April 2010
Paul Ingles - Articles - MapReduce with Hadoop... →
The mandy-local command just uses some shell commands to imitate the MapReduce process. If you try running the same command over a larger dataset you’ll come unstuck. So let’s see how we run the same example on a real Hadoop cluster. Note, that for this to work you’ll need to either have a Hadoop cluster or Hadoop running locally in pseudo-distributed mode.
Paul Ingles - Articles - MapReduce with Hadoop... →
The quantity of data we analyse at Forward every day has grown nearly ten-fold in just over 18 months. Today we run almost all of our automated daily processing on Hadoop. The vast majority of that analysis is automated using Ruby and our open-source gem: Mandy.
Hadoop Streaming →
Hadoop streaming is a utility that comes with the Hadoop distribution. The utility allows you to create and run map/reduce jobs with any executable or script as the mapper and/or the reducer.
Advanced keypress navigation with jQuery →
For some reason, when “keypress” is used, Safari can’t retrieve the keyCode for the arrow keys.
March 2010
Building a Better JavaScript Profiler with WebKit... →
I had the pleasure of showing off some the cool new features we’ve been adding to the WebKit inspector at JSConf last week. It’s no secret that debugging basically sucks in JavaScript, and until recently, it was a little bit worse in Objective-J. Up until now we’ve focused mainly on adding stop gap measures to our own code, but recently we’ve decided to shift gears and attack the problem head on...
Clonezilla →
Clonezilla, based on DRBL, partclone, Partition Image, ntfsclone and udpcast, allows you to do bare metal backup and recovery. Two types of Clonezilla are available, Clonezilla live and Clonezilla SE (server edition). Clonezilla live is suitable for single machine backup and restore. While Clonezilla SE is for massive deployment, it can clone many (40 plus!) computers simultaneously....
Sqoop « Cloudera » Apache Hadoop for the... →
Sqoop is a tool designed to import data from relational databases into Hadoop. Sqoop uses JDBC to connect to a database. It examines each table’s schema and automatically generates the necessary classes to import data into the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). Sqoop then creates and launches a MapReduce job to read tables from the database via DBInputFormat, the JDBC-based InputFormat. Tables...
The Lowdown on Routes in Rails 3 | Engine Yard... →
Stop! I’d like to tell you something important, but it may be a bit shocking, so you should probably have a seat. Here goes: everything you knew about working with routes in Rails 2… is history! With Rails 3, you’ve got to roll up your sleeves, unlearn what you learned, and route the new way around. And this time, it’s faster, cleaner and a lot more Ruby-like.
Ajaxian » CSS gets more Sassy with version 3 →
Nathan Weizenbaum promised that Sass will become a superset of CSS back in June 17, 2009. And we now have version 3 of Sass and Haml available that brings life to the promise
A List Apart: Articles: Contrast is King →
Remember thrusting your hand into a big pail of mixed-up, broken crayons (or gently reaching for your box of perfectly ordered, mint-condition crayons), then leafing through your construction paper to find the perfect hue to go with your chosen sticks of pigmented wax? Or, did you hunt for the perfect piece of construction paper first, then search for the ideal crayons to go with the paper?
Web Designer's Checklist, Web Designers' Browser... →
# CSS3 Properties # CSS3 Selectors # Web Applications # Embedded Content # Web Forms 2.0
EGit →
EGit is an Eclipse Team provider for the Git version control system. Git is a distributed SCM, which means every developer has a full copy of all history of every revision of the code, making queries against the history very fast and versatile.
Oooh, that's Clever! (unnatural experiments in web... →
Clearleft’s Paul Annet talks about simple, clever little tricks that can make web pages pleasing. This is a slideshow with audio. No accompanying video, but if you jump to the end, you’ll find links for the videos shown during the talk. More at Paul Annet’s site.
Marvell's Plug Computer: A tiny, discrete, fully... →
Analysis Opinion - Marvell announced today a new type of computer. It’s about the size of an AC to DC converting wall outlet plug, but is really a full SoC with a 1200 MHz CPU, built-in 512 MB Flash, 512 MB DRAM, Gigabit Ethernet and USB 2.0 support. It runs small versions of Linux, consumes about 5 watts max while allowing remote users (presumably those authorized by the...
Multiprocessing with Python →
Learn to scale your UNIX® Python applications to multiple cores by using the multiprocessing module which is built into Python 2.6. Multiprocessing mimics parts of the threading API in Python to give the developer a high level of control over flocks of processes, but also incorporates many additional features unique to processes.
Zero Intelligence Agents » UPDATED: Must-Have... →
Python is the greatest thing to happen to computer science since the Turing Machine! Well, no, but it has inspired me into a personal renaissance for software writing. Its flexibility, widespread community support, and leveraging of legacy C and Fortran code also make it an outstanding language for social science researchers. If you are a new researcher looking to get started, or experienced and...
