Unquiet Desperation

I’ll be presenting at the Cleveland Web Standards Association meeting on Sept. 8th, 2009. The topic is titled Frameworks in Plain English:

Frameworks are everywhere these days. You can hardly find a site that does not use one or more to get the job done.

Join the CWSA as we welcome Chris Miller, Co-Founder and Lead Developer of Podiobooks.com and Senior Developer, American Greetings Interactive as he takes us on a journey meant to answer such questions as: What is a framework? Why would I use one? What are the pros and cons of using a framework? What are the most prevelent frameworks in use today, and where can I find them?

As a prelude to the talk, I’d like to ask those of you using a software framework: do you have a favorite or favorites?  Why do you like it? What do you find lacking? Are there frameworks that you wouldn’t touch? Why? What pros and cons to you find working with frameworks vs. rolling your own?

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 data from an HBase table. The exported data is in a simple, flat format that can then be imported using another MapReduce job. This gives you both a backup capability, and a simple way to import and export data from tables.

The output of a backup job is a flat text file, or series of flat text files. Each row is represented by a single line, with each item tab delimited. Column names are plain text, while column values are base 64 encoded. This helps us deal with tabs and line breaks in the data. Generally you should not have to worry about this at all.

HBase Backup/Export/Import Tool

The Los Angeles Hadoop Meetup aims to be a Birds-Of-A-Feather style gathering of people working with Hadoop¹ and related technologies. We’ll be kicking off the new group with pizza and beer. It will be a meet and greet, we’ll discuss how we’re using Hadoop, what we’d like to get out of it, and what’s new on the horizon. At present, the speaker is yet-to-be-determined.

At Mahalo, we’ve been using Hadoop more and more often. We use HBase to store the text and revisions of our pages, and we are building an in-house cluster to handle some of the large data operations we have to deal with from time to time.

It’s an interesting technology, and I know we’re not alone in adopting Hadoop as one of the tools in our toolbox. When I looked around to find a local group dealing specifically with Hadoop, I came up empty. The logical thing to do was to start a group.

If you’re interested and want to know more, please either visit the Meetup page, or leave a comment for me and I’ll email you directly.

1. Hadoop is a software platform that lets one easily write and run applications that process vast amounts of data. I’ll be writing about this more in the future, both here and on Unspecified Error.[back]

For some reason, since switching to Wordpress 2.5.1, I’m getting blank pages when I preview. Anyone else seeing this? Anyone have a solution?

(Originally published on RefreshCleveland)

photo credit: doyoukekko

In the past few weeks, I’ve helped some of my friends move their WordPress blogs to new servers. One of them had a consistent problem with their host because WordPress was hogging cycles on the shared server. We implemented the WP-Cache plugin, and things got better in minutes.

Jeff Atwood has written a terrific article about the perils of using WordPress without caching.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the community around WordPress, and the software itself is remarkably polished. That’s not to say that I haven’t run into a few egregious bugs in the 2.5 release, but on the whole, the experience has been good bordering on pleasant.

Or at least it was, until I noticed how much CPU time the PHP FastCGI process was using for modest little old blog.stackoverflow.com.

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