Unquiet Desperation

I’ve ranted on The Secret Lair about how modern fantasy novels are pretty much cookie-cutter pieces of shite, especially when the blurb on the back goes something like this:

She is (insert Celtic-ish name here), an orphan girl in the land of (insert made up word, usually ending in -ia). Pursued by (insert bad guy with [...]

photo credit: carlosgomez
Had a nice weekend…drove up to Santa Barbara on Saturday and spent some time at Stearns Wharf. We hung out on the Wharf itself for a bit, then walked down to Wheel Fun Rentals and rented a double surrey. We rode along the beach, four of us pedaling, my son in the [...]

photo credit: ishkamina
First, I want to thank everyone who posted comments on my article about the Amazon Rush. When I write articles like these, I’m looking to start some discussion, and the discussion is now happening. I believe that’s a good thing, whether I’m right or wrong in my assessment.
Second, there’s a misunderstanding. [...]

photo credit: mpsfender182
I have yet to see any evidence that these Amazon rushes are accomplishing anything apart from making the author realize how ardent their fans are. “We’re going to make the suits at Amazon stand up and take notice!” seems to be the battle cry, but can you show me something that indicates [...]

We (Mahalo) have just released a backup and restore tool for HBase.
From the docs:
Attached is a simple import, export, and backup utility. Mahalo.com has been using this in production for several months to back up our HBase clusters as well as to migrate data from production to development clusters, etc.
Simple MapReduce job for exporting [...]