In this short blog I will introduce you to a useful tool called Htop, a process viewer for Linux, which is also available for Mac. In the words of Htop’s author Hisham Muhammad, it aims to be a better alternative to the top program. Among other features it provides full horizontal and vertical scrolling, searching […]
Mahout’s bank marketing example – SGD classifier and vector encoders
In my last Mahout post I gave an introduction to the Logistic Regression SGD classifier using continuous data. Roy, one of the commenters of that post asked about how to classify on different types of data. Therefore I decided to write a quick post on using Mahout’s vector encoders on the bank marketing dataset referring […]
How to manage your Docker runtime config with Vagrant
In this short blog I will show you how to manage a Docker container using Vagrant. Since version 1.6 Vagrant supports Docker as a provider, next to existing providers for VirtualBox and AWS. With the new Docker support Vagrant boxes can be started way faster. In turn Vagrant makes Docker easier to use since its […]
An Introduction To Mahout’s Logistic Regression SGD Classifier
This blog features classification in Mahout and the underlying concepts. I will explain the basic classification process, training a Logistic Regression model with Stochastic Gradient Descent and a give walkthrough of classifying the Iris flower dataset with Mahout.
Docker From A Distance – The Remote API
Many people use docker from the command line to build images, run containers and manage Docker on their machine. However, you can also run the same Docker commands via its remote REST API. In this blog I will guide you through Docker’s remote API using curl while pointing out a few details and tools that […]
NLUUG DevOps Conference 2013 – Reliability, clouds and the UNIX way
Last Thursday I attended the NLUUG DevOps conference in Bunnik, near Utrecht. The NLUUG is the Dutch UNIX user group. In this blog I will summarize the talks I attended, some fun things I learned and I will discuss my own talk about continuous integration at a large organization.
Puppet from the trenches – How to prevent overwritten user configuration with a custom type
In this installment of the ‘from the trenches’ series I cover the use of Puppet during one of our projects. We have used Puppet to provision Jenkins instances as part of a build and deployment platform for a large organization. I discuss the problem of when Puppet overwrites user managed configuration and how we solved […]
Bash – A few commands to use again and again
Introduction These days I spend a lot of time in the bash shell. I use it for ad-hoc scripting or driving several Linux boxes. In my current project we set up a continuous delivery environment and migrate code onto it. I lift code from CVS to SVN, mavenize Ant builds and funnel artifacts into Nexus. […]
QCon London 2013 – Simplicity, complexity and doodles
Westminster Abbey – View from the Queen Elizabeth II conference center …and now back home On my desk lies a stack of notepads from the QCon sponsors. I pick up one of them and turn few pages trying to decipher my own handwriting. As I read my notes I reflect back on the conference. QCon […]
Berlin Buzzwords 2012 Recap
This is a recap of Berlin Buzzwords 2012, the 2 day conference on everything scale, search and store in the NoSQL world. Myself and Martijn van Groningen arrive in Berlin Sunday evening. Unfortunately we are too late for the infamous Barcamp, a low-key mix of lightning talks, beer and socializing, so we decide to have […]