Friday, September 28, 2007

Zen Habits

I recently came across Zen Habits It's a web site that focuses on habits and practices that make our lifes more fulfilling and enjoyable. I found the articles very helpful and insightful. Give it a go and see what you think.

Wednesday, September 26, 2007

What the Hadoop is going on?

I recently started researching Hadoop, which is a framework for running applications with very large data sets and/or high computational requirements across large numbers of commodity hardware. Large data sets in this case range from TeraBytes to PetaBytes and large numbers of commodity hardware range in the thousands! :) If you are wondering how you could get over a 1000 pcs in one location have a peek at the pic below:



Commodity hardware implies your average pc and related hardware made for consumers. So basically these types of frameworks give you massive processing capabilities by networking heaps of regular PCs.

Hadoop is an implementation of MapReduce. MapReduce is a technique which facilitates the fragmentation of very large processing into smaller fragments (Maps) which can be executed in parallel across the large number of machines. The intermediate results of this processing are further simplified - the reduce.

Hadoop is based on Google's MapReduce implementation. Google's MapReduce further runs over GFS (Google File System) which is a distributed file system. Hadoop has its own MapReduce implementation and HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) which it runs over. The distributed file systems are needed for scalability, performance and fault tolerance.

If you want to give Hadoop a go there is an excellent tutorial on how to set up single node and multinode Hadoop clusters on Ubuntu.

Will Anderson - Wil of God

I'm gathering a group together to go and see Will Anderson at the Powerhouse this November (6th-18th). If you are interested in coming along drop me an email. I will probably buy tickets by next week. A description of the gig can be found here.

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Oktoberfest hits Brisbane

This year the Oktoberfest Brisbane will run from Friday the 5th of October at 2pm to Sunday the 14th of October at the new Musgrave Park venue. Details can be found here. If anyone is interested in going let me know.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Something for Kate

We went to see Something for Kate @ the Zoo over the weekend. They sounded excellent live and there were heaps of SFKers getting into it. One in particular, who seemed to think he was at a rave...must have been the recreationals he was on!

I must say I like the Zoo a whole lot better than the Arena and BEC. We'll be going for more gigs there I suspect. All I have to show for it is this dodgy pic taken with my mobile phone! :) (and a fantastic time ofcourse!)

An excellent "Last Lecture"

Here is a small video of a last lecture given by a professor at Carnegie Mellon University which is pretty awesome:



"If you live your life the right way, the karma will take care of itself, the dreams will come to you" :)

Friday, September 21, 2007

Genesis

Hello, and welcome to my blog! :)

Stay tuned for craziness and some insights! :)