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  • At the #hackreduce Hadoop workshop

    [10:05] At Hack/Reduce. It’s at a nice loft-style office space downtown. [10:10] Installing git, msysGit, Tortoisegit, and also the git package in cygwin on the off chance one of them proves useful. [10:30] They have Bixi usage, ocean carbon measurements, a Wikipedia dump and other sample datasets. Hey, wasn’t there an interesting theorem in an…

  • DB2 images for IBM Workload Deployer

    IBM Workload Deployer 3.0 has just come out along with the DB2 images I developed. IWD is a major revision of what was formerly known as WebSphere CloudBurst Appliance.  The idea behind it is that it lets you plug a box into your existing virtualization infrastructure (VMWare, pSeries, etc) and make it feel more like…

  • How to diff Word documents

    It’s fairly straightforward to diff or compare different revisions of an Office document on Windows. The approach below applies to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, as well as to ones created by Lotus Symphony, OpenOffice.org, or LibreOffice. Download and install WinMerge. This is a free, open source utility. Download the xdocdiff plugin. Unzip it somewhere.…

  • Triggers in DB2 Express-C 9.7.4

    My team at IBM recently released DB2 Express-C 9.7.4, the latest and greatest version of our free database. Raul wrote up a detailed article with the technical nitty-gritty of what’s new. There’s a bunch of different improvements, but one thing that’s caught my eye are the enhancements to triggers. A trigger is something defined to…

  • Reduce your stress by disabling notifiers, toasts, and every sort of popup

    A month ago, I disabled email notification in my Gmail notifier before doing a presentation and neglected to turn it back on later. It took me a long time to notice the lack of notifications. What I did notice was a reduced level of stress. I was able to effectively concentrate on a single task…

  • Find out public information about the people you email with Rapportive

    Rapportive is a great browser enhancement for Gmail. It automatically looks up email addresses and populates a sidebar with that person’s profile photo (from Google Talk or Flickr), job title (from LinkedIn), tweets, as well as links to their profiles on Facebook, Skype, etc. I find it especially useful when reading mailing list messages, as…

  • Linux Basics: Navigate with ls, cd, and pwd

    The Linux command line can be a bit intimidating at first, but it gets much easier once you learn a few basic building blocks. The power of the command line lies in combining many basic commands in interesting ways. Open up a Linux terminal (or, if you want to follow along on Windows, Cygwin). The…

  • MySpace’s death spiral due to no test environment, no source control, no code review

    I just saw an extremely insightful comment by Nick Kwiatkowski quoted whole by the High Scalability blog. Unfortunately, they buried the lede very deep, while I don’t trust the original medium of Disqus comments to have any longevity. Here’s the comment for posterity: Having been in a position where I was able to work with…

  • Twitter reinvents the vocative case

    I recently saw an interesting idea on reddit: that the @name notation popularized by Twitter and now adopted on many internet forums as a way of addressing someone is basically a reinvention of the vocative case. What’s a case? Well, English has three cases for nouns: subjective, objective, and possessive. The subjective noun acted on…

  • What is DB2 Hypervisor Edition?

    Edit: Please see DB2 HV images for IWD. It’s regular DB2. There’s no DB2 HV or DB2 HE. You use the same DB2 edition whether you are using it on physical hardware or a virtual server in the cloud. In fact, DB2 is fully supported in virtually every virtualized environment. 9 to 5, I’m the…