August 2009
6 posts
In-depth look at Clojure's STM implementation →
Insightful article. I read most of the Clojure book last weekend and it has been lot of fun. This will be my first proper attempt at learning a Lisp (I ditched CommonLISP for Python in the AI class back in school). I’m using Clojure to write simple Hadoop jobs (turns out Hadoop is the only use-case currently where I rely on the JVM runtime).
Home is where the brain is | San Francisco online →
Good article on the status of Indian immigrants in the US (specifically those in Silicon Valley).
Amazon launches Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) →
On the 3rd anniversary of EC2, AWS launches VPC. The pace at which AWS seems to launch new features is very impressive (the other cloud providers are severely lagging). Anyone has any idea how many people work for the AWS division at Amazon?
Google AppEngine: scaling across multiple... →
Todd Hoff of HighScalability does a good job of summarizing a talk by Google engineer Ryan Barrett from Google I/O 2009.
LZO compression for Hadoop-0.20+
Starting from Hadoop-0.20 onwards, any code related to LZO compression has been removed from the Hadoop source tree. This is because the LZO code is licensed under GPL and hence incompatible with Hadoop’s Apache license. One more thing you should know is LZO compression is only supported via a native library (AFAIK there’s no pure Java implementation of it). LzoCodec and LzopCodec are...
Cool hacks used to build SUSE Studio →
Nat blogged about some really cool hacks they’d to resort to build a challenging product like SUSE Studio.
The hack to get a list of all the files changed in the filesystem during the “testdrive” is particularly interesting - they used QEMU’s COW feature which essentially produces a small delta image if you do any writes in your VM while keeping the original image...