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Erik Gfesser

📍 Greater Chicago Area

Product Reviews: Part 5

This past Thursday (May 24, 2012), my Amazon reviews hit two milestones: 1500 cast votes and a breaking of the Top Review Ranking of 2000 for the first time in almost 2 years, bringing it to 1967. Over the last 2 months, my ranking shot up about 500 spots due

New Book Review: "HBase: The Definitive Guide"

New book review for HBase: The Definitive Guide, by Lars George, O'Reilly, 2011, reposted here: This text is amongst the few books I have read in my career which not only serves as a great introduction to a technology, but also provides significant content for both advanced users

BigDataCamp Chicago (April 21, 2012)

Personal notes from BigDataCamp Chicago attended yesterday at Morningstar. The first BigDataCamp Chicago, for which I registrered but could not attend, was held on November 19, 2011. This time around, the title for this event was amended to include "Open Data", to emphasize working with data publicly made

Google Analytics: 2.5 Years

In looking at the calendar, I realized that it was about time that I submit another post for a periodic series focused on Google Analytics, which I put in place for this blog about 2.5 years ago (October 2009), although the history of this blog stretches back another 6

New Book Review: "The Wrong Answer Faster"

New book review for The Wrong Answer Faster: The Inside Story of Making the Machine that Trades Trillions, by Michael Goodkin, Wiley, 2012, reposted here: A coming of age story of a man and an industry. As a first generation American, a Chicago-area native, and a software professional, I find

New Release: IBM DB2 10

While doing some research for a recent client, I came across a press release that announces the planned release of DB2 10 later this month (April 2012). At another previous client a couple years ago, I used DB2 9.5, and have not needed (or necessarily wanted) to look into

New Book Review: "Strategy and the Fat Smoker"

New book review for Strategy and the Fat Smoker: Doing What's Obvious But Not Easy, by David H. Maister, The Spangle Press, 2008, reposted here: When I first saw this title, I was inclined to think that the author had intended the phrase "fat smoker" to

New Book Review: "Hadoop in Action"

New book review for Hadoop in Action, by Chuck Lam, Manning Publications, 2010, reposted here: After checking out reviews of what O'Reilly and Apress had to offer with regard to Hadoop, I ended up purchasing this book based on positive reviews, my past positive experiences with the Manning

New Book Review: "Confessions of a Public Speaker"

New book review for Confessions of a Public Speaker, by Scott Berkun, O'Reilly, 2011, reposted here: About a year ago, shortly after one of the directors at the consulting firm with which I am currently employed recommended that I look into speaking on a more formal basis, partially

From the Trenches: IBM WebSphere WMB, WTX, MQ

At the moment, I am resurfacing after having spent nearly the last 6 months in the trenches of IBM WebSphere Message Broker (WMB) 6.1.0.9, IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX) 8.2.0.4, and IBM WebSphere MQ 6.0, a set of products that were inherent constraints