• My new challenge in Microsoft

    Over the last three months I’ve been having an incredible time at work. I opted not to talk about it because I wanted to make sure that it sticks this time 🙂 Before my current role, I participated in great…

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  • Knowledge Representation and Reasoning in 2012

    Happy New Year everyone! 2011 was a slow year for this blog. Early last year I joined Erik Meijers team in order to work on an incubation project that involved actors, distributed graph-based processing, a highly-scalable and reliable document store,…

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  • A crazy Savas trip 🙂

    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…

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  • XLDB 2011 conference – Observations

    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…

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  • My gas consumption is definitely going down 🙂

    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…

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  • Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011

    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

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  • Glastonbury 2011

    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…

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  • Implementing an Actor in C# with Task Continuations

    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…

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  • New challenge

    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…

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  • “It’s up to us to write what happens next… together”

    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…

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  • Squaw Valley skiing weekend

    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…

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  • “The Joy of Stats”

    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…

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  • “REST in Practice” in top 5 🙂

    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!…

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  • Diplomacy 2.0?

    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…

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  • Isn’t automation supposed to help us do things faster?

    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.…

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