The problem is, at its roots, a profound collapse of morals on Wall Street that would have found its way to financial destruction using any available set of instruments and laws.

Don't pin the recession on AIG's Joe Cassano | The Smirking Chimp

Apparently IBM was doing fundamental research into virtualization 40 years ago?

NOTE VMHIST07 - VM and the VM Community: Past, Present, and Future

This tutorial describes one approach to using Amazon EC2's Elastic Block Store (EBS) as a persistent storage mechanism for a production MySQL database server, including snapshot backup and restore.

Amazon Web Services Developer Community : Running MySQL on Amazon EC2 with Elastic Block Store

Overview:

Sqoop is a tool designed to help users import existing relational databases into their Hadoop clusters. Sqoop uses JDBC to connect to a database, examine the schema for tables, and auto-generate the necessary classes to import data into HDFS. It then instantiates a MapReduce job to read the table from the database via the DBInputFormat (JDBC-based InputFormat). The table is read into a set of files loaded into HDFS. Both SequenceFile and text-based targets are supported.

Longer term, Sqoop will support automatic connectivity to Hive, with the ability to load data files directly into the Hive warehouse directory, and also to inject the appropriate table definition into the metastore.

[#HADOOP-5815] Sqoop: A database import tool for Hadoop - ASF JIRA

Really great flash/flex viz.

Axiis : Data Visualization Framework

In an upcoming series spanning both coasts, Russell Jurney will explore startup geography — the importance and effect of physical location on technology startups. TechDrawl is flying him business class on AirTran round-trip to San Francisco and will be raising additional support for his travels by auctioning a pair of AirTran business class domestic passes on eBay and generally hitting-up and guilt-tripping our personal contacts for cash to cover his week of expenses. We will create a visualization page for donors to said fund. (Details to follow in a separate post). AirTran delivers the “best flying experience to smart travelers” and has 270 of its 750 daily departures leaving the ATL via Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport (its primary hub).

Jurney will try to quantify the ‘Valley Advantage.’ Tooling around Silicon Valley on a tractor (if they’ll rent him one at Dahl’s in the Valley), he will focus on several aspects of startup geography, including personal experiences of founders of both successful and unsuccessful startups and how their physical location influenced their startup’s trajectory. He will examine the importance of physical proximity in a social networked and internet collaborative world and try to answer the question, “How much does social networking make up for physical separation in developing a new venture and building a startup ecosystem?” Finally, he will examine regional specialization in technology startups and explore the question, “How important is it that the market your startup pursues is well suited to your physical location, and what kinds of products and markets are suited to different regions?”

Jurney is a technologist and a compulsive, degenerate technology entrepreneur who is writing his next business plan by creating this series of articles. You can read more about him on Cloudstenography and follow his journey to Silicon Valley on Twitter and on TechDrawl.

Doing a bit of writing about startup geography and regional advantage.

Russell Jurney Journeys to Silicon Valley — TechDrawl

Trial closing worksheet to evaluate product concepts with customers.

Trial Closing Questions.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Creative minds in all kinds of areas, from science to poetry, and mathematics to humour, may have traits associated with psychosis.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

Econometrics in R

Farnsworth-EconometricsInR.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Open Coffee Club Atlanta

Wednesday May 20, 2009 at 3:00pm

Tech Square Starbucks
48 5th St NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30308

Its been many months, and so its time again - Open Coffee Atlanta! Come one come all to discuss startups and network - entrepreneurs, investors, curious souls, but please no service providers.

Open Coffee Club Atlanta at Tech Square Starbucks (Wednesday May 20, 2009) - Upcoming