JAQL

Wondering what's up at JAQL. Seems they are still at Hadoop 0.18, whereas Hadoop has moved to 0.20.1. Anybody besides IBM using it?

Unknown Entity with Hibernate 3

While using Hibernate 3 and JPA, remember to place persistence.xml in the classes/META-INF folder. Otherwise, you will get Exception in thread "main" org.hibernate.MappingException: Unknown entity

Hadoop On Ubuntu

I am ramping myself up to MapReduce and GFS as part of a very exciting new opportunity. I needed to install Hadoop-0.20 on my Ubuntu desktop. I followed Michael Noll's excellent tutorial as well as the quickstart for the release. Michael's tutorial is not updated yet for the split of config files in Hadoop 0.20, and he has mentioned that clearly. So, I followed his tutorial and when it comes to the configs, I used the quickstart information for core-site, hdfs-site and mapred-site.

I was however getting stuck with a strange issue. jps would show the jobtracker process for a while, and then it would get killed. The logs had a java.io.IOException: /tmp/hadoop....jobtracker-info file could only be replicated to 0 nodes instead of 1.
The Hadoop mailing lists did not have any reference to this issue. All I found was this bug. I read on Cloudera's page that start-all and stop-all are deprecated, but I could not find any reference to it on Hadoop's wiki.

After various hits and trials, what worked for me was to edit start-all.sh. I first started the dfs and then waited for 5 minutes. Only then did I brin up the mapred deamons. This solved it.

Infamous Error 150 while creating a table in MySQL

I am working on a data migration and defining the schema. The application will eventually be implemented in Ruby on Rails, but instead of migrations, the client needed the sql dump. My CREATE TABLE statement was failing with errno 150, and SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS was not helpful. The Foreign Key section kept telling me :

Cannot resolve table name close to:
(id)) engine=innodb

I was completely zapped, both the related tables were INNODB tables, the columns were same type and size, indices were defined correctly. It was after sometime that I realized that the syntax for creating the foreign key was wrong. I was saying:

FOREIGN KEY (parent_id) REFERENCES parent.id

But it should be:
FOREIGN KEY (parent_id) REFERENCES parent(id)

Buying from Dell.

I decided on buying a Dell laptop. Dell was offering 2 GHz+ processors, which was a very tempting proposition. As I needed the laptop as soon as possible, I bought it from the direct Dell stores instead of the site. There were two choices - Vista prebundled or no OS. Needless to say, I went with no OS. Here began the most harrowing customer experience of my life.

The FreeDOS CD which came with the laptop did not work. It failed to recognize the hard drive. RedHat could not be installed either, no hard disk again. Fedora Core got installed, but my wifi button would refuse to power on. Windows XP would not get installed either, the installation hung midway.

Dell refuses to provide drivers for any OS except Vista! A clear way to dissuade people from going the non proprietary, non-Microsoft way. An intelligent financial strategy to subvert legalities and yet force the customer to buy tightly integrated systems.

When I called Dell Support, a customer service representative with no know how whatsoever told me that :

1. Dell can not support non factory OS.
2. They have NO non Vista drivers.
3. They cant tell me why FreeDOS is not installing. Nor will they help me install it, even though they gave the CD with the laptop.

45 minutes of interaction with the customer support guy had my head spinning. I felt absolutely cheated. Luckily, threats of suing the company worked, and the rep digged through some more guides to tell me some BIOS changes needed to install Windows XP.
Eureka, dream machine and excellent customer service!!!!

Apparently, the bundling with Vista is so strong that the BIOS itself is pre-configured. No documentation on what to change obviously from Dell, lest some lowly mortal attempt a lesser OS than holier than thou Vista.

Anti-trust anyone ?

YouTube API does not work through Resin

I have run into a strange issue with the youtube api. I am able to upload videos through the browser and verify them in my youtube acocunt. However, when I try to retrieve the videos, I do not get them. I am able to retrieve correctly through a junit test case.

After a lot of digging on the forum, I found this post:
Different behaviour under Tomcat and Resin

The client api documentation does not suggest any supported environments or versions. GData Doc

Pricing consulting services

I have been wondering a bit about the business model and economics of freelancing. Stumbled across some interesting links:

Freelance Consulting Rates
How to Price Consulting Services

Hotgigs has some good reference data based on skill set

Six resolutions for a new year of consulting | IT Consultant | TechRepublic.com

Came across some interesting new year resultions - Six resolutions for a new year of consulting | IT Consultant | TechRepublic.com

The 10 O’Clock Rule at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life

Ruchir sent me the following link

The 10 O’Clock Rule at LifeClever ;-) Tips for Design and Life

I think this makes a lot of sense. For a person like me who gets confused every day about what to wear and how to dress the kids up, if I lay out mine and the kids' clothes the night before, it surely helps. One thing I have also realized helps a ton is to clean up the house before going to sleep, that ensures one wakes up to a clean house and does not get disoriented in the morning, trying to sort things out. As a work from home mom of a toddler and an infant, I probably need all the efficiency(and more!)