Paperweight from Paperspace (YC) - a better PC in the cloud

By Vasudev Ram

Just saw this via Twitter.

Paperweight is a small hardware device from Paperspace, a Y Combinator startup that recently came out of stealth mode, according to the Paperspace about page.

Here is a post about Paperspace on the Y Combinator Posthaven (blog):

Paperspace (YC W15) Lets Anyone Access A Better Personal Computer That Lives In The Cloud

This video about Paperspace is good :-) Make sure to watch the whole thing - it's short.



If the embed above doesn't work, view the video here:

Paperspace video

The idea for the Paperspace computer-in-the-cloud may not be entirely new, since it seems to be (roughly) a sort of thin client, like the erstwhile Sun Ray, but it does seem innovative, overall.

I guess it could be called a PCaaS (PC as a Service :-)

- Vasudev Ram - Online Python training and programming

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Free parallel programming webinar (Python and R) by Domino Data Labs

By Vasudev Ram

I had blogged a few times earlier about Domino Data Lab, which is the maker of Domino, a Python PaaS (Platform as a Service) for data science (though it can also be used for general programming in the cloud). I had done a trial of it and found it to be quite good and easy to use. In fact Domino's ease of use for cloud programming was one of the points I specifically noticed and commented on, after trying it out.

Here is the last of those posts:

Domino Python PaaS now has a free plan

That post links to my earlier posts about Domino.



Today I got to know that they are hosting a free webinar on parallel programming with Python and R, using Domino. Here are the details:

[

Free webinar on parallel programming in R and Python

We'll show you how to utilize multi-core, high-memory machines to dramatically accelerate your computations in R and Python, without any complex or time-consuming setup.

You'll learn:

How to determine whether your tasks can be parallelized on multi-core, high-memory machines

General purpose techniques in R and Python for parallel programming

Specific applications of parallel programming in a machine learning context, including how to speed up cross-validation, grid search, and random forest calculations

Finally, how to use Domino for easy access to powerful multi-core machines where you can utilize these techniques.

About the instructor

The webinar will be led by Nick Elprin, one of Domino’s co-founders. Before starting Domino, Nick was a senior technologist and technology manager at a large hedge fund, where he managed a team that designed, developed, and delivered the firm’s next generation research platform. He has a BA and MS in computer science from Harvard.

]

You can sign up for the webinar here:

Domino Data Lab: free webinar on parallel programming in Python and R

- Vasudev Ram - Python training and consulting - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Scaled Inference, a cloud AI startup by ex-Googlers, gets Khosla Ventures $8M funding

By Vasudev Ram

Saw the news via this tweet by @asenkut - Aydin Senkut, Google's first product manager, and founder of Felicis Ventures.

Here is a TechCrunch article about the funding of Scaled Inference by Khosla Ventures:

Excerpts from the article:

[
Scaled Inference, a startup founded by two ex-Googlers that is building a cloud-based platform for third parties that want to use artificial intelligence and machine learning tools to run their apps and services – has raised another round of funding to continue its development and hiring, a Series A round of $8 million from Khosla Ventures.
...
has been putting together some of the first products (or services) that will run on top of that platform: pattern recognition, anomaly detection, prediction, and predictive ranking, which will be accessible by developers by way of a set of APIs.
...
As an example of where pattern recognition might be applied, he says, take a bank or credit card company like Visa.
...
“The pattern recognition APIs can then be used to detect correlations such as increased spending during certain time periods, at certain locations, by certain customers, on certain items, for certain combinations of these attributes,” he says. In turn, this type of insight can help guide important business decisions
...
this is a long-term vision, but this is one of the reasons that Scaled Inference went with the investors that it has done, Sercinoglu says. “Vinod Khosla is a long term investor, one of the longest-term thinkers in the business, and ours is a long term vision for AI and machine learning. That really resonated with him.”

Longer term, he says, “We seek to offer the same powerful technology as a public cloud API to everyone and for virtually any application; anything from personalized magazines to intelligent context-sensitive address books, app launchers, e-commerce sites,
]
They are not open to the public yet.

The idea seems interesting, not just for the applications mentioned, but also for the fact that they plan to offer the service as a public cloud API, available to everyone, so looks like it could have a lot of potential.

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Google Inbox launched, successor to Gmail

By Vasudev Ram

Google has launched a new email product called Google Inbox.

Saw this via Hacker News:

A post about Google Inbox on the official Google blog:

An inbox that works for you.

Hacker News thread about Google Inbox.

Google is going to roll out Inbox in stages to various sets of people. If you want to get an invitation to it, you can email them at [email protected]. I did it. Once I get invited, if I find Google Inbox useful or interesting, I will write a post about it.

