Steve Loughran: 301 Moved Permanently

I've moved my blog from 1060.org here. Why? Well, the team at 1060research have pushed out a new release of their NetKernel product, on which the blog was running, and if I wanted to retain the URLs I'd have to upgrade the code myself.  Being lazy and all, I opted not to.

What have I been up to since going offline

1. On twitter @steveloughran. Idle chatter.
2. Finishing up some major project at work that has kept be busy for the past 12-18 months. I am feeling more relaxed now. 
3. Coding in Groovy. It's like Java only better, and trivial to switch between the too. There's great IDE support in IntelliJ IDEA too.
4. Doing some proper Computer Science stuff, as opposed to Software Engineering.
5. Paper Reading. This may seem dull, but there is a lot of interesting stuff out there. If you spend too much time knee-deep in various projects' codebases you get sucked into various issues (log4j configuration etc), and out of touch with higher level problems. 
6. Holiday on the south coast of England. Not far; lazy. I lost a camera, which is a pity, but I've replaced it already.

My most recent set of readings was all the big datacentre papers on DRAM and HDD failures. A good way to revise on concepts like Poisson Distributions, Gauss Distributions, Weibull Distributions (which I never knew of before), and lots of other math-hard problems. It's shocking how much maths I have forgotten; I keep seeing these bits on the paper where they do integration or differentiation and say "clearly then" and the words mean nothing to me. I will have to revise some fundamentals.

With the work I've been doing wrapping up, I'm hoping to get more involved in Hadoop and Hadoop related work. I don't have a schedule for that -I'm just reading now.