Tree of Life

Since everything moves fast in the IT world, you have new terminologies entering their 3rd or 4th generation by the time you get a chance to get your hands dirty with them. Big Data has been one of them, an alluring technology allowing massive distributed power over large datasets using the famous map-reduce algorithm. Apache Hadoop allows scaling to massive proportions and has been in use with tech giants like Google and Facebook. I decided to start running a Hadoop cluster myself using the following guide as a started. https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/solutions-google-compute-engine-cluster-for-hadoop/blob/master/README.md This version installs Hadoop locally but uses the Google App Engine and Google Cloud Storage  and allows basic scaling/clustering. I started running the pre-requisites on a VM Centos 6.4 and things were going ok. Then I realized that I needed to go deeper into Hadoop and maybe run a sample locally, without achieving the Cloud version first. ...

The annual 2013 IT Skills and Salary Report is out from Global Knowledge. There are some encouraging signs in the report yet improvement is not as robust as I would like.

You might have seen the dreaded error codes of 10 ( "This device cannot start. (Code 10)" ) and 39 ( "Windows cannot load the device driver for this hardware. The driver may be corrupted or missing. (Code 39)" ) messages. The solution is elaborated really nicely here:  http://hateadub.wordpress.com/2011/04/20/code-10-device-manager-keyboard-and-mouse-not-working/ In my case, the issue was with the mouse and the keyboard which made it extra infuriating since I needed to use the On-Screen Keyboard and Mouse Keys (true nightmare). In particular, the issue was with the "upper filters" in the bowels of the registry where you just needed to keep 1 value ( HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}  mouclass and  HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E96B-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318} kbdclass) Once I retire, I will get back and take a look at windows documentation, in particular, h...

So sad!! Google Reader is officially closed. Really angry at Google for that. Best Alternative I found so far is Feedly  (btw I discovered the alternative finding site  http://alternativeto.net )

PluralSight is pretty amazing, if you are interested in MVC 4, make sure to go through the tutorials at the following:   http://www.asp.net/mvc  (on the right)

Spring is here and it is time for spring cleaning - sell everything you do not need on ebay, craigslist and if not sold; dump it!! Believe me you will never reach out for your 5 year old motherboard or your 3rd power supply. http://myworld.ebay.com/sedatiko

Microsoft is great in many things but the application/version handling is mediocre. I got really frustrated with the Visual Studio 2012 crashes everytime I opened a project: Problem signature:   Problem Event Name: CLR20r3   Problem Signature 01: devenv.exe   Problem Signature 02: 11.0.50727.1   Problem Signature 03: 5011ecaa   Problem Signature 04: Microsoft.VisualStudio.Progression.LanguageService.CSharp   Problem Signature 05: 11.0.50727.1   Problem Signature 06: 5011cc19   Problem Signature 07: 131   Problem Signature 08: 43   Problem Signature 09: System.MissingFieldException   OS Version: 6.1.7601.2.1.0.256.1   Locale ID: 1033   Additional Information 1: 0a9e   Additional Information 2: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789   Additional Information 3: 0a9e   Additional Information 4: 0a9e372d3b4ad19135b953a78882e789 Read our privacy statement online:   http://go.mi...

The purpose is to create a disk to keep contents shared across the VMs Following the instructions at http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/ws40_disks.html#1046465 Find your VM installation and run the following C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware Workstation> vmware-vdiskmanager.exe  -s 10GB -a ide -t 1 -c "D:\Virtual Machines\vmDisk.vmdk" (s: size, a: interface, t: type (0-3 for increase and size options), c:create) Creating disk 'D:\Virtual Machines\vmDisk.vmdk'   Virtual disk creation successful. How to browse a Vmdk? http://www.vmware.com/support/ws45/doc/disks_add_ws.html#1008949 Tried to add this newly created disk when the vm server was on by going to settings/add/hard drive/existing virtual. Got error: failed to add disk ide0:1 I shutdown the vm pc and add disk then try starting the machine. Then went to disk mgt in windows where I got the "Initialize Disk" prompt New Volume > Simple > Quick format and voila!!

Decided to write about a few practices I try to follow to be more efficient in the "IT realm" Use RDP Manager or Netop or whatever your remoting solution is to build a "directory" for your servers and back it up. Establish a hierarchy like this \ \ \ (Eg: NA\PROD\ECOM\firmweb1) Use a good folder structure to keep your project files, start a folder for each project. Use sub-folders for details on a particular part of project when too many files accumulate. Keep this folder close to root (C:\) back it up often Use SyncToy or any cloud solution to automate your backup. You will always skip manual backup. Use a batch (if you need control) file and schedule it periodically and make it email you If you produce Excel reports from SQL dumps, create a tab called query and paste your long complex SQL query into it. Learn Windows , Excel , Gmail shortcuts!!  Maintain an "Installer" folder and break it down to OS, Development Tools, Databases, Application Se...

Never again write any login password logic. Generate all necessary components in your database using the following: cd c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319 c:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319>aspnet_regsql.exe -A all -C "your_sql_connection_string" Start adding the following features: Membership Profile RoleManager Personalization SqlWebEventProvider script takes care of all and you have a login engine .. take it to next level integrating it with Facebook, Twitter etc..

He "is a God among insects" :) http://sqlblog.com/blogs/aaron_bertrand/archive/2010/10/25/fun-with-software-uninstalling-sql-server-2008-r2-evaluation-edition.aspx

The wonderful site, http://cloudharmony.com/speedtest/run allows you to run tests on latency, small and large file download speed. Depending on the nature of your application, the choice of a provider is crucial (of course price is another important factor). In the tests, Large File Download category, Amazon S3 is the winner with an average of 15.33 Mb/s. This might be suitable for applications working with large files (pdfs, catalogs, repositories). Windows Azure Service is the winner of the small file category with around 2.5 Mb/s. The difference between the large and small file is significant. This order of magnitude difference is probably due to the overhead of authentication, establishing a connection etc. Once the pipe is secure and ready, you are probably bound to the limitations of your IPO as well as the cloud service provider's SLA. Latency might be a concern for high throughput applications - I would argue that self-hosting or keeping the applications close...