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Month: January 2017

Thoughts and Goals for the Upcoming Year

It’s been an interesting year both career wise and generally.  This last year, I’ve had the amazing opportunity to speak at numerous conferences around the world, as well as give classes all over the world in data science and Apache Drill.  I’ve also learned a lot about the internals of Drill and even contributed to the codebase.  With that said, one can never rest on one’s laurels and as such I have a lot in store for the year.

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Off Topic: Why I simultaneously love and hate Apple

I confess, I’m an Apple user.  My first computer when I was a wee lad was a Wozniak edition Apple IIGS, and then a Mac Plus.  I went over to PCs for a while but returned to the Mac years ago and love every minute of it.  I love the attention to detail that Apple puts into their products and the emphasis on good design.  I’m not an Apple snob or anything, but I do think it is a shame that Apple hasn’t made better penetration into large enterprises, and I admit that I do wince a little every time I go into a client site and see row after row of Windows PCs… but I digress.

Why I love Apple…

In the last update of iTunes for Mac, Apple did something that truly knocked my socks off:  Apple finally figured out how to handle classical music.

Let me explain.  If you are cataloging pop music, you will want to store the performer and the song title.  The album info may or may not be relevant but the key fields are the performer and song title.  In classical music, these fields are significantly less important in that the title of a piece might be “Symphony #5” or something like that.  What you really care about is the combination of composer AND the title.  (IE: Tchaikovsky’s violin concerto is a different work than Mendelssohn’s violin concerto) But wait… there’s more.

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