I have four conferences coming up in the next eight weeks.
From 12th-14th February, I'll be attending Kiwi Foo Camp in New Zealand—one of those trips where the travel time is longer than the length of the conference :-)
The day after I get back, I'm off to Atlanta for PyCon. I'm involved in the Pinax tutorial at the start and will be staying all the way through the sprints where we hope to get lots of Pinax done!
Then March 10th-12th I'm in Montréal for ConFoo, the first conference I've been to in a while that's all expenses paid for speakers. I'll be giving a talk on, you guessed it, Pinax. Will be fun to introduce Pinax at a general Web conference.
I'll finish off the month in San Jose for BibleTech March 26th and 27th. I'll be giving two talks there, one on my graded reader project and one on using Pinax for collaborative corpus linguistics (partly talking about Pinax in general and partly talking about some early stage work I'm do specifically on corpus annotation tools in Pinax).
Hope to see many of you at at least one of them!
by : Created on Feb. 5, 2010 : Last modified Feb. 5, 2010 : (permalink)
Say you have a stream of incoming data. Perhaps it's a database table that's monotonically increasing.
You want to do some processing on it that will take a long time because of the size of the data. Say it's one million records.
You take a snap shot and processes the million records. Say that takes 4 hours. In the meantime, ten thousand new records have come in. So you take a snapshot and process those. Say that takes two minutes. In the meantime, a hundred new records have come in. So you take a snapshot of those...and so on.
The analogy with the paradoxes of Zeno of Elea is obvious and so Nicholas Tollervey and I have decided "Zeno processing" might be a useful term for this approach.
At some point the processing is quick enough that either no new data comes in or you can take the stream down for enough time to finish off the processing.
I'm sure there's an existing name for this technique, but I like "Zeno processing".
by : Created on Feb. 1, 2010 : Last modified Feb. 1, 2010 : (permalink)