Year: 2011

LibreOffice Conference

A bit belatedly I return to my second favorite Office Productivity Software (the first being Cloud- Google Docs).

July 9, 2011

LibreOffice Conference Registration Is Open

Filed under: Conference, Meetings — Florian Effenberger @ 20:26

The registration for the LibreOffice Conference, taking place in Paris from October 12th to 15th, is now open. Everyone interested in joining the first annual meeting of the LibreOffice community is invited to register online at

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

to help the organizers in planning.

The LibreOffice Conference will be the event for those interested in the development of free office productivity software, open standards, and the OpenDocument format generally, and is an exciting opportunity to meet community members, developers and hackers. It is sponsored by Cap Digital, Région Île de France, IRILL, Canonical, Google, La Mouette, Novell/SUSE, Red Hat, AF 83, Ars Aperta and Lanedo.

The Call for Papers is also open until July 22nd, and paper submissions will be reviewed by a community committee.

We look forward meeting you in the heart of France, celebrating the first year of LibreOffice, and discussing the plans for the next months.

The Steering Committee of The Document Foundation

http://conference.libreoffice.org/conference-registration/

 

Official LibreOffice Conference

Conference Registration

Please enter your personal data to register for Paris, Oct 12 – 15, 2011.

 

List of All Libre Office Announcements-

http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/announce/

 

Review of Google Plus

After resisting for two weeks I have decided to write a Google Plus review. This includes both the changed designed parameters, the invite growth features and all of the main sub-items and activities you can do in the G+  Stream, Share, Hang Out, Pictures, Circles.

Since I have 2500 people in my circles and I am in 91 circles

To keep it simple – I have noted the following 6 main sub-points.

1) Content Dissemination-

 

  • Sharing Blog Articles
  • Micro-Blogging
  • Sharing Pictures

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

————————————————————————————————————————————————————–

1) Content Dissemination-

  • Sharing Blog Articles

 

Sharing is as simple as Facebook but the design makes it simpler.

Note G+ uses lower number of colors, bigger fonts, slightly bigger icons to reduce the appearance of clutter.

Contrast this

with this-

 

Interesting to see that G+ has four types of media to share- besides writing the status/micro-blog (unfettered by 140 characters). Note these show icons only with hover text to tell you what the icon stands for.

Photo,Video,URL,Location (which seems to be Twitter like in every share)

Facebook has 5 types of Sharing and note the slightly different order as well the fact that both icon and text make it slightly more cluttered- Status (which is redundant clearly ),Photo,Link,Video,Question

G+ thus lacks polls /questions features. It is much easier to share content on Facebook automatically as of now- but for G+ you need to share the URL privately though. There exist G+ meme-s already thanks to re-sharing in G+ plus which seems to be inspired by Tumblr (?).

In addition Google has made your Google Profile the number one SERP for searching your name, so there seem clear tied in benefits of SEO with content disseminated here.

G+ has sharing in circles whereas Facebook has only Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends ,Customize.  This makes G+ interface slightly better in tweaking the spread of content to targeted audience esp by Bloggers.

  • For sharing Photos– G+ goes in for a whole new separate tab (one out of four) whereas Facebook treats photo sharing less prominently.
  • Google has lesser white space between photos, (The Facebook way used to be just snap photo by iPhone and send by email to auto-post), and the privacy in sharing photos is much better in G+ as the dropdowns in Facebook are not as granular and neither as nifty in icon design.
  •  
  • Also I like the hover and photo grows bigger feature and the auto import from Picassa (but I would like to auto-import into G+ from Flickr just as I can do in Facebook)
  • Google Plus also has a much more detailed version for sharing videos than photos as compared to Facebook  -upload Photo options  versus
  • G+ has much more focus on auto-sharing from mobiles

 

 

 

2) Online Professional Networking  and 3) Online Personal Socializing Organizing Contacts in Google Plus and seperate privacy controls make it easier to customize sharing without getting too complex. You can make as many circles and drag and drop very easily instead of manually clicking a dropdown box. Effectively speaking Facebook has just 4 kinds of circles and it does not distinguish between various types of friends which is great from philosophical point of view but not so goodn enforcing separateness between professional and personal networks. Note Facebook privacy settings are overwhelming despite the groovy data viz

4) Spam Control / Malware /Phishing/Porn Protection 

Spam Control in Facebook versus in Google Plus- note the different options in Google Plus (including the ability to NOT reshare). I am not aware of more enhanced protection than the ones available for Gmail already. Spam is what really killed off a lot many social networks and the ability to control or reduce spam will be a critical design choice

5) Time Cost versus Networking Benefit

Linkedin has the lowest cost in time spent and networking done. If G+ adds a resume section for jobs, recruiters, and adds in Zynga games, the benefit from G+ will expand. As of now G+ is a minimal social network with minimalism as design ethos.

