Sunday, August 7, 2011

On San Francisco and Storm



Today I had a single day to play a tourist in San Francisco.  Arrived yesterday afternoon, and is planned to stay until Thursday I am attending AAAI 2011, giving a tutorial there tomorrow, and plan some side trips and meetings, meanwhile spent all day out.  Since I have been in SFO many times before (although last time was in 2007!),  I decided to pick up a place that I have never visited before, looking at the brochure that I found at the hotel I chose the Walt Disney Museum, that resides in the Presidio which was a good opportunity to take a look at the Presidio (never been here before).  The Disney museum was interesting and surprisingly I spent there more than four hours (including the Disney old film of the day - the "Absent Minded Professor" in black and white).    Any visit in SFO is not perfect without walking near the bay, and eating sushi in Pier 39 looking at the waves.  San Francisco is one of my favorite cities, although driving here require patience, as the center city is totally congested.     And what about the storm in the title of this posting?  well - the weather here is nice, no storms!,  catching up on news I found a news item entitled "Twitter to open source complex event processing engine",  which of course attracted my interest, but drilling down to the details -- the title is somewhat over-statement.   Twitter has acquired BackType which created Storm, which is a kind of real-time Hadoop, on which one can implement event processing engine, but Storm itself is a platform and does not seem to have event processing language implemented, similar to Yahoo's S4.  It should be noted that there are some similar works that have implemented at least part of the event processing functionality over a kind of real-time Hadoop.  One of them is Colin Clark's DarkStar, the other is HStreaming. 
Nevertheless, it is interesting to see the Twitter is getting there.





 

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