Velocity 2010 The Aftermathglow

I was so impressed with Velocity 2009, I really wanted to present something at Velocity 2010.


Thread-limited scalability of memcached
Working with Shanti and Stefan of Oracle (née Sun Microsystems), I was able to accomplish that goal. Our session was rated 92.4%, which is an A+ in anyone's books. Congrats to us and the Velocity organizers and thank you, crowd.

Linear Modeling in R and the Hubble Bubble

Here is a scatter plot with the coordinate labels deliberately omitted.


Figure 1.
Do you see any trends? How would you model these data?

Memcached and Friends at Velocity 2010

This is the week. Starts tomorrow and it's sold out!


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Shanti and I will be presenting at 1300 on Thursday. The Velocity conference is being held at the Hyatt Regency Santa Clara, near Great America.

Playing with Primes in R (Part II)

Popping Part III off the stack—where I ended up unexpectedly discovering that the primes and primlist functions are broken in the schoolmath package on CRAN—let's see what prime numbers look like when computed correctly in R. To do this, I've had to roll my own prime number generating function.

Primes in R (Part III): Schoolmath is Broken!

Here we are in Part III. Wait!? What happened to Parts I and II? Well, I started to write an article about Amdahl's law, parallelism and prime numbers, but found myself buried three levels deep trying to resolve problems with prime numbers in R. My normal inclination is to use Mathematica for such things, but I happened to already be using R for another reason so, I thought I'd see what it had to offer for calculating with primes. It now looks like that might have been a mistake.

Go Guerrill-R on Your Data in August

Guerrill-R, get it? Register now for the Guerrilla Data Analysis Techniques (GDAT) class to be held during the week of August 9-13, 2010. The focus will be on using R and the PDQ-R for computer performance analysis and capacity planning.


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For those of you coming from international locations, here is a table of currency EXCHANGE rates. We look forward to seeing all of you in August!

Calculating the Cost of Elastic Capacity

Neal Richter sent me the following tweet
Unfortunately, the paper ("Optimal staffing policy for queuing systems with cyclic demands," Int. J. Services and Operations Management, 2010) cited in the PhyOrg news item, that Neal tweeted, is not accessible to either him or me. Nonetheless, I found an earlier paper (2007) by the same author (Pen-Yuan Liao), which has a lot of the same words so, I'm assuming they both describe the same thing, more or less. Either way, I'm quite certain the math is the same.