(Zynga would do well to partner with G+)

 

Introducing Radoop

Thats Right- This is Radoop and it is

Hadoop meats Rapid Miner=Radoop

 

 

http://prezi.com/bin/preziloader.swf

http://prezi.com/dxx7m50le5hr/radoop-presentation-at-rcomm-2011/

 

Radoop presentation at RCOMM 2011 on Prezi

What about Hive and Mahout?

Hive is a data warehouse infrastructure built on top of Hadoop, i.e. it uses the distributed file system of Hadoop and the efficient access technologies. Hive was initially developed by Facebook and is now used and developed by many other companies for their distributed data warehouse.

Mahout is a machine learning library already offering many scalable machine learning libraries implemented as well on top of Hadoop and its map & reduce paradigm. Hence, Mahout is one of the first distributed data analytics framework making use of the power of Hadoop.

You will see below that both frameworks will be tightly integrated with RapidMiner.

What can RapidMiner bring into the game?

Hadoop is great for large scale analytics, but it lacks an easy-to-use graphical interface. RapidMiner is an excellent tool for data analytics, but unless the analyst is not performing some nasty tricks, the data size is limited by the memory available. So we have the algorithms, the support for analytical process design, the user interface, and of course the community with a demand for large-scale analytics.

RapidMiner + Hadoop = Radoop

Radoop combines the strengths of RapidMiner and Hadoop. The result is a RapidMiner extension for editing and running ETL, data analytics and machine learning processes over Hadoop. The developers have closely integrated the highly optimized data analytics capabilities of Hive and Mahout, and the user-friendly interface of RapidMiner to form a powerful and easy-to-use data analytics solution for Hadoop.

Source-https://rapid-i.com/component/option,com_myblog/show,Big-data-analytics-made-easy-Radoop.html/Itemid,172/

 

and http://blog.radoop.eu/

Interesting? Sign up here- http://radoop.eu/z1sxe

Cloud Computing with #Rstats and CloudNumbers.com

Some of you know that I am due to finish “R for Business Analytics” for Springer by Dec 2011 and “R for Cloud Computing” by Dec 2012. Accordingly while I am busy crunching out ” R for Business Analytics” which is a corporate business analyst\s view on using #Rstats, I am gathering material for the cloud computing book too.

I have been waiting for someone like CloudNumbers.com for some time now, and I like their initial pricing structure.  As scale picks up, this should only get better. As a business Intelligence analyst, I wonder if they can help set up a dedicated or private cloud too for someone who wants a data mart solution to be done.The best thing I like about this- they have a referral scheme so if someone you know wants to test it out, well it gives you some freebies too in the form of an invitation code.

 

 

 

 

  • I read the instructions

  • I reviewed the pricing plan and click back to the dashboard 

 

  • I clicked on start new session

  • I click next
  • Choosing R from a very convenient interface design
  • Choosing all the applications I may need
  • This is a really nice feature in enabling to choose packages for R
  • Finally I can choose ONLY 7.5 gb RAM in the free version

I name the session in case I want to start multiple sessions

After waiting 15 minutes, my instance is up and I type R to get the following

Note I can also see the desktop- which is a great improvement over EC2 interface for R Cloud computing on Linux. Also it shuts down on its own if I leave it running (as of now after 180 minutes) so i click shut down session

 

You can click this link to try and get your own cloud in the sky for free -10 hours are free for you

https://my.cloudnumbers.com/register/65E97A

 

How to use Video chat on Facebook

  1. Just go to http://www.facebook.com/videocalling
  2. Get Started
  3. See this. You will need to download and install something on your computer.And calls are just one on one (Unlike Google Huddle which can have upto ten people and also doesnot need any installer -esp if you use Chrome)
  4. Send a video message if your friend is not available. (that beats Google Huddle which doesnot seem to have the video inbox feature yet)

 

CloudNumbers.com – #Rstats gets real in the cloud

I came across Cloudnumbers.com . Awesome name , I didnt know groovy domain names existed anymore.

What is cloudnumbers.com – The website which looks like the salesforce.com website in style and design-

says-

Things are still very raw here- but its an awesome concept. With 68 GB of Memory, I am sure R can blow away everything out of the water.

Probably the competition needs to ahem launch that private cloud soon, before they lose the momentum.

and you Get 2GB of storage, 2GB of traffic and 10h computation cost per month for free! I think this German startup has hit the nail on the head and it would be interesting to see what the future holds.

 

Check out http://cloudnumbers.com/product yourself and/or see the video

https://www.youtube.com/v/0ZNEpR_ElV0?version=3&hl=en_US&hd=1