• Getting Started with Microsoft SQL 2019 Big Data clusters

    Microsoft latest SQL Server 2019 (preview) comes in a new version, the SQL Server 2019 Big Data cluster (BDC). There are a couple of cool things about the BDC version: (1) it runs on Kubernetes (2) it integrates a sharded SQL engine (3) it integrates HDFS (a distributed file storage) (4) it integrates Spark (a distributed compute engine) (5) and both services Spark and HDFS run behind an Apache Knox Gateway (HTTPS application gateway for Hadoop).

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  • Introduction to BigData, Hadoop and Spark

    Everyone is speaking about Big Data and Data Lakes these days. Many IT professionals see Apache Spark as the solution to every problem. At the same time, Apache Hadoop has been around for more than 10 years and won’t go away anytime soon. In this blog post I want to give a brief introduction to Big Data, demystify some of the main concepts such as Map Reduce, and highlight the similarities and differences between Hadoop and Spark.

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  • Bing Maps API - Rest Locations (Geocoding)

    The Bing Maps APIs provide a REST API for Geocoding, hence finding a location based on a text input. This text input can be either a structured address or an (unstructured) search query. In this blog post we will see how to request a developer key and use the REST API for finding the coordinates to a query using the Bing Maps Location API.

    Request an API key

    If you already use Azure or have an Azure account, then you can request an API key directly from within Azure. To do so, log into your Azure account and go to the Marketplace. Search for Bing Maps API for Enterprise, select your pricing model and add it to your Azure account. The tier level 1 is free and grants you 10K requests/month. You can find more pricing information in the product documentation.

    If you don’t have an Azure account then you can request an API key from the Bing Maps Portal.

    Locations API (Rest)

    There are 2 types of queries available in the Locations API, structured and unstructured queries. In this example we will use an unstructured query to query the API with a search term. However, you can also find examples using structured queries on the Bing Maps Location API documentation.

    Let’s find the geolocation of Howth an Irish village in east central Dublin. To run this, you have to replace the <accesskey> placeholder with you own access key in the following snippet.

    $ curl http://dev.virtualearth.net/REST/v1/Locations?query=Howth+Dublin&include=queryParse&key=<accesskey>&output=json
    
    {
      "authenticationResultCode": "ValidCredentials",
      "brandLogoUri": "http://dev.virtualearth.net/Branding/logo_powered_by.png",
      "copyright": "Copyright © 2018 Microsoft and its suppliers. All rights reserved. This API cannot be accessed and the content and any results may not be used, reproduced or transmitted in any manner without express written permission from Microsoft Corporation.",
      "resourceSets": [
        {
          "estimatedTotal": 2,
          "resources": [
            {
              "__type": "Location:http://schemas.microsoft.com/search/local/ws/rest/v1",
              "bbox": [
                53.3509009854156,
                -6.12213139880203,
                53.4088417514008,
                -5.99270815503098
              ],
              "name": "Howth, Ireland",
              "point": {
                "type": "Point",
                "coordinates": [
                  53.3798713684082,
                  -6.0574197769165
                ]
              },
              "address": {
                "adminDistrict": "Dublin",
                "countryRegion": "Ireland",
                "formattedAddress": "Howth, Ireland",
                "locality": "Howth"
              },
              "confidence": "High",
              "entityType": "PopulatedPlace",
              "geocodePoints": [
                {
                  "type": "Point",
                  "coordinates": [
                    53.3798713684082,
                    -6.0574197769165
                  ],
                  "calculationMethod": "Rooftop",
                  "usageTypes": [
                    "Display"
                  ]
                }
              ],
              "matchCodes": [
                "Ambiguous"
              ],
              "queryParseValues": [
                {
                  "property": "Locality",
                  "value": "howth"
                },
                {
                  "property": "AdminDistrict",
                  "value": "dublin"
                }
              ]
            },
            {
              "__type": "Location:http://schemas.microsoft.com/search/local/ws/rest/v1",
              "bbox": [
                53.3849579306227,
                -6.08322532103279,
                53.392683365764,
                -6.06595509125969
              ],
              "name": "Howth, Ireland",
              "point": {
                "type": "Point",
                "coordinates": [
                  53.3888206481934,
                  -6.07459020614624
                ]
              },
              "address": {
                "adminDistrict": "Dublin",
                "countryRegion": "Ireland",
                "formattedAddress": "Howth, Ireland",
                "locality": "Howth"
              },
              "confidence": "Medium",
              "entityType": "RailwayStation",
              "geocodePoints": [
                {
                  "type": "Point",
                  "coordinates": [
                    53.3888206481934,
                    -6.07459020614624
                  ],
                  "calculationMethod": "Rooftop",
                  "usageTypes": [
                    "Display"
                  ]
                }
              ],
              "matchCodes": [
                "Ambiguous"
              ],
              "queryParseValues": [
                {
                  "property": "Landmark",
                  "value": "howth"
                },
                {
                  "property": "AdminDistrict",
                  "value": "dublin"
                }
              ]
            }
          ]
        }
      ],
      "statusCode": 200,
      "statusDescription": "OK",
      "traceId": "40fdef3af24f4784ace0cce7eac525d8|DB40060332|7.7.0.0|Ref A: 4E51EFC390E74430B0E957794757DF59 Ref B: DB3EDGE1021 Ref C: 2018-07-31T13:59:46Z"
    }
    