Ajaxian » Chrome Embeds Flash! →
For some time now, Adobe has been working with platform vendors to include the Flash plug-in pre-loaded. We’ve seen this ages ago in Windows, and more recently with Adobe’s efforts in the Open Screen Project.
Ajaxian » Chrome Embeds Flash! →
For some time now, Adobe has been working with platform vendors to include the Flash plug-in pre-loaded. We’ve seen this ages ago in Windows, and more recently with Adobe’s efforts in the Open Screen Project.
Rounded Corners in Internet Explorer: Staying... →
This article discusses adding rounded corners to a Web page layout and provides links to several techniques to accomplish this in Internet Explorer 8 and earlier.
jiffy-web - Project Hosting on Google Code →
Jiffy is an end-to-end real-world web page instrumentation and measurement suite. The first beta was released on 6/23/2008, as announced at O’Reilly Velocity 2008. Here’s a a copy of the slides and here’s the video. Jiffy was built and is maintained by the WhitePages.com team.
Jiffy Firefox Extension - Documentation →
The Jiffy Firefox Extension is written Bill Scott of Netflix. It adds an additional panel to Firebug that provides a visual view of the Javascript time measurements captured by Jiffy-Web. The extension is available under Creative Commons license. Jiffy-Web is a fine-grained and flexible website performance tracking and analysis suite written by Scott Ruthfield and the team at Whitepages.com. The...
Bionic Vision Australia →
Bionic Vision Australia (BVA) is a partnership of world-leading Australian research institutions collaborating to develop an advanced retinal prosthesis, or bionic eye, to restore the sense of vision to people with degenerative or inherited retinal disease.
FlexPaper - the open source document viewer... →
Welcome to the FlexPaper Project. The open source web based document viewer.
Open Source QR Code Library →
This project develops and distributes QR Code decode/encode library under GPL v2. The project goal is Utilize QR Code embedded information for programmable devices all over the world. QR Code is the industrial standard, JIS-X-0510 and ISO/IEC18004.
sustrik's zeromq2 at master - GitHub →
The 0MQ lightweight messaging kernel is a library which extends the standard socket interfaces with features traditionally provided by specialised messaging middleware products. 0MQ sockets provide an abstraction of asynchronous message queues, multiple messaging patterns, message filtering (subscriptions), seamless access to multiple transport protocols and more.
zeromq: Fastest. Messaging. Ever. →
Imagine pipes that connect your app to many other apps. That lets you talk using a simple socket API. From any language and on any OS. Really fast, that gets out of your way. It’s like TCP on steroids!
SeatGeek Predicts the Best Time to Buy Concert and... →
Quick Pitch: SeatGeek is a free, innovative search and forecasting web application that helps users save money on sports and concert tickets. Genius Idea: SeatGeek is a website that analyzes ticket sales for events and makes predictions as to the best time to buy in the resale market.
Colorful Sliders With jQuery & CSS3 – Tutorialzine →
In this tutorial we are using jQuery and the new transformation features brought by CSS3 to create a three dimensional dynamic slider effect. The techniques presented here – for creating sliders, and CSS dynamic resizable bars, can be used together or in part for powering all sorts of jQuery goodness.
Papers on PageRank you should read | Science for... →
PageRank is a standard and much discussed topic in SEO and while it is relevant, the methods and techniques discussed are often not. There is a lot of discussion around the original PageRank formula which is relevant, but there have been many changes and improvements since 1998. If you are an SEO who works with PageRank, you should read the following list of papers because they show that...
InfoQ: Basking in the Limelight →
Micah Martin introduces Limelight, a JRuby GUI library that uses the theater metaphor for writing GUIs. The talk introduces basic concepts, how to style GUIs, and much more.
InfoQ: Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 Released →
After more than six months in beta, the Adobe Flex developer team has posted on their official blog the final version of the Flex 4 SDK and Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder). While the Flex SDK is available for all platforms, Flash Builder 4 is currently only supported on Windows and Mac OS X - Linux developers will need to continue running the alpha version of Flex Builder 3 available at...
AirMail API — Urban Airship API v0.1 documentation →
Urban Airship’s AirMail API allows mobile developers to send persistent application specific messages to their users without needing their email addresses or other personally identifiable information. These messages are, where possible, backed by push notifications. Our AirMail API gives you inexpensive real time fully interactive messaging.
AirMail Client — Urban Airship API v0.1... →
Urban Airship’s AirMail gives you a drop-in user interface that provides push notification persitance and rich messaging. The AirMail client is a reference implementation of the AirMail API.
