The registration to ApacheCon Europe 2009 (23-27 March) in Amsterdam was opened last week. I already spent some time watching the available sessions regarding Hadoop, Lucene etc., have a look…

• Hadoop Tools and Tricks for Data Processing Pipelines
• Lucene Boot Camp
• Solr Boot Camp
• Introduction To Hadoop
• Introducing Mahout: Apache Machine Learning
• Hadoop Map-Reduce: Tuning and Debugging
• Lucene Case Studies
• Pig – Making Hadoop Easy
• Advanced Indexing Techniques with Apache Lucene
• Running Hadoop in the Cloud
• Configuring Hadoop for Grid Services
• Dynamic Hadoop Clusters
• Best of breed – httpd, forrest, solr and droids

As you can see, Apache Hadoop is playing a big role this year, and cloud computing starts to take off at Apache too. Unfortunately I didn’t find any Nutch related sessions – whats happening there?

I wasn’t able to write any Breakfast Links since monday due to projects (like the upcoming relaunch of this blog), birthday parties and efforts for christmas presents (big, big family)! Finally I turned on my news reader today…

* Amazon Launches Public Data Sets To Ease Research

Amazon (AWS) provides public data sets to demonstrate use cases for their (cloud) services. The article on TechCrunch also links to Swivel which is a repository for open data sets. Unfortunately you won’t find any textual data but a lot of data like U.S. Census, historical oil prices, world photovoltaic production and more.

* New Open Source Search Vendor

An interview of Hans-Christian Brockmann (Brox IT-Solutions GmbH) about Brox Open Source strategy in the field of enterprise search. Really interesting is Brockmann’s number of 180.000 lucene projects (more or less productive) out there! Brox already came up with their Eclipse project SMILA, which is going to be a base architecture to better integrate search and text mining into common systems. Nice to hear from those kind of projects in my business area!

* Z! – Episode 134: Qimaya – Anwendung neuronaler Netze (german)

Interesting interview with Roy Uhlmann (Qimaya aka former Queap) about neuronal networks in their search engine Qimaya. If you are interested in testing Qimaya you can request access to the demo – next invitation and access delivery is even today! As I can see, Qimaya is currently a german language only project!

Man, I love the new concepts of grid and cloud computing, especially their pricing models (pay only for RAM/CPU and Traffic). Go Grid currently offers a voucher of 50 USD for signing up.  I didn’t hesitate and got myself an account to check out wether it is useful for app serving or even search or text processing tasks!

Stay tuned for my review of Go Grid services!

Breakfast Links 28.10.2008

* AWS is Enterprise Ready

CloudAve summarizes the current state of Amazon’s Cloud Computing services in terms of prices, support and technologies. Amazon’s EC2 and S3 is a really exciting alternative (to hardware machines) in the large-scale processing field because of the support of Hadoop MapReduce! For german readers, there is also an up to date article at Computerwoche. I’m currently writing an article on Mozenda and GoGrid – after those I’m going to check out Amazon EC2!

* Why Defining Distance Is Important

Distance (dissimilarity) of objects explained by a real case (crime) scenario. I really appreciate those practical examples!

Breakfast Links 16.10.2008

* Cloudera – Redhat of Cloud Computing?

Cloudera, a startup from San Francisco starts to offer business support for Apache Hadoop related projects in terms of consulting, configuring and – important - running. Check also the post on BS about Cloudera.

* VideoSurf Is Now Live

* Searching For Small Businesses, Coming Up Frustrated

Neat article on how to find small businesses in search engines and generally on the web. Since I’m coming from a small village in germany too I feel the same.

* BarCamp Berlin 3, Topics

2 days left to go…

Breakfast Links 09.09.2008

20 Real-Life Challenges in Cloud Computing
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50575 (TheServerSide)

Breakfast Links 07.08.2008

Dell to trademark cloud computing
http://www.theserverside.com/news/thread.tss?thread_id=50244

Search Interfaces and Visual Clues
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2008/08/06/search-interfaces-and-visual-clues/

Google Stopwords Patent
http://www.seobythesea.com/?p=1109