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 :).
This HOW TO is more for my notes. We had a request at work, where we had to parse some log files and create a graph from the data in the log files.
The log files looked like this
[bash]
0m0.107s
0m0.022s
0m0.015s
2011-01-05_02_22
0m0.102s
0m0.024s
0m0.014s
2011-01-05_02_23
[/bash]
I wrote the following perl script to get the log file to look as such
[bash]| 0m0.107s| 0m0.022s| 0m0.015s| 2011-01-05 | 02:22
| 0m0.102s| 0m0.024s| 0m0.014s| 2011-01-05 | 02:23 [/bash]
perl script
[perl]
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Modules to load
# use strict;
use warnings;
# Variables
my $inputFile = ‘input.txt’;
my $version = 0.1;
my $logFile = ‘parsed_input.csv’;
# Sub Functions
sub Log($$$);
sub Trim($);
# Clear the screen
system $^O eq ‘MSWin32’ ? ‘cls’ : ‘clear’;
# Open the output log file
open(LOGFILE,"> $logFile") || die "Couldn’t open $logFile, exiting $!\n";
# Open the input file
open(INPUTFILE,"< $inputFile") || die "Couldn’t open $inputFile, exiting $!\n";
# Process the input file, one line at a time
while (defined ($line = <INPUTFILE>)) {
chomp $line;
# Check for blank line
if ($line =~ /^$/)
{
# Start a new line in the output
print LOGFILE "\n";
}
else
{
# Split the date and time
if ($line =~ /2011/)
{
@date = split (/_/,$line);
print LOGFILE "| $date[0] | $date[1]:$date[2]";
}
else
{
# Write the value to the output
print LOGFILE "| $line";
}
}
}
[/perl]
I then took the parsed log files and imported them into the cloud based reporting engine provided by Zoho at http://reports.zoho.com
The final result are these reports
Did I say, I love technology? 🙂
Quick way to figure out, which ports a particular program is using in linux
[bash] netstat -plan | grep -i PROGRAM_NAME [/bash]
Example : Check which ports SSH is listening on
[bash]
samurai@samurai:~$ sudo /bin/netstat -plan | grep sshd
tcp 0 0 0.0.0.0:22 0.0.0.0:* LISTEN 5257/sshd
tcp 0 52 123.123.123.123:22 124.124.124.124:32846 ESTABLISHED 3551/sshd: samurai
tcp6 0 0 :::22 :::* LISTEN 5257/sshd
unix 3 [ ] STREAM CONNECTED 5893 3551/sshd: samurai
unix 2 [ ] DGRAM 5849 3551/sshd: samurai
[/bash]
Most Redhat/Fedora users are used to chkconfig and service for controlling the services/programs that startup at boot time. Here is how you do it in Ubuntu
[bash] sudo SERVICE_NAME status [/bash]
Example : Check the status of Apache Web Service
[bash]samurai@samurai:~$ sudo service apache2 status
Apache is running (pid 3496).[/bash]
[bash] update-rc.d SERVICE_NAME add [/bash]
Example : Configure squid to start on bootup
[bash] update-rc.d squid add [/bash]
[bash] update-rc.d SERVICE_NAME remove [/bash]
Example : Configure squid to NOT start on bootup
[bash] update-rc.d squid remove [/bash]
NOTE : You need to have a startup script in /etc/init.d for the service to ensure update-rc.d works fine.
