Neal Waterstreet

Archives for February 2015

Sling TV trial

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I signed up for Sling TV as soon as it was announced. I was still looking to replace Aereo, but couldn’t find anything. Sling TV is a lot better, but it doesn’t really have a DVR. I finally got my invite yesterday.

Sling TV seems to provide what I really wanted – ESPN/ESPN2 and CNN. Those were really the only channels I missed that were not provided OTA. There is a pretty good set of channels inluded and for an extra fee you can purchase more channels. The sports channels package includes all the ESPN channels and I may add that in the fall. For now I think I am going with some channels for the kids.

At first glance, the picture quality is very good streaming on my Roku. I was able to install phone it on my phone and tablet and the quality was good there too. One problem is see is that it looks like only one stream can be used at a time. When I turned on the tablet the television paused. This could be a problem but we’ll have to wait and see.

No picture quality problems with college basketball on ESPN and the other channels look great too. I just wish I would’ve had this during the college bowl season…

Update: AMC is now included in the base package – Better Call Saul/The Walking Dead/Mad Men.

PASS Healthcare February meeting

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Time to jump back into the Healthcare VC with our first meeting of 2015. This month’s speaker is by David Moutray. Please sign up at the PASS Healthcare website. The meeting is scheduled for Thursday, February 19, 2015 at 1 PM (Eastern).

Here are some details on David’s presentation.

Topic Name
Data Quality: Boosting Software Performance and Business Profit

Topic Synopsis
If “Data is the Lifeblood of Modern Business,” then most businesses are walking corpses with sludge in their veins, because 10% to 25% of all data records in the average enterprise are wrong. Until the dramatic problems of Data Quality Management are addressed, SQL can never fulfill its original promise to eliminate application “silos”, enable systems to communicate and provide useful, actionable information to the modern business. I believe that we are on the cusp of a revolution in Data Quality that is even greater in scope and impact than the revolution in manufacturing quality that began over 40 years ago. Businesses that make the transition will survive and thrive. Those that don’t will finally stop shambling about and lay down to die. What is this revolution in Data Quality? How can you be a part of it (and avoid the headman’s ax)?!? This presentation will change the way you think about your jobs as Database Administrators and Application Developers.

Speaker Bio
As a database administrator and ETL developer for a large data warehouse team, I am passionate about fast query performance, data integrity and the relational data model. Like most Database Administrators, I am highly opinionated, but unlike some, I am willing to endure personal abuse in the spirit of open discussion. I also tell (bad) jokes. Hecklers are welcome.

Hadoop training Day 2

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Day two of my training was all about Pig, which is a scripting language for exploring data sets.

Here is a list of a few topics we covered today:

  • Pig Latin
  • A few operators
  • Grunt
  • Bag
  • Joins

We also worked on a few examples covering clickstream and stock market data.

I’m starting to realize how much there really is to learn here. We’re cramming a lot of information into each session, but I think this is the best way to get some experience with it.

Hadoop training Day 1

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I decided it is finally time to jump in and start looking at Hadoop. I’d originally scheduled for Windows version of the class, but it was cancelled so I switched to the Apache version. At this point, I really wish I’d kept up with Linux commands…

Some of the topics we have discussed so far:

  • Overall Hadoop architecture
  • HDFS
  • YARN
  • MapReduce
  • Briefly discussed Pig, but will get into that more tomorrow

I’m taking the Hortonworks official training since they are a Microsoft partner. One thing that is a little odd is that I am the only one in my classroom. Everyone else (about 15) are in different cities/offices. I really set up with combination of cameras and WebEx. It seems to work well, at least so far. The learning facilitator is top notch as well. Definitely not his first time teaching the course.

Lots to learn with Hadoop and I am hoping this course will help me get up and running.