If you have ever wondered how we can connect Tableau to Elasticsearch, this blog post should be of some interest to you. As of Sep 2016, there is no native Elasticsearch connector provided by either Elastic or Tableau, but here’s a tool someone put together which seems to work but require some effort on the … More Connecting Tableau to Elasticsearch
Our liquidambar tree is a bit of an wild lives magnet. The birds come to visit during the day and, the possums, at night. It’s a good thing Talbot, our grey, is himself an animal lover. This kookaburra has been hanging around our backyard for the last month or so, cooing and “laughing” like it’s nobody’s … More Wild Lives Around the House
Our little contribution to the spectacular magnolia blooms around Canberra this time of the year. (Photos taken in the first half of September 2016.)
It’s been 10 years since I started practising Value Investing and it’s time to do a little introspection and write down a few reflections. I hope these reflections can serve as a memory aid to my future self and be of value to others as well. I have always had an affinity to investing because of … More Reflections on Tens Years of Value Investing
There is still another month of chill to get through, but signs of spring are now all around our house in Canberra! Top row: magnolia tree and almond tree; bottom row: liquidambar tree. The birds are starting to come back too. (Photos taken on 27 August 2016.)
Everything that is old is new again. That’s the feeling I get when I look at Spark, which I learned is one of the fastest growing Apache projects in the big data space. There is remarkable similarity in the underlying architecture between Spark and that of a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) Database like Greenplum or … More Apache Spark vs MPP Databases
The Kalman Filter is one of the more useful tools in data science, but while there are a lot of well-written descriptions of the Bayesian tracking technique available online and in technical books/articles, for some reason it’s hard to find a simple derivation of the Kalman Filter from first principles. In this short note, I show how … More A Derivation of the Kalman Filter
The NSW and ACT governments have just announced a ban of greyhound racing starting in 2017 following a Four Corners investigation into animal cruelty in the industry. Taking a long-term view, there can be no doubt that this is a good decision. However, to make sure the decision doesn’t turn into a disaster in the short-term, we … More Life with a Greyhound
Who would have thought a garbage bin can look so interesting? Ice on bin, 16 June 2016, Arndell.
I have never warmed up to the use of “black swan” to signify an improbable but impactful event. The very first swan I saw was a resident at the Australian National University. It was naturally a black swan. For years I saw only black swans — there are many of them living all around Canberra. I saw … More Black Swans, White Swans
Mental Models 4 Life 