Author: geoff

Neo4j and graph databases

Here’s a nice introduction by Todd Huff to the topic of graph databases: what they are, and why they’re relevant. The author starts by trashing all of the candidates:

So relational database can’t handle complex relationships. Graph systems are opaque, unmaintainable, and inflexible. OO databases loose [sic] flexibility by combining logic and data. Key-value stores require the programmer to maintain all relationships. There, everybody sucks 🙂

And then Todd gets into a nice discussion of one graph database, Neo4j. He cites a piece comparing Neo4j with Hadoop. Hadoop’s great for shallow data reductions, like log processing, but really bad for deep relationships.
And don’t just read this piece; bookmark it! Because at the end, Todd includes an excellent bibliography of related articles.

A month with a netbook

Just over a month ago, I bought myself an Asus EeePC 901 netbook, and wrote a blog piece describing my first impressions, including the process of installing Ubuntu Netbook Remix as the default OS. And then I started using the device, and didn’t think much more about it.
A couple of days ago, a friend emailed me, and asked, “I haven’t read any comments about [the EeePC 901] from you. Do you like it? Was it all you thought it would be? Would you buy it again, now that you have experience with it?” Good questions.
First: yes, I like it. I’ve made two trips to California recently, for job interviews and apartment hunting, and each time I took the netbook with me. Previously I’d have toted my MacBook Air, and while I miss Mac OS X, Ubuntu is fine for the basics: email, web access, word processing, blogging, twittering, and so forth. And the netbook is half the size, with three times the battery life, at a fraction of the price.
The latest Ubuntu WiFi works just fine – it’s almost as easy as OS X. Audio is a bit of a pain: the function keys work sometimes, but not always, so I occasionally have to use the volume widget. More annoying is the fact that even when the volume is zero, audio output can still cause the speakers to buzz and click. Odd.
Sleep mode works – mostly. I normally close the lid to sleep, then open the lid and press the power button to wake it. However on several occasions the machine has failed to go into sleep mode; on one occasion I retrieved it from my backpack after a few hours to find that the battery was drained and the machine was really warm! After that incident, I have taken to watching the blinkin’ lights on the front edge of the machine when I put it to sleep; if it fails to go to sleep correctly (about 20% of the time) I open it up and reset it.
I’ve recently been thinking about what gear to take with me when I’m travelling to Shenzhen for Huawei. Both the MacBook Air and the EeePC 901 are plausible: both can support Skype, so that I can phone home. (However the Mac has better support for L2TP tunnelling with services like PublicVPN.com.) Neither machine has a DVD drive, however, so I bought a bus-powered USB external DVD drive from LG which I can use to watch movies on either system.
The size of the EeePC 901 has not proved to be a usability problem. The keyboard, trackpad and screen are all just fine. The only nit is that the space bar seems 1-2 mm too high, and it’s quite sensitive, so that I tend to catch it after typing bottom-row letters. However those who know me will confirm that I’m a lousy typist anyway, so it may just be me.
Would I buy it again? I think so – if not this unit, then an equally light netbook, like the Asus “Seashell”. But the combination of size, weight, and battery life is pretty damn compelling; the 8.9 inch netbook is my sweet spot. It’s a shame that manufacturers seem to be giving up on this configuration.
Several people have asked if I plan to install Mac OS X on the EeePC. Right now, the costs – complexity, problematic networking, screen size assumptions in some apps, GUI real estate usage – seem to outweigh the benefits, so the answer is no. Now if someone came up with a foolproof way of reading a Leopard installation DVD and writing a bootable SD card, I’d be interested in playing with it. Until then, Ubuntu will be just fine.
(And yes, I am composing this on the netbook. Not to do so would be silly, wouldn’t it?)

15 books in 15 minutes

Dan Ellard tagged me in the “15 books” meme.

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you’ve read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutess.

