linear systems of equations with a symmetric positive definite coefficient matrix, to compute correlated sets of pseudo-random numbers, and other tasks. We re-use the matrix B computed in the example above:

system.time (C <- chol(B))

Singular Value Decomposition with Applications

The Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) is a numerically-stable and very useful matrix decompisition. The SVD is often used to compute Principal Components and Linear Discriminant Analysis.

# Singular Value Deomposition
m <- 10000
n <- 2000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (S <- svd (A,nu=0,nv=0))

# Principal Components Analysis
m <- 10000
n <- 2000
A <- matrix (runif (m*n),m,n)
system.time (P <- prcomp(A))

# Linear Discriminant Analysis
require (‘MASS’)
g <- 5
k <- round (m/2)
A <- data.frame (A, fac=sample (LETTERS[1:g],m,replace=TRUE))
train <- sample(1:m, k)
system.time (L <- lda(fac ~., data=A, prior=rep(1,g)/g, subset=train))

Top R Interviews

 

Portrait of baron A.I.Vassiliev (later - count)
Image via Wikipedia

 

Here is a list of the Top R Related Interviews I have done (in random order)-

1) John Fox , Creator of R Commander

https://decisionstats.com/2009/09/14/interview-professor-john-fox-creator-r-commander/

2) Dr Graham Williams, Creator of Rattle

https://decisionstats.com/2009/01/13/interview-dr-graham-williams/

3) David Smith, back when he was community Director of then Revolution Computing.

https://decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

and his second interview

https://decisionstats.com/2010/08/03/q-a-with-david-smith-revolution-analytics/

4) Robert Schultz, the first CEO of Revolution Computing (now Analytics)

https://decisionstats.com/2009/01/31/interviewrichard-schultz-ceo-revolution-computing/

5) Bob  Muenchen, author of R for SAS and SPSS users AND R for Stata users

https://decisionstats.com/2010/06/29/interview-r-for-stata-users/

https://decisionstats.com/2008/10/16/r-for-sas-and-spss-users/

6) Karim Chine, creator Biocep, Cloud Computing for R

https://decisionstats.com/2009/06/21/interview-karim-chine-biocep-cloud-computing-with-r/

7) Paul van Eikeran, Inference for R,the first enterprise package to use R from within MS Office.

https://decisionstats.com/2009/06/04/inference-for-r/

8) Hadley Wickham, creator GGPlot and R Author

https://decisionstats.com/2010/01/12/interview-hadley-wickham-r-project-data-visualization-guru/

Thats a lot of R interviews- I need to balance them out a bit I guess.