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.

Goldman Sachs as a firm has internal views into almost every market there is. Seeing both sides of trades as well as the demand for creation of new products. The Manager would not say that internal talk among different groups wasn’t used in the determination on how to handle products that Goldman itself held. He squirmed out of taking any position.

The clear implication that you can take from these different data points is that Goldman Sachs has the ability to hold any product that they like and sell those that they don’t. They are not a neutral market making entity. They don’t see selling products that they don’t like to their own clients as a conflict of interest. Customers of Goldman Sachs need to ask themselves why the firm is selling any product. Because, if the item up for sale was worth holding, Goldman itself would hold it and not sell to the customer.

Goldman Sach’s ability to take positions and to be a market maker should be stripped. There should be a requirement that they can’t profit by taking positions as a market maker. There is no way to separate the conflict of interest otherwise.

1. The question is coming up about the ability for a party to be a market maker and to also take part in the market. With highly liquid stocks, it seems like this is OK since there is a fair amount of visibility into the market. There isn’t an information gap between different parties. But with illiquid assets like the CDOs, knowing who is involved and moving in which direction gives you a huge advantage over other players. It would only take a little bit of info to shift the advantage dramatically. If the Senators are smart they’ll see that with these types of assets market makers shouldn’t be allowed to take part in the market. It’s back door insider trading.
2. There is another line of questions on rating the CDO. Goldman Sachs is sticking with the line that everyone was a big boy and should have been able to look at the security and determine the risk. The problem is that this has been proven to be completely false. No one was able to accurately determine the risk of these items. The fact that they allowed Paulson to pick the contents and then short the CDO gave him a huge advantage in the deal. Whether this was illegal or not isn’t clear, it should not be allowed to happen again.
3. The Goldman Employees referenced the mathematical models that allowed rating agencies to take BBB+ sub-prime mortgages and rate them as a group as AAA. It’s shocking how far from reality this model was. It’s these types of models and economic thinking that has spurred my interest in this area. How can the supposed top economic minds get things so wrong?

Maybe live TV is just not conducive to news. The excuse that the host just doesn’t have time to fact check everything that is said has just gotten old. Every day, lie after misstatement after miss characterizations are made continually. How many times does the Daily Show have to embarrass them before they listen?

If as an agency you can’t control the quality of what is being said, then maybe it shouldn’t be shown live. What would stop the stations from filming an interview with different talking heads and then having the interns fact check what was said. Why is there the need to let someone who once did something a long time ago spout off live on TV?

Of course the problem may be that it was never really news to begin with.

The software is still listed as beta and definitely has a rough around the edges feel. But it does all of the basic things that kindle for the iPhone does. It allows you to pull in any of the books from your amazon archive, sync locations between different devices, change the font and reading formats to fit the device, and sync notes between devices. The main disappointment that I had was that the mac version doesn’t appear to have a book search feature. The laptop version of the software is the ideal place to be able to go back into your books and take notes or look up relevant parts. Without a basic search feature though this is severely hampered.

Up until now I’ve been splitting my two basic classes of book purchases, books that I’d just like to read from cover to cover and books that I need as reference material. I still purchase in physical form most of my computer books because I want to be able to look something up quickly and flip to exactly the point that I need. This is not an ideal use case for the kindle though, which is really good at reading from cover to cover. If the laptop software had a good search feature I would definitely start looking at purchasing reference books in digital form. It would be a great tool for looking things up and taking notes.

Well, hopefully Amazon listens and gets search implemented. It’ll transform the laptop software from a curiosity into a really powerful tool.

I had originally placed a few types of ads on these pages, just so that I could try them out somewhere other than at the day job. But now that I’ve got ReadPath cranking there really isn’t any need to experiment here any longer.

I’m fairly happy with this new theme, but you might continue to see some changes as I customize things.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owGykVbfgUE

Apparently DirecTv and Tivo have made up after some earlier issues and are planning on releasing a new receiver in 2010, but who knows when that will be. Might have to start scrambling for an alternate content source fast since you can’t watch the first two episodes of Big Love and then just stop. Withdrawal like that can have serious health issues.

A few months ago, I downloaded Amazon’s kindle app for the iPhone, more out of curiosity than anything else. Initially I just couldn’t see myself reading books on such a small screen, especially one that was backlit and would cause eye-strain. However, in the last couple weeks I’ve discovered how seamlessly Amazon has made syncing devices and reading locations. Since during the day, I pretty much always have the iPhone with me, I can just pull it out and start reading. The iPhone is perfect for the situation where you might only have a few minutes and might need to put it away very quickly. I was getting my van washed yesterday and was able to read for 5 min at the car wash. The magic happens though when you get back home, turn on your kindle and it knows to sync your reading location up to where you left off on the iPhone and vice-versa.

I’m now finding that I’m able to get even more reading done during the day. Filling in small breaks instead of waiting for a single block of reading before bed.

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Next, it’s milk time.

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