I’m doing mine in my blog, so I don’t lose it in the bowels of Facebook:

  1. “Lord of the Rings” (J.R.R.Tokien)
  2. “Third Wish” (Robert Fulghum)
  3. “Consciousness Explained” (and everything else by Dan Dennett)
  4. “The Ancestor’s Tale” (and everything else by Richard Dawkins)
  5. “God is not Great” (Christopher Hitchens)
  6. “Godel, Escher, Bach” (and everything else by Doug Hofstadter)
  7. “I, Asimov” (Isaac Asimov – I like his novels, but prefer these essays)
  8. “H.M.S.Ulysses” (Alastair MacLean)
  9. “The Penguin Atlas of Ancient History” (and the others in the series by Colin McEvedy)
  10. “The Daughter of Time” (Josephine Tey)
  11. “Windscale 1957” (Lorna Arnold – my mother; also her books on the UK bomb)
  12. “The Demon-Haunted World” (Carl Sagan)
  13. “Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation” (ed. Roger Housden)
  14. “Level 7” (Mordecai Roshwald)
  15. “Swallows and Amazons” (Arthur Ransome – the whole series, please)

Plug-and-play HD video for the Mac

Here’s my latest Amazon product review, for the JVC Everio GZ-HM200 Dual SD High-Def Camcorder.

Plug and play HD for this Mac user

It’s been a number of years since I had a camcorder. It was a tape unit, and after the initial infatuation with the new toy, I found that I never used it. Recording was a chore (juggling tapes and batteries), uploading was tedious, and the quality wasn't all that good. For quick ad hoc recordings, my various digital still cameras could grab a few seconds of good-enough video. The camcorder disappeared from my life.

A few years later, things have really changed. I received the Everio GZ-HM200, snapped in a couple of 8GB SD cards, charged the battery, and I was ready to go. We took a day trip to Mount Rainier; the weather was perfect, and I took a lot of video of photogenic glaciers and waterfalls.

When I got home, I wanted to upload the video into my computer. The Everio comes with software for Windows PCs, and Mac users are hardly mentioned in the documentation. I had searched the various on-line discussions of Mac video, and there were many cautionary tales about compatibility issues with the Everios. I anticipated problems.

I was wrong. I connected the USB cable to my Mac Mini, started iMovie (part of iLife’09), and opened up the camcorder. The USB menu opened, and I chose the “Upload” option. iMovie detected the camera, asked me a few questions (video quality, destination, whether to check for stabilization issues), and then imported the video clips. It was trivially easy – just the way I like it.

The Everio has a “Snapshot” mode to take still images, and I had tried it out. This meant that while I was working with iMovie, iPhoto also started up and offered to import the photos I’d taken. My verdict: it’s OK for casual 1x use, but no substitute for a real digital camera. The problem is that the Everio’s autostabilization mode only works for video, not for still images. This meant that a couple of 20x zoomed images, while impressively magnified, were hopelessly blurred. I’ll stick with my Panasonic DMC-TZ4 for the still shots.

The JVC Everio is a tremendous little camera: compact, easy, light, and producing excellent HD video. (Yes, my Mac Mini feels a little underpowered for working with this.) The dual slot SD card design is excellent; the camera will automatically switch from one card to the next during recording, and you can swap cards on the fly. In XP mode (17 Mbps VBR 1920×1080) 16GB is good for 2 hours of recording, which feels about right. (You can crank it up to 24 Mbps, which will give you 1 hr. 20 min., or drop down to 5Mbps, at which point you can run for over 7 hours!) No more media juggling…..

There are tons of additional features in this camera, and sometime I may try them out. But for the basic job of plug-and-play HD video, this is hard to beat.

Recomended.

(And I gave it five stars.)

Joining Huawei

I’ve just signed on with Huawei, the telecommunications systems company headquartered in Shenzhen, China. I’m going to start by working from home in Seattle, until we relocate to Silicon Valley at the end of July. I can’t go into any detail about what I’m going to be doing, but I’m very excited about the company and the opportunity. I’m also looking forward to visiting Shenzhen to meet my colleagues.

Waiting….

