I'm going to be giving a talk on Azure Machine Learning for my employer, so you'll probably see a few ML-related topics on the blog as I put together some thoughts. My first post on the topic will be linking to David Crook's ML talk. His slides and code are freely available. David moves a…
satRdays
Steph Locke is starting up satRdays, the R equivalent to SQL Saturdays. Right now, she's still in the very early stages of planning, but I'm already excited. The RTP area is full of analysts (if you're interested, join the Research Triangle Analysts Meetup group and attend some of their meetings), and I think we could…
Making Music With SQL Server
This is an old post, but I'm turning Thomas Rushton's idea into a lightning talk for the .NET User Group. Basically, the idea is that you can call Console.Beep with different pitches and for different lengths of time, with the end result being music. I'm also going to demo the Super Mario Brothers theme. Here's…
BimlOnline
The fine folks at Varigence have created BimlOnline, an online BIML tool. It's free during the beta period, so check it out.
Happy Thanksgiving
No technical post today. If you want some of that, go check out Curated SQL. In the meantime, I recommend you eat a lot of turkey and watch a lot of football.
Capturing Deadlocks With Extended Events
Extended Events is the replacement for Profiler. There are a number of advantages to XEs: they are much more lightweight than server-side traces, they can capture more information, and there are more methods for storing this information (including a ring buffer and writing out to disk). My biggest problem with Extended Events is that even with…
Jitter And Color In R
As I work through Practical Data Science with R, I picked up on a jitter function in chapter 3 (free download). I'm going to explore that jitter function a bit in this post. Setup If you want to follow along, grab the data set from the authors' GitHub repo. The relevant data file is in…
Podcasts I’m Enjoying
With winter comes colder temperatures, and that means I have to put the top up on the Miata. That is unfortunate for many reasons, but one of the plus sides is that I can comfortably listen to podcasts in my car, squeezing in a few extra hours of learning each week. Here are the main podcasts I'm…
Pluralsight Reviews: Ethical Hacking: Reconnaissance/Footprinting
This review covers Dale Meredith’s Ethical Hacking: Reconnaissance/Footprinting. The material in this course follows pretty closely to the Certified Ethical Hacker material on the topic, and I think Meredith’s rendition has many of the same benefits and flaws that I found with the CEH literature. The course is 3 1/2 hours long, so it might…
My Personality Insights and Tone Analyzer
Based on Kevin's experiment from a few days ago, I decided to try out the personality analyzer. I started with a section of the first chapter of my dissertation and got the following: You are inner-directed, skeptical and can be perceived as insensitive. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas…
36 Chambers - The Legendary Journeys: Execution to the max! 