Author: MC
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Carbon Credits Uncorked: A Wine-Inspired Guide to Climate Action
Introduction Imagine walking into a wine shop, surrounded by bottles from every corner of the globe. Each wine tells a story of its origin, the conditions of its creation, and the expertise behind its production. Now, picture a similar scenario, but instead of wines, you’re navigating the world of carbon credits. Overwhelming? It doesn’t have…
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Fixing the Heartbleed vulnerability on CentOS
While the popular media have jumped on the Heartbleed Bug as if the sky were falling causing mass panic, it is actually quick and easy to fix for us CentOS users. Red Hat released a patched version of OpenSSL on 8th April and it has already filtered down to the CentOS updates repository, so all…
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The problem with Big Data is not the Data
There is a seemingly irrational obsession about how BIG your Big Data has to be before a magical unicorn appears and delivers the answers your business needs. Not a day goes by where I don’t see some swanky infographic reminding me that Facebook collects several Yottabytes of data every day. Ok, so I may have embellished that a…
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Integrated Systems & Virtualization for Midsize Business – IBM #expertsyschat
Earlier today @IBMPureSystems held a #ExpertSysChat discussion on Twitter; they run these periodically about a variety of issues surrounding Cloud & Virtualization adoption. Obviously they have a product in this area but the discussions tend to be interesting. Generally they get an independent expert to chair the discussion and propose questions, a selection of IBM staff are…
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Is Google infringing on my patent?
Firstly I should qualify post by saying I’m not a “patent troll” nor do I agree with the mess that is “software patents” in the US. However in my previous life I worked in R&D at British Sky Broadcasting and part of my job was to create Intellectual Property that Sky could turn into new…
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Winning with Big Data – IBM Research
Earlier today (10th August 2012) IBM Research (@IBMResearch) ran a webinar titled “Box Office to Front Office – Winning with Big Data in Sports & Entertainment“. It was split in two halves, one Entertainment focused and one more Sports focused. I tuned in primarily for; Todd Yellin, VP of Product Innovation, Netflix Ray Elias, CMO,…
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It’s not how big your data is, it’s how you use it!
Over the past couple of months I have met and talked to a lot of new and interesting people. Everywhere I go I encounter the same questions about Big Data, it’s like some sort of mass hysteria around what on the face of it is a simple concept “volumes of data”. Example questions; “How much…
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Installing CentOS packages on Red Hat Enterprise Linux
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…
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A brief history of Red Hat, Fedora and CentOS
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…
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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…
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Hadoop: Processing ZIP files in Map/Reduce
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…
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What Netflix knows about you and why it’s a lesson to others…
There has been recent a flurry of articles about Netflix and how they are analysing user behaviour and habits to enhance the recommendations they make. Last week Mohammed Sabah (Senior Data Scientist @ Netflix) presented at Hadoop Summit in San Jose describing some of the ways they do this and the impact of making good recommendations – measurable…
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Fear, uncertainty and doubt about Cloud
Since the rise of the Cloud phenomenon there has always been grumbles about the security of data stored within it and data accessible over Cloud-based solutions. Naturally big-name vendors have capitalised upon this fear, uncertainty and doubt by portraying Cloud as being powered by cheap-and-nasty server hardware prone to failure, and managed by spotty teenagers or cowboys. It’s not…