And it was at that age … Poetry arrivedin search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know whereit came from, from winter or a river.I don’t know how or when,no they were not voices, they were notwords, nor silence,but from a street I was summoned,from the branches of night,abruptly from the others,among violent firesor […]
Author: benk
Vignette from Creative Writing
Today I went to a workshop at the church office, at which we learned a bit about poetry and prose. After a couple exercises, we spent a little time developing a vignette. I had prepared to describe arriving at home, but had a change of mind just as we began to write. Here is what […]
On The Road
I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that’s why it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon. Jack Kerouac
Feed the Monster
Hydra excels at taking massive amounts of data and making it interpretable. It’s flexibility and scalability are really put on display when you have a lot of data, like Map-Reduce in Hadoop. Now that I have a local stack running, I need to feed Hydra in order to play with it, much like the Tamagotchi’s […]
Emerald Reflection
2014-3-24 I rose early this morning, eager to catch a fish worthy of dinner with my love. Yesterday’s outing proved less successful, but the crisp air beckoned me onto the water. I didn’t realize that it wouldn’t be that dinner that would make today memorable. My boat, an ’83 Steamer Deluxe, was the top selling […]
Getting Started on Hydra
Dependencies Maven Java 7 SDK RabbitMQ (Instructions provided below) Building 1. Checkout from Github 2. RabbitMQ As described in the Hydra Readme.mdown, Hydra uses rabbitmq for low volume commands and control message exchanges. On a modern Linux systems apt-get install rabbitmq-server and running with the default settings is adequate in most cases. For Mac OS (my environment), I used Homebrew to install it. Super easy […]
County Housing Search
From Mar 27, 2012 I recently wrote a job to identify the counties with the most houses for sale (according to the 2010 Census). To do so, I ingested the data from the Census Bureau, and wrote a MapReduce job. My goal was to have all counties and the total houses for sale in ascending […]
Using Java’s URLEncoder
We developers really should heed the warnings of deprecations. Java’s URLEncoder.encode(String); throws the deprecated warning, encouraging us to use URLEncoder.encode(String,String);. I use this tool to encode the special characters in parameters on an URL to prevent a misunderstanding with a server. Want to finally do the right thing and use that method? Here’s what you […]
Enabling Password-less SSH
In setting up a local Hadoop stack, you’ll need to enable SSH access to your machine from your machine. This is also useful for other systems, so a good thing to know in general. The following instructions will guide you through setting it up on a Linux box, but can also be applied to Mac […]
Markdown Overview
Markdown is the technology behind the README files seen on Github and elsewhere. The file extension is .md, and the output when rendered in a browser follows a consistent syntax. The goal of Markdown is foremost readability.[1] Even in a non-HTML rendered state, it can be read and understood. This is achieved by using punctuation characters as markers for what a text represents.