Upcoming Mini-tutorial at BigDataCamp: How to Build a Hadoop Cluster from Scratch in 20 Minutes by CTO of Infochimps

Flip  Kromer (@mrflip), CTO of Infochimps will give a an overview and tutorial on using the latest version of Ironfan (which until today was called cluster_chef)  at the BigDataCamp unconference put on by  Dave Nielsen just before O’Reilly’s Strata Conference Feb 27 from 5:30pm to 10pm We’ve been using cluster_chef at Runa as the basis of our chef management for our [...] [...]

Access Web Servers on EC2 Private Addresses with Firefox FoxyProxy & Google Chrome SwitchySharp

There are sometimes web ui services on EC2 instances that are only accessible via the AWS private IP addresses. The one I run into most are the WebUI of HBase and Hadoop. There are probably many others. Running a Socks Proxy Tunnel to an EC2 server On your local system you will need to run an [...] [...]

Avoiding a series of tests with Ruby Hashes of Hashes that might have nil before the leaf hash

I’m mostly using Ruby to write Opscode Chef Cookbooks. There are a lot of hashes of hashes that contain attributes or Data Bags. Things that look like: If I wanted to test if this value is set I couldn’t safely just say: because in some cases or may be nil . If ether of those [...] [...]

Install Pgrep and PKill for Mac OS X with Brew

My fingers still tend to do ps ax | grep some_program_name_I_want_to_kill and then do a kill 2012 to kill that process. Then I remember that I could use pgrep and/or pkill to do the same kind of thing. But then I remember I’m on a Mac which doesn’t have those commands built in, though most [...] [...]