Meanwhile, here are a few features of Google Inbox mentioned in the official Google blog post:

Bundles (of emails) - like categories that they had before in Gmail.

Highlights - key information from important messages.

Reminders, Assists, and Snoozes.

Assist - if you send a reminder to the hardware store, Assist will tell you its number and if it's open.

Snooze lets you snooze away emails and reminders, until a later time or until you reach another place, like your office.

Interestingly, Google seems to have made a somewhat poor choice of name for the product, again (after doing it with "Go" for the Go language), since in both cases, the word is very common and generic ("inbox" and "Go"), so it will be difficult to search for (even using Google, ironically).

Of course, there are workarounds, like using "golang" instead of "Go", and I'm guessing "Google Inbox" instead of just "Inbox", but those won't work as well as having a more unique name. I just did a Google search for the word "inbox", though, and www.google.com/inbox/ was the first hit.

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Yahoo buys Indian startup Bookpad

By Vasudev Ram

Just saw this on GigaOm via Twitter: Yahoo is buying a one-year-old Bangalore-based Indian startup called Bookpad. Bookpad has a product called Docspad which is used for document viewing and editing etc.

Links about the Yahoo acquisition of Bookpad on some news sites:

On GigaOm:

Yahoo buys Indian startup Bookpad for document viewing and editing capabilities

On the Economic Times:

Yahoo buys Bangalore-based tech startup Bookpad for Rs 50 crore

On TechCrunch:

Yahoo Acquires Bangalore-Based Bookpad, Makers Of Online File Editing And Collaboration Software Docspad




- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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HP buys Eucalyptus, ex-MySQL CEO to lead cloud effort

By Vasudev Ram

Interesting news, from GigaOm:

HP buys Eucalyptus as cloud consolidation commences for real

Excerpt from the GigaOm article:

[ Hewlett-Packard, which is basing its cloud strategy on OpenStack, has decided to buy Eucalyptus, a backer of a rival open-source cloud technology. And Eucalyptus CEO Marten Mickos, will lead the company’s cloud effort as SVP and general manager of HP’s cloud Business. ]


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Domino Python PaaS now has a free plan

By Vasudev Ram





I had blogged about Domino, a Python Platform-as-a-Service, earlier, here:

Domino, a Python PaaS for data science

and here:

Domino Python PaaS hits v1.0

Today I got to know via an email from one of the Domino founders, that Domino now as a free plan. Here is a screenshot showing it:

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Domino Python PaaS hits v1.0

By Vasudev Ram



I had blogged some weeks ago about Domino, a Python PaaS for data science.

Today I got an email from one of the Domino founders about the release of v1.0 of the Domino (Python, R and Matlab) PaaS.

Excerpts from that email:

[
Use of Domino and the community around it have exploded since we launched a few months ago.
...
we have just released Version 1.0 and along with it, our first pricing model:
...
Everyone will get five hours free of run time
...
After that, runs will cost $0.75 per hour (or fraction of an hour)
...
Pay only for what you use.
...
added some frequently requested features,
...
and dramatic performance improvements when uploading a large number of files.
]

Interesting stuff ... as I said in my previous post about Domino, one good point is that it is easy to use.

Domino buzz.

About Domino

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

Python training / Python development

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Cloudera's Impala engine - SQL querying of Hadoop data

By Vasudev Ram

I had blogged a while ago about SQL coming to Hadoop, citing a GigaOm article. That article had also mentioned Cloudera's Impala product as one of the strong contenders in this area.

Ckoudera Impala is an open source SQL query engine that can operate directly on Hadoop data; there is no need to extract the data into an RDBMS. They also plan to support Business Intelligence tools.

Here is the original announcement of Impala from Cloudera:

Cloudera Impala: Real-Time Queries in Apache Hadoop, For Real

Interestingly, they mention in that announcement, that Google's Dremel paper was one thing that inspired them to create Impala.

I had blogged about Dremel earlier:

Drill by Apache, like Google Dremel

More on Google Dremel - Wired article

These are the key benefits and features of Cloudera Impala (excerpt from their page, emphasis mine), that I found interesting:

[
Key Benefits of Impala

Speed to Insight
Perform interactive analytics directly on data stored in Hadoop. Get answers as quickly as you can ask questions, without the bottlenecks caused by data movement and jumping between data silos.

Cost Savings
Reduce data movement as well as duplicate storage with specialized systems by performing interactive analysis directly on full fidelity data.

Full Fidelity Analysis
Ask questions of all your data - without loss of fidelity from aggregations or conforming to fixed schemas.

Familiarity
Leverage existing BI tools and employee skill sets (SQL) to interact with data stored in Hadoop.

Discoverability
Enable more users to interact with more data by providing a single repository and metadata store from source to analysis.

