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 [...]

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:

app['rds_database'][environment]['rds_name']

If I wanted to test if this value is set I couldn’t safely just say:

if app['rds_database'][environment]['rds_name']

because in some cases

if app['rds_database']

or

if app['rds_database'][environment] [...]