Oh boy, here we go again. I actually managed to come up with a list of my top 3 this year, so let’s just cut to the chase, shall we? Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy LCD Soundsystem - This is Happening Titus Andronicus - The Monitor And the runner-ups in alphabetical order: Arcade Fire - The Suburbs Beach House - Teen Dream Best Coast - Crazy For You Das Racist - Shut Up, Dude Das Racist - Sit Down, Man Robyn - Body Talk The-Dream - Love King Toro Y Moi - Causers Of This Wavves - King of the Beach Wild Nothing - Gemini Xiu Xiu - Dear God, I Hate Myself Best EPs: ...

After spending the better part of a day trying to get HDFS to mount on my Mac, I finally gave up. Luckily, I was able to find MuCommander, a cross-platform Java port of the Norton Commander of old, and as luck would have it, it supports HDFS in the latest version! Very handy for quickly browsing your HDFS clusters if you can’t mount it or don’t have the Hadoop toolset installed. ...

Hadoop has a built-in feature for easily distributing JARs to your worker nodes via HDFS but, unfortunately, it’s broken. There’s a couple of tickets open with a patch again 0.18 and 0.21 (trunk) but for some reason they still haven’t been committed yet. We’re currently running 0.20 so the patch does me no good anyway. So here’s my simple solution: I essentially copied the technique used by ToolRunner when you pass a “libjars” argument on the command line. You simply pass the function the HDFS paths to the JAR files you want included and it’ll take care of the rest. ...

Using Hadoop’s DistributedCache mechanism is fairly straightforward, but as I’m finding is common with everything-Hadoop, not very well documented. Adding files When setting up your Job configuration: // Create symlinks in the job's working directory using the link name // provided below DistributedCache.createSymlink(conf); // Add a file to the cache. It must already exist on HDFS. The text // after the hash is the link name. DistributedCache.addCacheFile( new URI("hdfs://localhost:9000/foo/bar/baz.txt#baz.txt"), conf); Accessing files Now that we’ve cached our file, let’s access it: ...

Android 2.0 introduced a feature that lets you backup your apps and their settings to the “cloud.” Normally this feature is accessible by going to Settings > Privacy and checking Back up my settings. Unfortunately, it seems that many HTC phones hide this setting. If “Privacy” doesn’t appear in your settings then use this trick to get there. Settings > Search > Searchable items Enable “Settings” Goto the “Home” screen Search for “Privacy” Check “Back up my settings” It’s just too bad there’s no easy way to backup your apps manually, without resorting to an app on the market… ...

After suffering through yet another morning of ‘find’ pegging my CPU and grinding my sad little laptop hard drive for a couple of hours, I finally decided to rectify the situation. Most Linux distributions these days ship mlocate by default, and so I decided to give it a go on OS X. Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite support OS X out of the box yet. I’ll spare you all the miserable details (it was an epic struggle getting this compiled), but I finally managed to get it working. ...

Today I’m launching my latest personal project, srchmvn.com, to help Java developers find Maven artifacts. It’s also the first project I’ve finished* and released in a very long time. The Problem While Maven is, at it’s core, a build system, one of the most valuable features it offers is it’s centralized repository and transitive dependency management for your projects. You can simply include an artifact definition and Maven will, at build time, download and provide not only the selected artifact, but all it’s dependencies as well. ...

For some reason, I had a relatively hard time finding this info all in one spot, so here it is: Using MySQL with JRuby is actually pretty easy (and no annoying arch issues on OS X! :-) Install GEMs (DBI, JDBC driver, DBI adapter): $ jgem install dbi jdbc-mysql dbd-jdbc Then use it! require 'dbi' require 'jdbc/mysql' dbh = DBI.connect('dbi:jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/test', 'root', '', { "driver" => "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver" } )