Unification
Leverage the same file and data formats, metadata, security and resource management frameworks you use for the rest of the Hadoop system.

Key Features of Impala

SQL queries on CDH in seconds

Native MPP query engine

Integration with leading BI tools

Support for HDFS and HBase

Support for a wide variety of file formats including text, SequenceFiles, Avro, RCFile, LZO and Parquet

In-memory data transfers

Leverages metadata, ODBC driver, SQL syntax and Beeswax GUI (in Hue) from Apache Hive

Kerberos authentication

Fine-grained, role-based authorization with Sentry

100% open source (Apache licensed)

]

Here are a few related interesting posts:

Cloudera gets $65 mil more to grow Hadoop based Big Data offerings

On GigaOm: Cloudera makes SQL a first-class citizen in Hadoop">Cloudera makes SQL a first-class citizen in Hadoop

Cloudera Touts Near Linear Scalability with Impala

And here is a video of a technical deep dive into Cloudera Impala, on their site.

Read other posts about Big Data on my blog.

Check out this photo of an impala with cheetahs:

Excerpts from the Wikipedia page about the cheetah:

[ The cheetah is a large feline inhabiting most of Africa and parts of the Middle East. The cheetah can run faster than any other land animal— as fast as 112 to 120 km/h (70 to 75 mph) in short bursts, and has the ability to accelerate from 0 to 100 km/h (62 mph) in three seconds. ]

Maybe Cloudera should have named Impala as Cheetah instead :)

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises


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The SageMath Cloud - Python and computational mathematics in the cloud

By Vasudev Ram

I got to know about this today, via this post:

Hello Planet Python (seen via Planet Python).

The SageMath Cloud (beta) is a new development by William Stein, a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington, who started the SageMath project.

I had blogged about Sage earlier, here:

Calculize and Sage Notebook, online math tools

So today I signed up for a free account on the SageMath Cloud and then tried to enter and run a simple Python factorial program. After a hitch or two (it's beta), it worked.

Here is a screenshot of the factorial program in SageMath Cloud (click image to enlarge):

And here's a screenshot of the result of running "python factorial.py" in the command-line box of SageMath Cloud (click image to enlarge):

Here's a post that I found, by the creator of SageMath Cloud, William Stein himself, talking about his work on it. He mentions using ZFS and plans to use Google Compute Engine for the SageMath Cloud:

Holiday Coding the SageMath Cloud


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Domino, a Python PaaS for data science

By Vasudev Ram

Domino (dominoup.com) is a new Platform as a Service (PaaS) for data science. It supports Python, the R language and Matlab.

I saw it via a retweet by Cameron Laird (@Phaseit).

I signed up and tried Domino, using their sample Python project. It prints "hello", and plots a simple graph using matplotlib.

To do this, I had to download their command-line tool called domino; this is a one-time task. Then I used it to download the project to my PC.

Then I ran it on Domino, with "domino run main.py". This gives you a message that the run has started on their server, and prints a link where you can check the status of the run. The run command will also upload the project files if they are newer on your machine than on Domino. Running "domino" gives the help for the command, and they also have a help section on their web site with a lot of info.

I did encounter a couple of issues, one is fixed, the other is minor and will soon be fixed.

Here is a screenshot of the results:

They have an interactive web wizard that guides you through the steps of creating and running your first project, even though the steps are quite simple. And that is one thing I like about Domino. They seem to be trying to take the pain (and routine work) out of deployment and running of apps in the cloud. In fact, that's what they say on their home page, or words to that effect. Also, I've exchanged several emails with the founders, regarding various questions I had about Domino and its capabilities, and their responses have been prompt and helpful.

Domino also emails you a notification when the run ends, with a link you can click to see the results page, including the output, which you can download.

I was interested to see that Domino uses Docker, which has been in the news a lot lately.

Docker on Wikipedia.

An article on Linux.com about Docker: Docker: A 'Shipping Container' for Linux Code

Domino uses Docker - a post by Domino on the Docker blog.

[ Update: I checked a bit more and saw that Docker uses LXC (LinuX Containers), which in turn use cgroups, a Linux kernel feature originally written by two people at Google. according to Wikipedia. ]

Domino Data Lab on Twitter.

One of their tweets (in response to a query) says, "Perl coming soon. C on the list".

- Vasudev Ram - Dancing Bison Enterprises

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Amazon Web Services CLI rewritten in Python

By Vasudev Ram

The Amazon Web Services Command Line Interface (AWS CLI) has been rewritten, in Python.

Saw this news in a thread on the Python Reddit.

According to the thread, it (the AWS CLI) was earlier written in Java, and now uses Python, and either boto or boto-core.

