I was thinking about what book to read next and it occurred to me to ask you nice people. I'm in the mood for something factual but interesting - something like The Prize, if you're familiar with that. I was intrigued by Fiasco but I haven't looked into it.

So what …

Looks like I've finally converted Alex to Python as well. "This is actually shorter than perl and still makes sense". Be forewarned - if you code with me, you'll be doing Python in no time.

Due to aforementioned OS X stupidity with the Home and End keys, my new favorite Eclipse hotkey is Ctrl-Q. It takes you to the location of your last edit. So next time you hit the End key to go to the end of the line but end up at the …

The title pretty much says it; I'm planning an SJC/SF trip next week, if you want to meet or chat drop me a line - Darugar at gmail.

Nice and detailed article from Jesse Noller on concurrency, threads, the GIL, and Python. Worth a read; I learned a lot from it.

For the record I'm one of the people who doesn't think threads are not the true solution to the concurrency problem.

Wikihow's How To Stop Accumulating Books has been making the rounds in blogs and delicious popular. Reminds me of the ultimate book non-accumulator, a good friend of my dad's.

This particular friend of my dad's would always bring me books when he came to visit. I was a voracious reader …

Yet another Scoble post on a facebook accounts being closed, this time with the iFart app author.

Facebook is like Disney Land. It's a nice and enjoyable place, but it has its own special governance. It can decide when to let you in and when to throw you out.

It's …

After 2 days of pain, finally a hackintosh is born. My advice to you if you're thinking of setting up a hackintosh: don't. Go buy a cheap mac instead.

As I was fond of saying in the old days: Linux is free if your time is worthless. Hackintosh is about …

Inaugration day, and I missed just about all the festivities. One thing did stand out for me: the text of the Oath of the Office of the President:

"I do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best …

Queues are nice things. We should be using more of them.

A couple of benefits that I knew of but didn't really appreciate until Alex started using beanstalkd in his application:

- Having a worker-pulls-jobs-from-queue model provides near optimal use of the machine and prevents overload and thrashing. Setup as many …

Parand says:

When attempting to do a two man job with only one man, substitute endurance for raw power.

We're starting a San Diego Hadoop User Group. Please send me an email ( darugar at gmail ) if you're interested or leave a comment here. Details to be worked out, but we'll likely will have the first meeting towards the end of February.

Interesting video of how Obama's campaign logo was designed. Via LogoDesignLove.

Slides from my Data Processing in the Cloud talk:

Cloud Computing: Hadoop

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: pig cloud)

Have you noticed how more and more the headlines of the top blogs are all the same announcement at the same time? Unfortunately we're going back to the PR-firm driven news reporting that was prevalent in the era of magazines, instead of that brief but wonderful time when bloggers actually …

In most cases I prefer dot notation over bracket notation for dictionary access. That is, I prefer mydictionary.myfield over mydictionary\['myflield'\]. I also prefer attempted access to undefined keys to return None instead of raising an exception.

With the help of this thread, this is what I've been using …

There have been several requests for this, so I might as well post it here for general use. I put together a simple system for dumping data out of Oracle databases and loading onto Hadoop DFS. The slightly interesting part is the parallelism - Python's Processing library is used to dump …

I'm trying to setup ad-hoc small mailing lists using GMail. They have a contact groups feature that mostly does what I need. However, the interface for adding contacts is quite limited - you pick from a list.

It'd make a lot more sense to allow addition of contacts to groups based …

I'm trying to find the appropriate design for RESTful design of URLs for search and for collections of items.

The setup: we have two models, Cars and Garages, where Cars can be in Garages. Base URLs:

/car/xxx           (xxx = car id)
/garage/yyy     (yyy = garage id)

Now we want to …

I'm using Yahoo Live to get a look at the Yahoo UCSD Hack Day event, and I'm quite surprised at how well it works.

Seeing someone's face via their webcam is an absolute waste of time, particularly on on video conference calls, but here I'm looking at a view of …