I’m pretty sure that this is the longest gap in my blogging since I started back in December 2003. So why the hiatus? A few reasons come to mind:

  • A lot of my off-the-cuff comments which would previously have shown up in my blog now wind up on Twitter. Some of this is because it’s trivially easy for me to post a Tweet from my iPhone, wherever I might be; more significant is that fact that many of the items that I used to comment on – from friends, from news sources – show up on Twitter first, and it’s easy to “RT” them with my comments. So there’s a reverse network effect taking place here.
  • Another factor is the current state of my life. I’m in the middle of job-hunting, and for obvious reasons I don’t want to broadcast the details. Perhaps some of my conversations are with companies that are officially in the middle of hiring freezes; it would be tacky to mention them. Or I might be talking to a stealth-mode start-up, where stealth is the key word. And then these processes always seem to take longer that one would hope, and I don’t really think that it would be appropriate for me to vent about the frustration which I occasionally feel. So that whole (important) area of my life is off-limits.
  • I’ve been posting most of the technical material that I might previously have published here on my new blog, Speaking of Clouds. And yes, that blog needs more material – see previous point.
  • My reviews – of books, music, movies, concerts, and gadgets – are reduced in frequency because I’ve been buying less stuff, and going out less. And Amazon Vine has been sending me fewer items that I want to review on my blog. (Until today, anyway.)
  • Above all, I have this persistent feeling that my life is about to change, dramatically and comprehensively. We’re talking about the what, where, and how. And so I find myself metaphorically holding my breath….

So bear with me. I expect my posting rate to increase really significantly – RSN!

One of the best meals of my life…

Warning: this is pure food porn. But I can’t keep this to myself. I will conceal some of the names, to protect those involved…
After a very successful week of meetings here in the Valley (and more to come tomorrow, actually), I arranged to meet up with an old friend for dinner. I chose a restaurant that we had enjoyed before, the James Randall in Los Gatos, and we sat down to eat soon after 7.
The waiter gave us the menus, and listed the specials for the evening. At this particular restaurant they offer a prix fixe option on Tuesday through Thursday: appetiser, entree and dessert for $43. Add $30 to get the chef’s wine pairings with each course. I was feeling expansive, as was Adrian, so we went for the whole shebang. We had a feeling that we were in for a special treat.
I ordered the black bean soup and the duck breast; Adrian ordered the cheese special (involving panko and a flash in hot oil) and the duck. A few minutes later, the waiter returned. There was only one duck breast left. Would we be amenable to splitting a duck breast, and then splitting another entree – say, a New York steak. There would, of course, be a wine pairing for each entree. What a deal! Yes, of course…
At this restaurant, “wine pairing” is not what you might expect. It’s not just a glass of wine matched to the item: it’s two generous pours of different wines (or other beverages) that each complement some aspect of the dish. With my soup, I got a rose wine and also a pale ale. Sounds bizarre, but it worked a treat. I kept up quite well, tasting and demolishing each of the two half-glasses of wonderful red wines ((Adrian: do you remember where that Cabernet Sauvignon came from?)) that accompanied each of the demi-entrees, but Adrian fell behind, as shown in this picture. Adrian snapping the "problem"
At last we came to the dessert. I chose a chocolate torte; the portion was tiny but extraordinarily intense. It was paired with an excellent domestic port. Adrian opted for the classic strawberry shortcake (which looked almost perfect), which came with an orange muscat. (And at his insistence I actually finished most of Adrian’s muscat!)
Yes, it was an expensive meal. But it was wonderful entertainment, and if (as I suspect) I wind up living down in this part of the world, it’s nice to build some relationships and start some traditions. And that meal was almost perfect……

All woo, all the time

Another delightful fisking of Eagleton and his admirer, Stanley Fish, this time from Crooked Timber. In the comments, Salient and Steve LaBonne sum up thus:

So, the purpose of religion is aesthetic?

A lot of that going around; seems to be pretty much the last-ditch line of defense nowadays for muddleheads trying to hold out against the assault of the Evil Dawkhitch Stormtroopers. Often involves the truly brain-dead confusion of religion with religiously-inspired art.
And no, it’s not possible to engage productively with such manifestations of severe cognitive impairment.

Yes, yes, yes

Over the last two weeks I’ve been listening to just one album: the Pet Shop Boys “Yes”. The first couple of times I was doubtful: there was none of the political and sexual drama of “Fundamental”, which I’ve decided is one of their finest albums ever. But “Yes” grows on you – or at least it grew on me. If “Fundamental” was dark, “Yes” is quietly positive about life and love. The Amazon MP3 album includes a bonus “track”: a full-length repeat of the album with commentary from Neil and Chris. MP3 imitates DVD, I guess – but it works very well. Recommended – emphatically so!