Skip to main content

SyncLunch January 2013 - Darren Cook on Data Analysis Review

I don’t usually blog a review of the SyncNorwich lunches, but the January SyncLunch was something special, we had a speaker! Darren Cook contacted me before Christmas expressing a desire to come and speak to the group. However we didn’t have any meetings on the days he was available, so as the January lunch hadn’t been booked at that time I booked it for one of those days.

Darren Cook is a professional data analyst, software developer and entrepreneur. He is director at QQ Trends, a company that solves difficult software and data challenges for its clients. He is currently based in Tokyo, but originally from Norwich, and was in Norfolk over the holiday period this year. He talked about how eating more chocolate allows you to extract more value from your data.

Darren has a gentle engaging style that is very easy to listen to and understand. He actually spoke about how the amount of chocolate a country eats is statistically relative to the number of Nobel prizes it has. This had me baffled for a while, but was clear once Darren explained the reason for the correlation. Darren’s presentation was very interesting and entertaining. I am hoping that we can have him speak at one of our larger meetings the next time he’s in the UK.

Next month we’re moving to a new restaurant for the SyncLunches. The February SyncLunch with be on Wednesday 6th February at The Library at 1pm.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7

I recently upgraded from Tomcat 6 to Tomcat 7 and all of my Ant deployment scripts stopped working. I eventually worked out why and made the necessary changes, but there doesn’t seem to be a complete description of how to use Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 on the web so I thought I'd write one. To start with, make sure Tomcat manager is configured for use by Catalina-Ant. Make sure that manager-script is included in the roles for one of the users in TOMCAT_HOME/conf/tomcat-users.xml . For example: <tomcat-users> <user name="admin" password="s3cr£t" roles="manager-gui, manager-script "/> </tomcat-users> Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 6 was encapsulated within a single JAR file. Catalina-Ant for Tomcat 7 requires four JAR files. One from TOMCAT_HOME/bin : tomcat-juli.jar and three from TOMCAT_HOME/lib: catalina-ant.jar tomcat-coyote.jar tomcat-util.jar There are at least three ways of making the JARs available to Ant: Copy the JARs into th...

Write Your Own Load Balancer: A worked Example

I was out walking with a techie friend of mine I’d not seen for a while and he asked me if I’d written anything recently. I hadn’t, other than an article on data sharing a few months before and I realised I was missing it. Well, not the writing itself, but the end result. In the last few weeks, another friend of mine, John Cricket , has been setting weekly code challenges via linkedin and his new website, https://codingchallenges.fyi/ . They were all quite interesting, but one in particular on writing load balancers appealed, so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone and write up a worked example. You’ll find my worked example below. The challenge itself is italics and voice is that of John Crickets. The Coding Challenge https://codingchallenges.fyi/challenges/challenge-load-balancer/ Write Your Own Load Balancer This challenge is to build your own application layer load balancer. A load balancer sits in front of a group of servers and routes client requests across all of the serv...

AWS Summit London 2025

It felt good to be back at the AWS Summit . I got a lot out of last year and this year was interesting too. I attended some sessions on interesting topics and some which reassured me I’m doing the right things.  It was good to catch up with some old friends, see my colleagues in person and chat with some of our suppliers at their stands. For an event which boasts 24,000 attendees, most things run extremely smoothly. My only real gripes are not being able to get into some sessions as they were full and the length of time it takes to get a cuppa! Keynote I skipped the keynote last year as I was keen to get on with some hands on labs. This year I thought I’d find out what it was all about. It took place in the 4000 capacity auditorium, but that was full, so I watched in one of the many smaller theatres.  The theatres aren’t exactly small, each one holds more people than the entire nor(DEV):con conference in Norwich. Each is separated by only a curtain and headphones are provided...