I was listening to NPR on my way to work today and heard this interesting snippet about a Valentine’s Day tradition in Japan. Apparently, all the women give chocolate to men on Valentine’s day :). This just notched up Japan in my “cool country” list :).
I say, we make that a world wide tradition :).
The usual process for a DBA to download files from Oracle Metalink (support) site is
Say your database is in a data center and your workstation doesn’t have high speed connectivity to the data center, you can use the following trick to download content to a l[u]inux server in the data center that has Internet connectivity (and hopefully it is not your database server 🙂 ).
[bash]wget http://download.oracle.com/otn/linux/oracle11g/linux.x64_11gR2_clusterware.zip –user ORACLE_ID –password ORACLE_ID_PASSWORD[/bash]
- Replace the link with the link to your content and use your Oracle ID and password.
Quick how to on capturing HTTP headers using tcpdump on a web server (running Linux).
[bash] tcpdump -s 1024 -C 1024000 -w /tmp/httpcapture dst port 80 [/bash]
I was interviewing a candidate for a job opening at my work. I asked him how he motivates his team and he made this comment about how you truly measure if you can motivate a person
Think of a 16 year old working part time at a retailer. She is just working to earn money to buy some lipstick or perfume. Think how you can motivate her to work on a thanksgiving weekend!!
I have been snowed in for the first time (in the 10 years that I have been in Chicago) :). I woke up early and took some pictures. Here is one showing my car (nearly drowned in snow 🙂 ) with snow around it for some prospective
Here’s another showing how much snow we had to dig through on the footpaths to walk around
More pictures at http://www.flickr.com/photos/kudithipudi/sets/72157625835243633/
As I mentioned here, I have made some resolutions for 2011. As with any good task list, it is worthless unless you take a look at it periodically and update it :). I am going to publish an update on each one of the resolutions every month. Here goes the first one
I started out at 194 lbs and am not at 188 lbs. Hopefully I will be able to keep this downward trend.Progress on 2 out of the 4 resolutions!!.. Not bad :).
PS : Thanks for all the support I have been getting on the first resolution :). I didn’t realize the situation was so bad :).
Cache servers depend on cache control headers provided by the web server. Essentially, the web server (based on the configuration) specify’s what content is cache-able and for how long. (Note: Some of the cache servers might ignore this and have a default cache period for specific content. But that is not for another post 🙂 )
Here is a quick and dirty way to configure Apache 2.x server to enable cache control settings on all content in a directory
[bash]
ExpiresActive On
<Directory "/var/www/html/static">
Options FollowSymLinks MultiViews
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
ExpiresDefault "modification plus 1 hour"
</Directory>
[/bash]
This configuration tells apache to enable cache headers for all content in the /var/www/html/static folder. The cache expiration is set to expire 1 hour from the modification time of the content.
I attended a webinar hosted by Deepak Singh from Amazon’s Web Service group on analytics in the cloud. He made a very compelling case for utilizing the cloud to build out your analytics infrastructure. Esp with the growing data sizes that we deal with now, I think it makes absolute sense. You can utilize different software stacks and grow (and shrink) your hardware stack as required. Great stuff..
But there is a catch. Most of the data generated by current organizations is “inside” their perimeters. Whether it is the OLAP database collecting all your data or that application that spews gigabytes of logs, most of the data is housed in your infrastructure. So if you want to use the cloud to perform analytics on this data, you have to first transfer this data to the cloud. And therein lies the problem. As Deepak mentioned in the webinar, human beings have to yet conquer the limitations of physics :). You have to have a pretty big pipe to the Internet to just transfer this data.
Amazon has come up with various means to help with this issue. They are creating copies of publicly available data sets within their cloud so that customers don’t have to transfer them. They are also working with companies to keep private data sets in the cloud for other customers to use. So similar to how you would be able to spin up a Redhat AMI, by paying some license fee to Redhat, I believe they are looking at providing customers access to this private data sets by paying some fee to the company providing this data set. It is a win-win-win situation 🙂 for Amazon, the company providing the private data set and Amazon’s web services customers. They also support a one time import of data from physical disk or tape.
Coming back to the title of this post :). I think this field is still in it’s infancy. Once companies start migrating their infrastructure to the cloud (And yes, it will happen. It is only a matter of time :).), it will be a lot easier to leverage the cloud to perform your analytics. All your data will be in the cloud and you start leveraging the hardware and software stacks in the cloud.
LinkedIn (professional networking site) is providing a way to map your networks to see where you have your strongest connections. Here is a map of my networks. You can click on the image to get to the live map.
My strongest connections so far are at
I wish they came up with a map showing the location of my network too. That way, I can find out if I can get a job in New Zealand through my network :).
