Thursday, February 28, 2013

How long does it take to set up a local Hadoop Cluster

Given an LXC container with a recent Hadoop installation on it, it will probably take about 20 minutes to set up a 10 node (LXC Container) cluster on a single host machine. Moving them around doesn't take that long either. So, it is really fast, which begs many questions about many business models founded on the idea that easy installation forms a barrier worth scaling. 

My favorite bash command prompt setting


In my .bash_profile


stty columns 1000
PS1="\e[0;32m\u@\w->\e[m"



Monday, February 25, 2013

Building MonetDB on Mac with Macports Libraries

There have been some issues raised when building MonetDB with Macports libraries on Mac. I addressed it on the mailing list, and here, I just write the summary, for my own future reference:


To build MonetDB with the Macports distribution of readline, one needs to run configure with the following command line options:

      --with-readline=/opt/local CFLAGS=-DLIBICONV_PLUG

/opt/local is where I have my macports libraries, including readline.

In macports' distribution of iconv, if LIBICONV_PLUG, is not defined, causing some function names to be redefined. 

I guess macports authors did this in order to avoid some potential
collisions with the "readline" library that comes with Mac OS-X (as part of Xcode command line tools?).

The "-DLIBICONV_PLUG" compiler option disables the redefinition of function
names in macports' iconv.

Friday, February 22, 2013

Worth watching

For those interested in infrastructure and data center technologies, GigaOm Structure streams interesting video.