Went to Staples the other day to grab some assorted accessories for work and I saw they had some Brookstone USB Desktop Missile Launchers in the clearence section, so I grabbed one.
What fun, I thought. Plugged it into my work desktop (running LinuxMint Debian Edition) only to find there were no linux drivers for this particular device.
This turned into a nice little weekend project 
Ha! First day of my long awaited vacation and what do I do? Write a blog post about stuff I do at work of course!
A good portion of our team prefers to interface with Hive programatically using the Hive Thrift Server
The more we rely on it, the more we need to harden it.
It is not really setup or packaged for this so we need to go to town on it.
So, I started playing with a beta of Brisk this weekend.
The Datastax guys are industrious, energentic and are very open to hearing from both the Cassandra and Hadoop communities. You should hit them in #Datastax-Brisk on Freenode IRC.
I’ll post more on my benchmarks and tests later, I’m still getting comfortable with it, but it is still very familiar, already being a Hadoop and Cassandra user.
I need to setup the OpsCenter stuff which looks pretty cool and put some real data in it.
So far, my favorite thing:
INFO 23:36:22,093 Chose seed 192.168.x.x as jobtracker
Magic!
My current concern is how to deal with deletes in CFS (CassandraFS) as Hive (and Terasort for that matter) kicks up a lot of ephemeral data. Cassandra doesn’t delete stuff instantly, so I imagine I’ll need to do some tweaking with GCGraceSeconds to find an optimal setting.
So, this is my quick 5 minute setup to get going and running benchmarks.
I’m such a sad bastard.
I got stuck fixing a production issue and had to miss the inagural NYC Cassandra Meetup group 
To attone, I figure I’d write a quickie Cassandra post.
Over the last few months we’ve been migrating our infrastructure over to the Chef platform for infrastructure automation. It is analogous to Puppet, which I’ve tinkered with in the past.
I’ll skip the debate over which is the better tool. There has been lots of discussion all over about it. Suffice it to say, we chose Chef for a myriad of reasons and this post isn’t a case study.
My first big chef project was migrating our Hadoop cluster on to it.
I’m a pretty heavy Gmail user and I’ve recently gotten everything moved over to my account (finally), but getting some of my ancillary non-Google stuff to play along has been quite difficult.
I just baught a Samsung/Google Nexus S (which I LOVE! and Gingerbread is fantastic) and paired my Google Apps account to it to find I cannot use Google Apps Google Checkout account to buy apps from the Android Market (!!!!@&@&), but that is a whole other article…
Anyhoo, I’ve found that the stock CheckGMail you get from the repos doesn’t seem to work and if you Google around you’ll find complains back to 2007 for various issues related to GMail or the project itself. Various fixes are put forth requiring you to grab the latest subversion snapshot to replacing certain perl libraries and disabling this or that.
These are the fixes I used to get the program working again with my google apps account…
Linux Mint is awesome!
From their site:
The purpose of Linux Mint is to produce a modern, elegant and comfortable operating system which is both powerful and easy to use.
Started in 2006, Linux Mint is now the 4th most widely used home operating system behind Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS and Canonical’s Ubuntu.
It installs beautifully and just works!
Linux Mint Debian Edition is awesome++
Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) is a rolling distribution based on Debian Testing.
The purpose of LMDE is to look identical to the main edition and to provide the same functionality while using Debian as a base.
It’s a little rougher around the edges, but the rolling updates makes it totally worth it,
So I wrote in an earlier post about alt-installing Python 2.6 from source on CentOS, which was easy enough. But, this made it more difficult to maintain and deploy as well as add modules. So, I was lucky enough to come across a nice little yum repository hosted by Rizwan Kassim (Geekymedia.com) that contained an RPM that would do the alt-install work for me
I’m aware that EPEL has a Python 2.6 package, but the Geekymedia RPMs have a whole flurry of modules you can add as well as an RPM for setuptools which will make your life immeasurably easier when running Python 2.4 and 2.6 side-by-side for installing python packages.
The only problems with the Geekymedia RPMs are that the binary packages are all 32-bit (I’m running servers here folks!) and I was unable to get the MySQL-python26 one to work right for me.
So, let’s get down to business.
Earlier I showed you how to setup Hadoop, then how to setup Hive to use a MySQL-backed Metastore.
These notes presume that you have setup your Hive metastore to use MySQL. If you don’t you’ll only be able to have one Hive instance running at a time (so no CLI while the HWI or thrift server is a-runnin’)
Got carried away, I daemonized myself 
Hive is a pretty nifty data warehousing extension of Hadoop that lets you dump structured data into HDFS and query it using a SQL-like language called HiveQL which runs all the map/reduce junk for you.
It’s pretty darn simple to install, but if you want to really free it up you need to do some tweaking.