Thursday, 2nd April 2009
On the ground at the G20 protests. Roo Reynolds got trapped in the square mile.
Amazon Elastic MapReduce (via) Hadoop as a service. Basically a web based GUI around Hadoop—you could roll this yourself on EC2 but for a small markup on regular EC2 prices you get to avoid the extra work setting everything up. Data processing scripts can be written in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++ and are loaded in to S3 before firing off the job.
Heap Dump Analysis. Using jmap to dump the JVM’s memory to disk, then analysing it using the visualvm GUI tool.
We advise startups to launch when they've added a quantum of utility: when there is at least some set of users who would be excited to hear about it, because they can now do something they couldn't do before.
Google uncloaks once-secret server. Instead of a data centre wide UPS and redundant power supplies, each Google server has its own 12V battery. They live in standard shipping containers, each holding 1,160 servers.
Tracking UK Liberal Indecency. The mashup I’ve been waiting for: Tom Hume used the Guardian Content API to track swearword usage over time.