Fractional Futurist

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  • Where are we on the Big Data hype cycle?

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    MC
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    At the moment it seems that every other day brings announcements of a new “Big Data” start-up, partnership, conference, report etc. Just about every man and his dog have made some form of press release related to “Big Data” recently. Every week I stumble across some “Big Data” relevant conference or event that I’ve just missed out…

  • Reaction to: Raspberry Pi impressions: the $35 Linux computer and tinker toy (Engadget)

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    This Engadget article by Terrence O’Brien (@TerrenceOBrien) is a little underwhelming. It has all the writing style and voice I’m accustomed to reading on Engadget – where they’re normally dissecting the latest shiny piece of hardware from Apple, Samsung etc. However the Raspberry Pi was never intended for iPhone-totting news editors; its original purpose was…

  • Surviving the 1st Global Data Science Hackathon

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    If you haven’t heard already, this week is BigDataWeek – a coordinated set of community events around the globe to bring like-minded Data Geeks together. One of the most exciting developments is the announcement of the 1st Global Data Science Hackathon.  Starting on Saturday and running for 24 hours competitors around the global will be vying to better predict the Air Quality…

  • It’s been a while…

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    It’s been a busy couple of months…  I’ve left my career at BSkyB to co-found a Data Science startup called TUMRAand have been busy beavering away on developing our products!! I have however updated my parent website https://cutler.sg/ recently, and have yet to consolidate MovableType with my HTML5gasm homepage.  Expect more soon :O)

  • lm-sensors on Ganglia

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    Ganglia has a great little utility called gmetric that allows you to report on anything you like.  Abusing this feature combined with a simple shell script I was able to get CPU Temperatures from lm-sensors into my pretty graphs on Ganglia. Original credit goes here.  

  • Hadoop Hack: TaskTracker priority

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    Changing the ‘niceness‘ of only one type of daemon While recently playing with our cluster during a Terasort benchmark I realised just how dumb it was to leave everything running with the default level of niceness (0).  SSH sessions were timing out, reporting was going haywire, al-sorts of fun. I know the Cloudera CDH3 distribution allows you to set a…

  • Revolution R on CentOS 6

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    One of the most interesting talks I attended at Hadoop World was by Revolution Analytics.  A couple of months ago they released a set of open-source packages to Github which marries their ‘R’ statistical programming language to the power of Hadoop.  As well as running R programs across Map/Reduce it includes support to work with…

  • Site Update: NGINX, CloudFront, Hadoop World, AI Class

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    It’s been a few weeks since I last posted… I’ve migrated this site to a new home and done a bit of spring cleaning. You can expect more interesting analysis of social media data shortly. I’ve compiled quite a bit lately just because I started capturing data and then forgot to switch it off! In other news; This site…

  • Measuring use of Social Media during live TV events

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    Lately I’ve been postulating ways to get some meaningful data out of social media like Twitter.  While half paying attention to a Formula One race in the background on the TV, I twigged on to an interesting experiment.  I generated a Formula One relevant filter to use with the Twitter Streaming API, whereby Twitter would…

  • Flying, Fishing, Time-saving Bots in World of Warcraft!

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    Recently I have been revisiting projects from the past – hundreds of little toys, gadgets, fragments of code.  One example of that I’m going to talk about here… In the infamous MMORPG that is World of Warcraft, there are many vanity items that are intentionally a massive time sink to acquire.  Obtaining these items can…

  • Bye bye Slicehost… Hello Host Virtual

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    Recently I was ranting about Slicehost being assimilated by Rackspace and how bleak its future seems.  I have a few virtual machines hosted by Slicehost and tried out Rackspace to see what I was in for.  Deeply saddened by their service I started looking for a new home. Linode looked promising at first – native…

  • NGINIX on a 256MB VM slice ~24,000 TPS

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    This post is a bit of a brain-dump detailing exactly how/what/why, if you just want the juicy bits skip to the bottom 😉 I’ve been a loyal user of the Apache Web Server for some 10 years.  Working on everything from custom server modules (in C) all the way through to bog-standard use cases like…

  • Rackspace Cloud Hosting #FAIL

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    I’ve been an Slicehost customer for years, and I vividly recall that the sign up process went something like this; Sign up in the website and enter billing information (1 minute), Create a simple VM with Fedora (5 minutes), SSH into the machine and start using it (<1 minute), So basically within 7 minutes of…

  • Hello GNOME 3 courtesy of Fedora 15

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    A couple of weeks ago I migrated my home computer to Fedora 15 featuring the new GNOME 3 user interface among other significant changes.  At first it was quite a struggle to get used to, I almost rolled back to Fedora 14.  After persevering for the first few days it got easier to work with,…

  • Google Music Manager on Linux (Wine)

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    UPDATE:  Google have finally provided a native Linux client, just login to http://music.google.com/ and click ‘Add Music’ to install it. Last week I received a Beta invite for Google Music.  I jumped straight onto it only to meet the message “Music Manager is only available for PC and Mac”.  Being an avid Linux user I…