Month: July 2012

  • Installing CentOS packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux

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    At the weekend I got into a discussion with Andy Stanford-Clark and Richard Appleby on Twitter troubleshooting basic application installation in Red Hat Enterprise Linux (like Pidgin). Not finding a solution later began to plague me, I grabbed a copy of RHEL and installed it on a Virtual Machine to solve the problem. If you’re interested in the history of the Red…

  • A brief history of Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS

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    The Linux ecosystem can be confusing because of the shear amount of choice available. I’ve always been a Red Hat guy and have spent a significant amount of my life staring at it’s installer. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used just about every other distribution out there as well as create my own one. This…

  • Reasons why QR Codes aren’t dead!

    I’ve always been a big advocate of QR codes – provided they’re used correctly and not stamped on all sorts of stuff for the sake of it. I think they can be an amazingly powerful way of communicating information in a simple cross-platform way. A couple of months back Forbes asked Are QR Codes Dead? and…

  • Hadoop: Processing ZIP files in Map/Reduce

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    Due to popular request, I’ve updated my simple framework for processing ZIP files in Hadoop Map/Reduce jobs. Previously the only easy solution was to unzip files locally and then upload them to the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) for processing. This adds a lot of unnecessary complexity when you are dealing with thousands of ZIP files; Java…