When Lee Dirks asked me to represent the Microsoft Research Connections team at a Digital Public Library of America meeting at Harvard Law School in Boston, I immediately checked my calendar. The DPLA folks are starting a wonderful new journey of defining a platform for digital libraries so they needed …
Granted, Netflix had to build their own pipeline based on open source technologies. They used the right tool for the job. They used a NoSQL solution for reliably gathering/recording their data at scale. They used an RDBMS where it made sense.
Netflix is a big company. They can build their own data processing infrastructure from the various pieces. However, what about all those smaller companies that want to collect and process data that is critical to their growth, competitiveness, survival? Wouldnt they benefit from cloud solutions that are scalable, reliable, and NOT managed by them!
I moved to the US in September of 2005. I set a goal for myself to stay organized with regards to my finances and collect as much data as possible for data analysis. Since then, every single entry in my credit card statements is explicitly reviewed and categorized. I used …
/**/ To me Steve represents the perfect example of a visionary, a creator, leader, an artist, a world changer. In my eyes, the world is a better, more beautiful place, because of Steve. Source: apple.com, Oct 5, 2011 Steve Jobs Read more [...]
Another year, another Glastonbury!!! And as always, it didn’t disappoint. This year it was a different experience for me but it was still a lot of fun! :-) It was the first Glastonbury since 2004 that I didn’t experience on my own. Mary was with me, which meant that camping …
/**/ We are having fun at work with some investigation work in the NoSQL space. We’ve been playing with actors in our distributed system. There has been a lot of prior work in this space so we are not really doing anything new with actors but it’s still fun. Scala, …
It was more than 18 months that I moved to the Technical Computing organization inside Microsoft. I had joined a startup team that worked on building a platform for large-scale compute and data processing on top of Azure. It was an amazing experience. We worked hard, produce great results, and …
I hadn’t come across the “HOME” movie before. I watched it earlier today. Our home, the planet that we call Earth, deserves at least 1 1/2h of our time. Please please please watch this movie in its entirety!!! The cinematography is spectacular; the narration really beautiful; the conveyed message powerful, …
The last weekend of January I traveled to California to meet with Jim and Emil for a weekend of skiing at Squaw Valley. We were treated with an excellent weather on Saturday and amazing new 20-30cm snow on Sunday. Soooooo much fun! I hadn’t seen my pal Jim for a …
Happy New Year everyone! The first blog entry of 2011 is about an 1-hour BBC documentary on the “Joy of Stats” (video on YouTube) with Hans Rosling as the presenter. Hans Rosling is a great inspiration to me. He always talks about the power of data and its analysis, a …
This is cool. O’Reilly had an ebook promotion for cyber-Monday here in the US. “REST in Practice” did very well. It was the fifth best-selling title :-) Tim O’Reilly published a blog entry about the top selling books. Not bad! :-) If you have read the book and would like …
I feel that I need to express my opinion on the recent Wikileaks-related events. I know that many of my friends or those who follow my thoughts on the Web might not agree with me but I always believe that it’s healthy to have a difference in opinions since it …
I am a technologist. I am a geek. I know that. I make use of all sorts of gadgets or read about them. I try to follow all the latest developments. I read books to educate myself about new things. At work and at my free time I try to …
/**/ Ahhhh! One of my “children” is growing up and maturing! I am so proud of the team over at Microsoft’s External Research. They have done an amazing job with Zentity. The new version packs a great set of cool new features, building on the extensible nature of the graph …
/**/ Well, after feeling extremely honored as a result of the Visiting Professor appointment, I thought it might be good to bring myself down to earth as fast as possible. So I asked my family to send me few photographs from my childhood. It’s always good for one to remember …
I arrived at home after a fantastic weekend in New York. Since my cell phone had run out of battery while I was still at the JFK airport, I was only able to check my email after I got home. The first message in my mailbox: Subject: Professor Savas Parastatidis …