Leo on Tech

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  • Setting up a new Macbook

    I’ve just migrated to a new Macbook Pro as my primary work machine. As part of setting it up, I installed the following: Caffeine to prevent it from going to sleep when I don’t want it to go to sleep BetterTouchTool so that I can middle-click (three finger tap) to close tabs and paste in…

  • Tuning wifi on Mac OS 10.10.3 Yosemite

    I’ve experienced increasingly bad wifi performance on my Macbook Air over time. This has been accentuated further by me being somewhere with a lot of network lag. I did some research and the following suggestions made the wifi faster and more responsive with Mac OS 10.10.3 Yosemite. 1. Disable Bluetooth. I don’t use any wireless…

  • #DUTO2015 conference

    I’m at the Data Unconference in Toronto today. Jarred Gaertner just gave a through-provoking keynote on the ethics of big data, and I’m about to dig my hands into some open data sets in Richard Pietro’s hands-on session. My colleague Polong Lin will be on a panel about IBM’s data science tools this afternoon, which…

  • $10k! Spark hackathon in San Fran

    I’ll be in San Francisco this weekend helping run the Apache Spark hackathon, and afterwards I’ll be at Spark Summit 2015. If you’re curious at all about Spark, you should come out and hack with us. We’ll have some fun data sets and help you find a team. You can take the free Spark Fundamentals…

  • Encrypt Gmail, Facebook emails with OpenPGP and Mailvelope

    Facebook just released a great use case for OpenPGP encryption in Gmail and other web email providers. You can now configure Facebook to encrypt all email it sends you with OpenPGP. Whether or not you use Facebook, it’s surprisingly easy to use Mailvelope to integrate OpenPGP with Gmail and other email providers. Mailvelope is a…

  • $7,500! Spark hackathon in Boston May 28-30

    My team will be supporting the Spark hackathon in Boston on May 28-30. This weekend’s a good chance to teach yourself Spark. “Apache Spark is an open source processing engine built around speed, ease of use, and analytics. If you have large amounts of data that requires low latency processing that a typical Map Reduce…

  • How I made my Android Galaxy S3 phone run faster

    My primary phone is a Samsung Galaxy S3 running Android 4.4.2 Kit Kat. It’s a little old at this point, but I’m disinclined to upgrade for the sake of upgrading. It was getting slower, so I’ve recently taken a number of steps to tune and optimize its performance. Things I’ve done to make Android slower…

  • Installing DB2 on Mac OS X

    It’s useful to have a local installation of the DB2 on Mac for development and test purposes. I have a local installation on my Macbook to develop DB2-backed Ruby on Rails applications.

  • Free Apache Spark course with Docker image

    My friends over at Big Data University just launched a refresh of their Apache Spark course. Spark is an engine for processing and mining large amounts of data quickly. The course takes advantage of a Docker image for Spark. Docker provides a way to run Spark on a typical laptop without getting a beefy server.…

  • Dockerize all the things

    As my team creates new web apps and microservices in Rails, Meteor JS, and other stacks, we dockerize them. Docker is great because it enforces loose coupling, modular design, and process isolation. A Docker container can be thought of as a very lightweight VM that shares a Linux kernel with its host. The infrastructure and…