Monthly Archives: May 2008
New York Neanderthals
Paul Graham writes, “Cambridge seems to be the intellectual capital of the world. … And what US city has a stronger claim? New York? A fair number of smart people, but diluted by a much larger number of neanderthals in … Continue reading
EC2 Authorizations for Hadoop
I just did my first test-run of a Hadoop cluster on Amazon EC2. It’s not as tricky as it appears, although I ran into some snags, which I’ll document here. I also found these pages helpful: EC2 on Hadoop Wiki … Continue reading
Stop Your Java SAX Parser from Downloading DTDs
Back in February, in a slightly plaintive post, the W3 sysadmins asked that people stop hammering their servers with requests for XHTML DTDs. Everyone said yes, this is a stupid problem that wouldn’t have happened if a) the XML spec … Continue reading
We Don’t Know How We Program
Paul Johnson, in the U.K., wrote a piece about how there is no known “process” for programming. At some point, all the theory and methodology goes out the window and someone has to sit down, think about the problem, and … Continue reading
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Calling Java Constructors with this()
The things I don’t know about Java… could fill a book. Here’s a new one, from the Hadoop sources: public ArrayWritable(Class valueClass) { // … } public ArrayWritable(Class valueClass, Writable[] values) { this(valueClass); this.values = values; } The second constructor … Continue reading
Astronauts Without Mission Control
Joel Spolsky complains that architecture astronauts are taking over at big, rich companies like Google and Microsoft, pushing out elaborate architectural systems that don’t solve actual problems. He’s right in that smart, technical people like to take on any large, … Continue reading