I don’t care what Google or others say, this isn’t open source. This is published source. There is no way to see bugs, contribute a patch, or take part in discussions on development. The only saving grace is that Google is publishing their code with a fairly unrestrictive license.

What this situation is screaming for is to have someone with a desire to actually behave in an open source manner to come along and fork the code. Then allow developers to contribute to that branch and let Google go it on their own. My hope is that Amazon will do exactly that with their fork of the Android code base.

Exception in thread “Multicast Heartbeat Receiver Thread” java.lang.NullPointerException
at org.slf4j.impl.Log4jLoggerAdapter.error(Log4jLoggerAdapter.java:493)
at net.sf.ehcache.distribution.MulticastKeepaliveHeartbeatReceiver$MulticastReceiverThread.run(MulticastKeepaliveHeartbeatReceiver.java:137)

After the error, the Multicast Heartbeat Receiver would not shutdown and would just hang. Eventually you would have to kill off the java process manually.

Doing a quick search found this page. With a small snippet added to the web.xml to add a shutdown listener everything shutdowns cleanly now.

<listener>
  <listener-class>net.sf.ehcache.constructs.web.ShutdownListener</listener-class>
</listener>

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One nice bonus of running ReadPath, is that it is constantly spidering content from RSS feeds for the news reader. The other day I realized that I’ve now stored a full billion content items going back several years. So of course having that much content I had to create a search engine to mine it. So, I created MiniSearch to play with different concepts involved in running a general search engine. There are a lot of things that turned out to be a lot harder than expected.

Currently the index is in the process of being built and only includes 20% of available content. There is also a lot of work to be done with ranking still. I’ll post again when I think it’s in a more usable state.

Great Job Mozilla guys

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Well, today that day has finally arrived. I noticed yesterday that DI has an iPhone app that allows you to stream their premium channels over 3G. I was listening today for about an hour while out running some errands with Caitlin. I only lost the signal once for about 5 sec while driving in some hills, the app does a great job of buffering and keeping the music going. The quality is great and with ~1hr of streaming it only used 25Mb of data according to the built in meter (I’ll have to double check with ATT’s meter).

One of the greatest things about the app is that if it does cut out for any reason it can determine that it’s at the end of a stream and gracefully fades out so that there aren’t any jarring cuts in or out. Every streaming app should copy this.

Then if you find a RSS feed that you’d like to add to ReadPath, drag the link below to your bookmark bar.

Add To ReadPath

Then when you’re on a page that you want to subscribe to, press the bookmarklet and it will have ReadPath subscribe you to the feed.

Oh, I changed the name of the blog as well. Not as worried about having my real name on the web anymore.

My production cluster is still running HBase 0.20.3 and has performed flawlessly. It has a table holding half a billion content items, taking up several terabytes of space, and has made it through several disk failures without a hitch. However, I’m looking at the Cloudera distro because I’m not happy with having to repackage everything, test it out, push to the live cluster, and then retest to make sure that everything made it properly every time a new release comes out. I’m hoping that using the Cloudera distro will simplify a lot of this. I’m also hoping that with the patches that they include and testing being done that I’ll have a more stable cluster. I had a real bad experience with the 20.4 update which is why production is still on 20.3.

One major problem that I still have, even with the Cloudera distro, is that the LZO code isn’t included due to licensing problems. I’m really hoping that the new compression options can be packaged up soon so that these libraries don’t need to be maintained separately any more.

A couple quick notes that I found from my testing.

• The way that HBase interacts with and manages zookeeper has changed. It’s more like running an unmanaged zookeeper setup. I found that not only did I need to make sure that the zookeeper configs in the hbase-site.xml needed to be correct on all of the servers, but that when I ran map-reduce jobs against HBase that it seemed to be reading from /etc/zookeeper/zoo.cfg and that this needed to be correct on all of the regionservers. I initially had only edited it on the server running my zookeeper instance. I also added the file to the HADOOP_CLASSPATH in hadoop-env.sh but I’m not sure that that’s required.
• I wish that there was a better way to manage the HADOOP_CLASSPATH and it’s inclusion of the hbase and zookeeper jar files. I’m trying to find a way so that this doesn’t need to be edited each time I update the software to a new version.
• I had to change the value for dfs.datanode.socket.write.timeout. On the live cluster I have it set to 0 which is supposed to mean no timeout, but it appears that there is a bug with this latest version that doesn’t respect that value properly. So I just set it to a high number.

It is quite sad to see this spin. Journalism’s purpose is to find the truth in the story instead of making up their own spin to sensationalize. But we’ve gotten to the point where the corporate interests behind the News has an interest in keeping the crossfire between the right and the left going. If this means taking some liberties, then they’ve shown that they’re willing to do so.

