It’s not every day that you receive snail mail with life-changing information in it, but when it does come, it can come from the unlikeliest sources. A year ago, when doing a simple change of health insurance vendors, I had to give the requisite blood sample. I knew the drill… nurse comes to the house, takes blood, […]
HBase queries from Bash – a couple simple REST examples
Learn how to do some simple queries to extract data from the Hadoop/HDFS based HBase database using its REST API. Are you getting stuck trying to figure out HBase query via the REST API? Me too. The main HBase docs are pretty limited in terms of examples but I guess it’s all there, just not […]
Running Gephi graph vizualization on OSX Mavericks (10.9.5)
Having trouble launching latest Gephi on OSX? I’m running Mavericks but I’m sure this will help others who have upgraded or who are still running older versions of OSX. From command line, use the jdkhome parameter when launching Gephi and point it to the system Java 1.6 install: $ cd /Applications/Gephi.app/Contents/MacOS $ ./Gephi –jdkhome /System/Library/Java/JavaVirtualMachines/1.6.0.jdk/Contents/Home/
Analytics Dashboard – Kibana 3 – a few short quick tips
After you’ve loaded log files into elasticsearch you can start to visualize them using the Kibana web app and build your own dashboard. While using Kibana for a week or so, I found it tricky to find the docs or tutorials to get me up to speed quickly with some of the more advanced/hidden features. In […]
From zero to HDFS in 60 min.
(Okay, so you can be up and running quicker if you have a better internet connection than me.) Want to get your hands dirty with Hadoop related technologies but don’t have time to waste? I’ve spent way too much time trying to get HBase, for example, running on my Macbook with Brew and wish I had […]
JDBC syntax for Matrix/Paraccel Driver
Need to “Perform Big Data Analytics at Massive Scale?” The Actian Analytics Platform includes the Matrix high performance analytics database (formerly known as Paraccel). I’ve seen some people asking online for what JDBC URL syntax is. If you are using the JDBC driver be sure to read the README which gives the details: The driver recognises JDBC […]
Leveraging Analytics for Personal Health
I spent the last 6 months undergoing some dramatic health changes (ping me for details), primarily diet, and now I’m getting around to refactoring my fitness. Naturally, I want to try some apps that both collect lots of sensor data but that also present it back to me in a meaningful (and hopefully motivating) way. While I’m […]
2 Dashboard examples – Devops and more
I came across a couple interesting packages recently for both system and app monitoring scenarios. AppFirst Their “Beautiful Dashboards” slogan says it all – they have a free version of their DevOps Dashboard system for monitoring up to 3 servers. Among lots of cool stuff, I especially like how they show historic ranges in the […]