Hiking around Stevens Creek Reservoir

We've been to this place quite a few times. I like the peace and quiet here. It's close to Mountain View, like San Antonio Rancho.

There are multiple trails here. Our favorite is the one around the reservoir. You have to walk on the reservoir wall, near the boat ramp to the inner side of the reservoir. The trail then reaches Stevens Canyon Road again but at the other end of the reservoir. You can turn around and come back the same way or walk back on the road along the reservoir's outer edge, completing a full circle.

Some good Cassandra, Lucene presentations and misc Comp-Sci posts

About 2 months ago I attended the Cassandra Summit at San Francisco. Yes, I've been meaning to write this blog for a while now. I was surprised (pleasantly) to see such a good turn out. Lot of energy and real world use cases. I didn't get to attend all the talks of course, but all the slides and videos are online. Here are some good ones:

• https://speakerdeck.com/mheffner/time-series-metrics-with-cassandra
• http://www.slideshare.net/jaykumarpatel/cassandra-data-modeling-best-practices
• http://www.slideshare.net/SergeyPetrunya/mysqlconf2013-mariadbcassandrainteroperability

A few JVM related posts worth reading:

• http://vanillajava.blogspot.com/2013/07/c-like-java-for-low-latency.html
• Safepoints, memcpy, and Unsafe.copyMemory 
• Mechanically sympathetic Functional Programming (ahem Scala)
  

Go language and reactions:

• http://uberpython.wordpress.com/2012/09/23/why-im-not-leaving-python-for-go/
• http://andrewwdeane.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-reliability-of-go.html 
• http://golang.org/doc/faq#exceptions

If you like the Markdown syntax and want a good, no fuss editor for writing documents:

• http://markdownpad.com - for Windows users (paid version can even do tables) 
• http://dillinger.io - for in-browser use

Some Comp-Sci stuff to keep your (my) mind fit:

• Github's syntax coloring using Bayesian classifiers 
• Bayes network for code recommendations 
• Markov models - http://pkghosh.wordpress.com/2013/04/15/smarter-email-marketing-with-markov-model/
• Neural nets - http://blog.forecast.io/cleaning-radar-images-using-neural-nets-computer-vision/
•  A comprehensive path-finding library for grid based games
• (Geo hashing) Slightly old but still a fun encoding scheme 
• Search engine basics with cool tools
• Switch statement implementations in C/C++

Scala and Spark related videos:

• Spark Streaming: Fast Distributed Stream Processing with a High-Level API
• Scalable and Flexible Machine Learning with Chris Severs and Vitaly Gordon

DB:

• BDB is now AGPL. Out with BDB, in with LMDB
  
• PG and MySQL driver internals 
• The write cache: Swap insanity tome III
  

2 Lucene related presentations worth reading: 

• Personalized-Search-on-the-Largest-Flash-Sale-Site-in-America 
• Rapid-pruning-of-search-space-through-hierarchical-matching

Until next time!