Category: Systems Engineering
Rules Apathy: Form vs Function
I have received a few private messages about Charles Young and his form v. function rules debate. Folks have sent me references and articles to counter his debate points, however, I am impassive about this topic. It is common sense to objective systems engineers (and well documented) that trying to manage large sets of rules [...]
Read moreDisadvantages of Rule-Based Systems (Part 1)
In Orwellian Event Processing the discussion moved away from my original intent, which was primarily to discuss the vendor-state-of-denial regarding the prior art for processing complex events, and gravitated toward a discussion on the “inefficiencies” of rule-based systems. I was surprised learn that there are professionals who believe that there is no basis in fact [...]
Read moreOrwellian Event Processing
Recently we completed the installation and training of an open source Bayesian classifier to replace a rule-based approach to manage forum spam. In a nutshell, we found the rule-based approach was highly prone to both false positives and false negatives; however, a statistical approach using a Bayesian approach has turned out to be far superior. [...]
Read moreGeoIP and Geo-Targeting
Lately I have been busy with a web-based geo-targeting project. For those of you not familiar with geo-targeting, the deeper you get into geo-targeting, the more you realize how important and interesting it is. Geo-targeting is used for fraud detection, personalization, ad-targeting, content-delivery, and more. In addition, the same basic concept is used [...]
Read moreAmazon CloudFront Test Results with Small Objects
Following up on our Date with the CloudFront Operations Manager we have just released our public test results using a small 1.6kb object (a small gif file). The results of the tests can be found here, Amazon CloudFront / S3 Small Object Test Results In a nutshell, we found a fairly significant performance improvement using [...]
Read moreTIBCO Silver v. Amazon EC2: First Impressions
Just coming off a ten day vacation, I was planning to write a few posts on a few “pure” scientific topics like string theory, complexity, and emergence. However, a few folks contacted me and asked me my opinion on TIBCO Silver; so, I thought I would at least blog on my first impressions. TIBCO’s [...]
Read moreA Date with the CloudFront Operations Manager
After running some tests on Amazon CloudFront globally, our team’s conclusions have landed me a date with the CloudFront Operations Manager. In a nutshell, our test results concluded: We were testing using CF/S3 to deliver content faster to customers in geographic regions different than our server. One would expect the downloads to be (noteworthy) faster [...]
Read moreMahout on Elastic MapReduce: Running k-means Clustering
Following up on KMeans Clustering Now Running on Elastic MapReduce, Stephen Green has generously documented the steps that was necessary to get an example of k-Means clustering up and running on Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR) on the Apache Lucene Mahout wiki. Mahout on Elastic MapReduce by Stephen Green As a side note, there has been [...]
Read moreAnnouncing Amazon EC2 with IBM by the Hour
Amazon EC2 running IBM now offers Amazon EC2 instances combined with popular IBM applications that you can pay for by the hour with no need for licenses or long term upfront commitments. You can now flexibly scale your IBM applications up and down and only pay for what you use. If you already have an [...]
Read moreKMeans Clustering Now Running on Elastic MapReduce
Stephen Green, blogger and principal investigator of the AURA project in Sun Labs, has moved the state-of-the-art of analytics-as-a-service a few steps forward with the first documented working Mahout application on Amazon’s Elastic MapReduce (EMR). EMR was announced on April 1st and on April 15th Stephen announced to the Mahout users group that he was [...]
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