I wouldn’t be terribly sad to see almost every major news body we have today collapse. They’ve strayed too far from their true purpose. There will still be a need for honest news gathering and there are people willing to devote their lives to that purpose. The way just needs to be cleared for these people to come to the fore again.

One of the difficulties with VMware is that their acronyms can be very difficult to wade through. ESXi is what they refer to as a hypervisor. This essentially is a very cut down operating system that is designed to only run other Virtual Machines. There are some requirements to running ESXi, I had to go through 3-4 servers before I found one that the installer had all of the drivers. I finally got it to run a server I had picked up from Penguin Computing (2x dual core Opteron with 4Gb mem and 250Gb hard drive).

Once I found a server that worked, the system installed quickly. The next problem was that you need to download the vSphere client to administer the server which is windows only (there are command line clients for other operating systems, but I wasn’t ready for that yet). I didn’t have a windows box laying around (all linux and mac), so I had to launch a WinXP VM in workstation on my linux desktop to administer my ESXi server. Amazingly everything worked great.

The next issue that I ran into was that I already had a large number of VMs created that I was using on workstation, but I couldn’t see how to get them on to the ESXi server. In the vSphere client there are clear instructions on how to create a new VM or download an appliance, but not how to import an existing VM. It turns out that VMware has a very simple way of doing this using the VMware Converter. This product works as a switchboard allowing you to convert or move VMs from one place to another, a really handy tool.

Overall ESXi is a great tool for running a whole bunch of server VMs. VMware offers a huge number of management products in the vSphere product line for managing load and moving VMs in a datacenter. But if you just need to run a few VMs on a single server I would definitely recommend looking at ESXi.

We also decided to go with the wifi only model, which is cheaper, but most of our book reading is at home where there is total coverage. If we’re out and about we read on the iPhone and then sync back to the kindle to continue reading at home.

Hopefully this latest version will arrive before the next round of books that we’ve been waiting for. I’m waiting for The Evolutionary Void and we’re very happy that MockingJay will also be released in a kindle version.

I was happy to hear that Bezos was focusing on creating the best book reader instead of chasing yet another tablet.

• Often the mail icon will show that I have new mail, but when I open the app there is nothing there, even after hitting the refresh button.
• After I delete email they’ll show back up again as unread.
• I’ll often get a list of blank emails that I can’t do anything with.

Closing the Email app has no effect. The only thing that has helped so far is to double click the button to get to the quick switch screen, hold down the mail icon until they vibrate and the minus icon appears (I believe that this kills the background process), click the minus’ to close all running background processes. Once I do this Mail will begin to sync again. This leads me to believe that there are issues with communication between the background process and when you bring the app to the foreground.

I’m checking every day to see if Apple has pushed an update, but this was a pretty big bug to let slip into ios4.

There seems to be some healthy competition again in the browser space and Chrome is pulling ahead with the JavaScript performance. I had stuck with Firefox for a long time because it had Firebug, which is probably the single most useful web development tool out there. But now that JavaScript libraries like YUI are getting so much more solid and stable I’m finding that I don’t need to dive in with Firebug as much.

Overall I’m just happy to see that I have a choice. While performance and stability are great, I hope there’s more competition among the browsers as web application platforms and not just web content distribution. There’s still a long way to go in this area.

It would be nice to have a place where we can set up who our friends and coworkers are as well as what we’d like to share with them. Having to recreate this network each time we want to use a new site is a complete pain. But who can we trust to store this valuable info?

Leo Laporte has mentioned in his podcasts that for some reason he just doesn’t trust Facebook as much as he would trust a company like Google to fill this role. I agree wholeheartedly that it’s risky to trust Facebook. For me, the core of this mistrust is that I feel that Facebook hasn’t yet found its truly profitable niche yet like Google has. Google makes so much money in search ads that it can afford to not make money in other areas and take the high ground when it comes to privacy and openness. Facebook doesn’t have this profit center yet to support the other areas of its business. The scary part is that the data that Facebook collects could be quite valuable. It’s really going to come down to where they decide to draw the line on how to use our data. And because this is still unknown and they’ve taken several missteps in the past, it’s difficult to really trust Facebook.

As the interview went on though, I actually found myself agreeing with Dan Stein that this was McCarthy style journalism. Taking a single point from years ago and using it to paint an entire organization. I think Rachel was riled up and went into attack mode too quickly. The proper way to ask about these points would have been to have asked if FAIR, as an organization, still supports the beliefs that she brought up in her research or whether they’ll disavow the positions. If they won’t disavow the racist positions, then there is a story there, but for Rachel to make the accusation that because someone once said something reprehensible that the entire organization was racist was itself unfair.

Usually I’m a big fan of her reporting, but I think that in this instance she should have looked at what she had and decided that it wasn’t enough to build a story off of. She’s developing a great reputation as being a journalist that will stand up to anyone and ask tough questions, she’s just got to make sure that the quality of the story is there.