    In the above code we see that the API returns the geolocation, a bounding box and other useful geo information such as country region and administrative district as a json body.

    With the Bing Maps API, one can also perform Batch operations. You can find more information about Batch operations on the Bing Blog.

    Resources

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  • MS Hack 2018 - Smart Outlook

    In the MS Hack 2018 global Microsoft Hackathon, I joined the Smart Outlook project for 3 days in order to develop a few ideas to make your daily work in Outlook more productive. We came up with a few ideas, mainly about enhancing folders, categories, and focus inbox as well as notifications about new emails. We build a mock UI to visualize the idea of our solution; the code is available on Github.

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  • Resolving _HOST in kerberized HDP Sandbox

    Since HDP-2.5 Hortenworks provides its HDP Sandbox within a docker container within a Virtual Machine ISO. For many developers working with multiple VM HDP Sandboxes this is not optimal, as we always have to tunnel each connection through the VM host into the docker container. That’s why we are building our own custom Sandbox. However, when building a kerberized Hadoop installation, it is a bit tricky to configure a hostname such that Kerberos principals resolve the _HOST variable properly.

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  • Intro to Deep Learning for Computer Vision

    The field of Deep Learning (DL) is rapidly growing and surpassing traditional approaches for machine learning and pattern recognition since 2012 by a factor 10%-20% in accuracy. This blog post gives an introduction to DL and its applications in computer vision with a focus on understanding state-of-the-art architectures such as AlexNet, GoogLeNet, VGG, and ResNet and methodologies such as classification, localization, segmentation, detection and recognition. It is based on a presentation that I held in the Seminar of Computer Graphics at Vienna University of Technology.

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  • Data-driven Visualizations

    I gave a talk about data-driven visualizations an D3.js at the last ViennaJS October Meetup (28.10.2015). Here are the links to the talk and the slides.

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  • Installing Visual Studio Code on Ubuntu

    Visual Studio Code is an open source multi-platform IDE for web development (especially JavaScript and Typescript) - enough reasons for me to check it out.

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  • Swiss Web Audio Group: 1st Meetup

    In the first official meetup of the Swiss Web Audio Group (SWAG) we talked about Soundio, Soundio, Music JSON and Soundio.

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  • Sound.io Introduction

    The sound.io core library implements a graph object model for audio - we are calling this the audio graph. The audio graph can be constructed out of a collection of audio-objects and connections that links the audio-objects together.

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