4/7/14, 10:30am: Mainframe 50th Anniversary
Only the highest scored students have the opportunity to participate in the IBM Master the Mainframe World Championship. In this competition, 43 student contestants from five continents, will compete for the grand prize of mainframe computing, which has 50 years of history behind it. This two-day event will be taking place in New York City, April 7-8, and XRDS will be there covering every detail live for you. Continue reading
Some months ago I attended a presentation where one of my colleagues, Panos, showed how he used Python to process data in a meaningful way. In particular, he showed how he extracted some interesting findings from a .csv file coming from the Boston Mayor’s 24 Hour Constituent Service web site. Such findings involved incidents that were still open by then, how many incidents were closed in a justifiable amount of time and others. Continue reading
In the last decade the Internet has come to dominate how we consume information. News, entertainment, and even education, are often a click away. If you know what you want, a few typed words can lead you to the webpage you seek. But what if your search is less concrete? What if you are looking to find inspiring, new, undiscovered content to consume? You could certainly ask a friend, or you could ask a personal recommendation engine. Continue reading
In my thesis work I’m developing a framework built on top of KVM and QEMU which adds the capability of cloud-wide agentless monitoring. If you’re interested in this line of thinking read on for a high-level introduction and please comment in!
Three properties of the Virtual Machine (VM) abstraction enable and distinguish modern cloud computing: strong isolation, virtualized hardware, and soft-state provisioning. Strong isolation provides isolation between a VM and its host, and between a VM and other VMs executing on the same host. Because of strong isolation, separate entities may share the same host without knowledge of each other in a multi-tenant environment. Virtualized hardware frees a VM from its underlying hardware architecture and devices. This freedom consolidates workloads, now untethered from their hosts, by migrating them as the work intensity varies, and assigning resources only when needed. Soft-state provisioning reduces the time to deploy a running service. Requested resources can tightly match current workloads, and as the demands of the workload change over time, resources are elastically scaled. Continue reading
Search engines are powerful tools that can really help you with your work. Apart from finding useful resources and interesting articles, a search engine can be used for other practical purposes. Specifically, if you don’t know which word to use exactly in the phrase you are writing down, or if you do not remember how to spell it, you can use a search engine to find an answer. You can also search for specific terms within a web page and make sure if they exist or not. Continue reading