Technology & MSG

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Out of the box, Apache Accumulo attempts to replicate its table metadata five times. There’s nothing wrong with that practice, ensuring that the table metadata will be more resilient to hardware failure. Unless you have less than five DataNodes — not uncommon in the case of a small demo or test cluster — in which […]

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A brief visual trip from my 2013 tasting diary, in chronological order. No apologies if you head to the kitchen right after… Pho from Pho 75 Reston, VA Grilled Thick Sourdough Breakfast Sandwich at Lowell’s (better picture) Seattle, WA Infused Martinis (pre-poutine) at Tini Bigs Seattle, WA The Boat from The Weiner’s Circle Herndon, VA […]

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After more than twelve months with Cloudera, I still have difficulty explaining to others what I do for a living. Titles mean different things to different people at different companies in different industries. Perhaps some exposition is in order. As a part of our Field Services Team, the bulk of my time is spent embedded […]

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After enabling Kerberos on a working Hadoop cluster running CDH 3u6, we ran into two problems. Tiny problems, but problems that took a long time to find and prevented the cluster from working. In troubleshooting, we found the existing corpus of documentation and mailing list archives lacking, so hopefully the following might assist others in […]

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Two months ago I started at Cloudera, a mid-sized Silicon Valley startup that focuses on open-source software. The decision to leave my old job was hard. To start, I had many of the same reservations that I did back in 2008 when I left a previous project for “something new, something promising, something challenging,” except […]

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