Ehcache - Cache Server →
Ehcache now comes with a Cache Server, available as a WAR for most web containers, or as a standalone server. The Cache Server has two APIs: RESTful resource oriented, and SOAP. Both support clients in any programming language. (A Note on terminology: Leonard Richardson and Sam Ruby have done a great job of clarifying the different Web Services architectures and distinguishing them from each...
Ehcache - Ehcache - Performance At Any Scale →
Ehcache is an open source, standards-based cache used to boost performance, offload the database and simplify scalability. Ehcache is robust, proven and full-featured and this has made it the most widely-used Java-based cache. It can scale from in-process with one or more nodes through to a mixed in-process/out-of-process configuration with terabyte-sized caches. For applications needing a...
10 Awesome Tools To Get More Out of Wikipedia - by... →
Wikipedia is an ocean of information. While you may still want to seek secondary information sources before trusting it entirely, you cannot argue that the site contains a plethora of useful information.
The State of the Internet Operating System -... →
On a standalone computer, operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the machine’s resources, making it possible for applications to focus on the job they do for the user. But many of the activities that are most important to us today take place in a mysterious space between individual machines. Most people take for granted that these things just work, and complain when the...
Introducing "Aristo", A jQuery UI Theme — Nothing... →
Ace and Aristo are the respective open source themes of SproutCore and Cappuccino, applied to their parent JavaScript libraries. You can see a great comparison of the two in this article by Allen Pike. Both UI libraries duplicate the functionality of jQuery UI slightly, but look simply amazing doing so. I had already started mocking and building my own jQuery UI theme when I re-discovered the...
Ruby Hero Awards →
There are many people in the Ruby/Rails world who contribute to our community and rarely receive any recognition or payment for their work.
Quick Tip: How to Target IE6, IE7, and IE8... →
Two months ago, I, in a video quick tip, demonstrated how to use the underscore and star hacks to target Internet Explorer 6 and 7 in your stylesheets. In today’s quick tip, we’ll take things one step further, as we introduce a new hack that targets IE8 and below as well. It should be noted that this is not a best practice, and conditional comments should be used instead 98% of the time. With that...
Ajaxian » Ext Designer 1.0: WYSIWYG application... →
This has been said, because Ext is a very high level language for Web development. Almost DSL like, versus low level functions that you can sprinkle in your code. If you by into the Ext way, then you can build UIs in a very simple manner, through JSON. This is perfectly setup for a design tool, and with Ext Designer, they have it.
paperplanes. How To Redis →
We’ve covered some good ground already, some blabber about Redis in general, and also some thoughts on when using it could be beneficial. The other big question is: How do I integrate that stuff in my application? How do I get my objects to be stored neatly in Redis? The simplest way is to just use the redis-rb library and talk to Redis almost directly. That’s quite low level compared...
FullCalendar - Full-sized Calendar jQuery Plugin →
FullCalendar is a jQuery plugin that provides a full-sized, drag & drop calendar like the one below. It uses AJAX to fetch events on-the-fly for each month and is easily configured to use your own feed format (an extension is provided for Google Calendar). It is visually customizable and exposes hooks for user-triggered events (like clicking or dragging an event).
Ruby Module Mixin Awesomeness « Rails Rant →
The deeper I dig into Rails, the more I need to know about Ruby. I have been learning more about how Ruby does OO. I came to Ruby from Java and at first things like modules were confusing for me. Recently I discovered the power of mixin modules. I was trying to figure out how to put my models into a plugin and then override or add additional functionality to those models. My main reason for doing...
qrcode-rails - Project Hosting on Google Code →
A plugin for Ruby on Rails to generate QRCode (QRコード).
All Things Distributed →
The ability to boot from Amazon EBS gives customers very powerful control over the boot configuration of the Amazon EC2 instances. In the traditional boot process, the root partition of the image will be the local disk, which is created and populated at boot time. In the new Amazon EBS boot process, the root partition is an Amazon EBS volume, which is created at boot time from an Amazon EBS...
NOSQL Databases →
DEFINITION: Next Generation Databases mostly address some of the points: being non-relational, distributed, open-source and horizontal scalable. The original intention has been modern web-scale databases. The movement began early 2009 and is growing rapidly. Often more characteristics apply as: schema-free, replication support, easy API, eventually consistency, and more. So the misleading term...
Amazon's Dynamo - All Things Distributed →
In two weeks we’ll present a paper on the Dynamo technology at SOSP, the prestigious biannual Operating Systems conference. Dynamo is internal technology developed at Amazon to address the need for an incrementally scalable, highly-available key-value storage system. The technology is designed to give its users the ability to trade-off cost, consistency, durability and performance, while...
Play framework ★ Home →
Finally a Java framework made by Web developers. Discover a clean alternative to bloated enterprise Java stacks. Play focuses on developer productivity and targets RESTful architectures.