Purpose of this blog

Hi, I wanted to create this blog to document some of the coding work I'd like to do, mostly in Ruby and iPhone development. This is mostly for me so I don't forget what I work on, but I hope it's helpful to anyone out there.

I'm still primarily interested in Ruby on Rails but Sinatra is looking very interesting as a simple Ruby framework for building applications without a database.

Stay tuned for more stuff!

Comments

Building a Hadoop cluster

I've recently had to build a Hadoop cluster for a class in information retrieval . My final project involved building a Hadoop cluster. Here are some of my notes on configuring the nodes in the cluster. These links on configuring a single node cluster and multi node cluster were the most helpful. I downloaded the latest Hadoop distribution then moved it into /hadoop. I had problems with this latest distribution (v.21) so I used v.20 instead. Here are the configuration files I changed: core-site.xml: fs.default.name hdfs://master:9000 hadoop.tmp.dir /hadoop/tmp A base for other temporary directories. hadoop-env.sh: # Variables required by Mahout export HADOOP_HOME=/hadoop export HADOOP_CONF_DIR=/hadoop/conf export MAHOUT_HOME=/Users/rpark/mahout PATH=/hadoop/bin:/Users/rpark/mahout/bin:$PATH # The java implementation to use. Required. export JAVA_HOME=/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/CurrentJDK/Home hdfs-site

The #1 Mistake Made by Product People at All Levels

In my 20+ year career in product management for B2B enterprise companies, I have seen product managers at every level make a certain kind of mistake. It is so easy to make that I occasionally make it myself when I'm not careful. What is this mistake? It is to spend too much time on tasks and deliverables that are not core to the product function, which is to to determine and define products to be built. If you keep falling into this trap then ultimately you can't be effective at your job and your company won't sell compelling products. Your primary job as a product manager is to figure out what your market and customers need and make sure it gets built. If you aren't careful, you can spend all of your time performing tasks in support of products such as sales enablement, customer success, product marketing, and pre-sales. How Do You Know This Is Happening? It is easy to fall into this trap for many reasons. Here are a few scenarios that come to mind: Product Marketing

Connecting to SQL Server from OS X perl

I've been spending my coding time in the offhours working on Perl instead of Ruby. My coding time in general has been very limited, which is part of the reason for the length of time between updates. :) My latest project is to pull data out of a Microsoft SQL Server database for analysis. I'm using perl for various reasons: I need a crossplatform environment, and I need certain libraries that only work on perl. Some of the target users for my code run on Windows. I know that Ruby runs on Windows but it's not the platform of choice for Ruby developers. The vast majority seem to develop either on OS X or Linux. So Ruby on Windows isn't at the maturity that ActiveState perl is on Windows. In fact, I don't even run native perl anymore on my MacBook Pro. I've switched over to ActiveState perl because I don't need to compile anything every time I want to install new CPAN libraries. And because it's ActiveState, I'm that much more confident it will w

Thoughts on Product Management

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