I had blogged about boto here, earlier. boto is a Python library to enable access to Amazon Web Services, written by Mitch Garnaat.

The Google command line tool gsutil also uses boto.

If you are interested in creating command line tools for Unix or Linux systems, you may like to read my tutorial article on the topic, published on IBM developerWorks:

Developing a Linux command-line utility

Though the tutorial uses the C language, many of the concepts discussed in the article are applicable to writing command line tools in Python as well, because, when writing such tools, you will basically be using the C library and Unix features such as standard input, standard output, pipes and I/O redirection, but via Python.

---

O'Reilly Velocity Conference

---

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Free Python PaaS - Red Hat OpenShift free tier

Checking out Red Hat's Open Shift.

OpenShift is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) from Red Hat.

It supports Python, as well as many other popular languages.

It has a free tier.

I read about it here:

Self hosted Python web hosting platforms : Python

That Python Reddit link mentioning OpenShift also has some other interesting comments on the same overall topic of "Self hosted Python web hosting platforms".

- Vasudev.

CloudJee from Pramati: Java apps in the cloud

CloudJee | Mission Critical Java Apps in the cloud

CloudJee is a Java cloud apps company/product from Pramati, an Indian software  company.

http://www.cloudjee.com/customers

http://pramati.com/about

http://m.prnewswire.com/news-releases/announcing-cloudjee-the-proven-cloud-platform-for-building-mission-critical-java-saas-applications-208471431.html

I remember Pramati from the early days of Java and J(2)EE. They were the first and maybe the only Indian company to create a J2EE (Java 2 Enterprise Edition - now called JEE) application server. Interesting to see that they have been existing all this while, and have come out with CloudJee.

CloudJee/Pramati also recently acquired WaveMaker, a tool for building Java apps, from VMware, and have integrated it into CloudJee.

http://gigaom.com/2013/05/01/vmware-garage-sale-continues-as-it-offloads-wavemaker-to-pramati/

- Vasudev Ram
dancingbison.com

Netflix's many uses of Python

The Netflix Tech Blog: Python at Netflix

Interesting article.

They talk about using Python for many areas at Netflix, including for the cloud (AWS), caching, process management, web interfaces, data crunching and REST.

I've come across many different uses of Python before, like others have (after all, it is a versatile language, with many "batteries included"), but this may be the first post I've seen that talks about so many uses of Python at one place.

- Vasudev
dancingbison.com

IBM to adopt OpenStack as foundation of its cloud offerings

IBM Makes OpenStack The Cloud Platform To Beat – ReadWrite

Here is the IBM press release about their plans to use OpenStack:

http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40519.wss

Also follow IBM Cloud on Twitter to see what they are up to (heh:):

https://mobile.twitter.com/ibmcloud

Interesting news, recent, seen via Twitter.

OpenStack (and its history) are interesting too:

http://www.openstack.org/

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenStack

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/openstack/

http://www.wired.com/insights/2012/06/nasa-openstack-amazon/

Parts of OpenStack, including the core, OpenStack Compute (Nova), are written in Python.

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/09/openstack-2/

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/04/citrix-cloudstack/

Go language can be deployed on dotCloud - experimental

Golang on dotCloud - January Hackday Project - dotCloud blog

Interestingly, this is by a guy who uses Python a good amount, apparently.

Go figure ...

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5135054

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com
Software consulting and training (***Python, Linux, databases, open source software)

Freakingly fascinating article by pmarca (Marc Andreessen)

Marc Andreessen On The Future Of Enterprise - TechCrunch

I blogged it in last post but blogging it again after reading more of the article (50 short pages on my  mobile) because I think it is worth reading for anyone interested in the future of (Internet)  technology vis-a-vis business, whether they agree with it or not, even though I'm not sure I understand or agree with all the points mentioned - he covers many topics.

- Vasudev Ram
dancingbison.com

URL for PiCloud Notebook (based on IPython)

In my recent post about PiCloud Notebook, I missed out giving the URL for it, due to some issues with posting from a new and unfamiliar phone.

Here it is:

http://blog.picloud.com/2012/12/23/introducing-the-picloud-notebook/

- Vasudev Ram
www.dancingbison.com

Cloudera gets $65 mil more to grow Hadoop based Big Data offerings

Cloudera snares $65M more to boost international, enterprise growth | Data | GigaOM

Cloudera team includes Mike Olsen of Berkeley DB / Sleepycat Software / Oracle, and Doug Cutting of Lucene and Nutch, among others.

BsdDb (Berkeley DB) libraries are available for C, Python and other languages.

BSDDB is embedded in millions of computers and devices, like SQLite is.

SQLite (and Linux) may be among the most widely deployed and used software in the world, considering that both are used in the growing millions of Android phones worldwide.

http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/home.html

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudera