Sun, 12 Dec 2010
Hadoop: The Definitive Guide - Short review
Hadoop is one of those technologies that seems to have forever changed
the way parts of the industry work but has had no effect on my
actual job. In an attempt to keep myself current for the after techtalk
conversations I decided to buy Hadoop: The Definitive
Guide, Second Edition by Tom White - and I'm very happy with the
choice.
While there are massive amounts of information online about Hadoop and the ecosystem emerging around it I still found HadoopTDG to be a useful book and worth the money (especially on the iPad as it's a bit big for comfortable tube reading). The explanations are clear, there is enough detail without slowing the book to a crawl and some of the more important side projects are covered, showing outsiders like me which subprojects can help build the bridge in to my existing infrastructure.
A good book, covers a lot of ground and provides a good level of detail - 7/10
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Posted: 2010/12/12 09:12 | /books | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Sat, 11 Dec 2010
Clarifying With Facter
While adopting a configuration management tool like Chef and Puppet will
have a large, nearly immediate effect on your work flow even after using the
tools for a while you'll still get a little smile at all the little niceties
you continuously discover.
One recent small win we had recently was bringing some apache configs files under Puppet command. When we started we had the following block of config:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !10.23.143.33
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !10.23.143.2
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !10.23.143.3
It's not hard to read and roughly understand what it does, but you have no real context; magic numbers keep things terse but are rarely the most helpful when in the land of a strange system. After putting the configs in to a module and abstracting them a little into a template we have the much nicer:
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !<%= primary_loadbalancer %>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !<%= secondary_loadbalancer %>
RewriteCond %{REMOTE_ADDR} !<%= ipaddress_eth0_mgmt %>
As part of the tidy up we also renamed some of the (remarkably large amount of) Ethernet interfaces to describe what they were for, rather than leaving them as eth12:34
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Posted: 2010/12/11 21:35 | /tools/puppet | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
Wed, 08 Dec 2010
London Perl Workshop 2010
Over the years I've had the opportunity to attend a lot of different events
focused on quite a few different programming languages, but none of them
match the sheer enthusiasm and love of the language that you get from
London PM. While there is always a
contingent of LPMers at Perl conferences held further abroad the
London Perl Workshop
is my yearly chance to see lots of old friends, what they've been up to
and discuss what's coming next in our field.
Other than the 3 1/2 hour tube problems getting to the venue (and having to leave the pub early) I had a great time, the organisation and volunteers were as always exceptional and it was a great idea to try and get some speakers from outside the community - and doubly so when you're lucky enough to get the seriously clued PostgreSQL expert Simon Riggs.
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Posted: 2010/12/08 23:23 | /events | Permanent link to this entry | This entry and same date
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