This last week I have been reading Docker Up & Running by Karl Matthias and Sean P. Kane, a newly published book on Docker – a container technology which is designed to simplify the process of application testing and deployment. Docker is a very new product, first announced in March 2013, although it is based […]
Apache Spark is a system for doing data analysis which can be run on a single machine or across a cluster, it is pretty new technology – initial work was in 2009 and Apache adopted it in 2013. There’s a lot of buzz around it, and I have a problem for which it might be […]
A little while ago I reviewed Ken Cherven’s book Network Graph Analysis and Visualisation with Gephi, it’s fair to say I was not very complementary about it. It was rather short, and had quite a lot of screenshots. It’s strength was in introducing every single element of the Gephi interface. This book, Mastering Gephi Network […]
Amongst hipster start ups in the tech industry Bitcoin has been a thing for a while. As one of the more elderly members of this community I wanted to understand a bit more about it. Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Paul Vigna and Michael Casey fits this […]
A break since my last book review since I’ve been coding, rather than reading, on the commute into the ScraperWiki offices in Liverpool. Next up is How Linux Works by Brian Ward. In some senses this book follows on from Data Science at the Command Line by Jeroen Janssens. Data Science was about doing analysis […]
In the mixed environment of ScraperWiki we make use of a broad variety of tools for data analysis. Data Science at the Command Line by Jeroen Janssens covers tools available at the Linux command line for doing data analysis tasks. The book is divided thematically into chapters on Obtaining, Scrubbing, Modeling, Interpreting Data with “intermezzo” […]
Pair programming is an important part of the Agile process but sometimes the programmers are not physically co-located. At ScraperWiki we have staff who do both scheduled and ad hoc remote working therefore methods for working together remotely are important to us. A result of a casual comment on Twitter, I picked up “Remote Pairing” […]
Regular readers will know I am on a bit of a graph binge at the moment. In computer science and mathematics graphs are collections of nodes joined by edges, they have all sorts of applications including the study of social networks and route finding. Having covered graph theory and visualisation, I now move on to […]
I am on a bit of a graph theory binge, it started with an attempt to learn about Gephi, the graph visualisation software, which developed into reading a proper grown up book on graph theory. I then learnt a little more about practicalities on reading Seven Databases in Seven Weeks, which included a section on […]
I came to databases a little late in life, as a physical scientist I didn’t have much call for them. Then a few years ago I discovered the wonders of relational databases and the power of SQL. The ScraperWiki platform strongly encourages you to save data to SQLite databases to integrate with its tools. There […]
