Ignite Berlin
Forgot to post about this, but Ignite Berlin is tonight! Sabine and I are giving a short talk on our little idea/project, legomanhunt.com.
Log analysis with Pig and gnuplot
There are lots of easy ways to analyse standard Apache (and Tomcat) access logs. Tools like Webalizer and AWStats have existed for some time and are well tailored to logs generated from "standard" web traffic. What happens when you want to get a bit more advanced, look for different trends and graph things that standard tools just won't do? When your servers generate gigabytes (or terabytes) of data, the natural choice right now would be to gravitate towards Hadoop. However starting to hack away at MapReduce jobs in Java somehow seems a bit, well, wrong to be honest. Then came along a little Pig.
Hadoop Installation Quick Start
We've just finished setting up a small 15-node Hadoop cluster at work and more and more things keep coming to my mind that could be solved or dealt with easily in Hadoop. However, relying on a production cluster to mess around with just isn't worth all the hassle (amongst other things). So with all of the various ways to actually get up and running with Hadoop, what's the easiest or best choice? Here are some options that are available and some comments on the ones that I've played around with the last couple of months.
Free navigation!
The word is finally out, all Nokia devices with GPS now come with free driving and walking navigation! Do check it out but please be kind so my web services are not hammered in the first day 
Next best language?
I know the question has been asked before, but for a Java developer who is getting a bit tired of Java land, what is the next best language (or non-Java framework) to pick up? Here's a small social experiment to see what the community thinks: #nextbestlanguage
