Why am I envious of Big Data geeks in the Valley?

1. Hacking your way through Big Data and taking pride with Hadoop on your tool belt?
2. Also living in the Silicon Valley? Or among the Hadoop Summit attendees?

Did you just answer yes to both questions?!?

Well then, I'm a bit envious of you because next week, Silicon Valley is the place to be for us, Hadoop and Big Data geeks. Next week, the concentration of Big Data talent will be so high in the Valley that I tend to agree with Leon on this one:

I am always envious of the people who live in Silicon Valley. It is not the California weather that I crave though it is nice. If you like technology there never seems to be a shortage of meetups, conferences and all around interesting events.

First, on June 13th and 14th, Yahoo and Hortonworks team up to bring you a Hadoop Summit with an attractive agenda and speaker list. So many tracks, so many speakers, so many talks, that I’m not even going to mention them myself; just head over and whet your appetite. :)

The very next day, June 15th, IBM is inviting people over for a free (breakfast and lunch provided) Big Data Developer Day. The day will blend in both hands on labs and interactive discussions with the opportunity to meet other technical folks and exchange knowledge.

If you are interested in

• Hadoop scripting,
• real time in-memory analytics,
• Big Data for social media,
• log analytics,
• Big Data in general

June 15th is your full day of time well spent with senior technical leaders of our Big Data development team.

So, if you are in the Valley and you have the day available to invest it in your Hadoop and Big Data skills, I recommend you register as the number of participants is limited.

Ruby 1.9.3 via RVM on Mac OSX Lion: Success Story

That fast!

After a long time away from Rails and Ruby, I roll up my sleeves today and try to figure out what I’ve missed lately:

• first, Rails 3.2 proves to be engineered to work faster in dev mode, by now incorporating the Active Reload gem by default.
• then reading some more, Ruby 1.9.3 bubbles up — it’s freaking fast bro!

Great news, time for our good old friend RVM:

1. $ rvm get head
2. $ rvm reload
3. $ rvm install 1.9.3

But wait…

The Problem

Installing Ruby from source to: /Users/marius/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p0, this may take a while depending on your cpu(s)...

ruby-1.9.3-p0 - #fetching 
ruby-1.9.3-p0 - #extracted to /Users/marius/.rvm/src/ruby-1.9.3-p0 (already extracted)
Fetching yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz to /Users/marius/.rvm/archives
Extracting yaml-0.1.4.tar.gz to /Users/marius/.rvm/src
Configuring yaml in /Users/marius/.rvm/src/yaml-0.1.4.
Compiling yaml in /Users/marius/.rvm/src/yaml-0.1.4.
Installing yaml to /Users/marius/.rvm/usr
ruby-1.9.3-p0 - #configuring 
ERROR: Error running ' ./configure --prefix=/Users/marius/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p0 --enable-shared --disable-install-doc --with-libyaml-dir=/Users/marius/.rvm/usr ', please read /Users/marius/.rvm/log/ruby-1.9.3-p0/configure.log
ERROR: There has been an error while running configure. Halting the installation.

The installer fails with an error message including checking whether the C compiler works... no even with Xcode 4.2 available.

The Wrong Path

Checked configure.log, found all the questions on SO and went for the fast solution:

$ rvm reinstall 1.9.3 --with-gcc=clang

which didn’t work for me!

The Solution

Following mpapis’ advice, I downloaded the GCC Installer for OSX 10.7+, v2, by Kenneth Reitz, and a simple

$ rvm reinstall 1.9.3

did the trick! So I was happy to jump to the next step:

$ rvm --default use 1.9.3

The Bonus

Downloading and installing the massive Xcode tool suite (2.5GB!!!) is a huge hassle if you just want GCC and related tools.

The osx-gcc-installer includes the essential compilers:

• GCC
• LLVM
• Clang
• Developer CLI Tools (purge, etc)
• DevSDK (headers, etc)

Therefore, since I’m not planning to use Xcode for other reasons, I simply removed it:

$ sudo /Developer/Library/uninstall-devtools –mode=all

If the Rails install fails with a message along these lines:

ERROR:  Error installing rails:
 ERROR: Failed to build gem native extension.

        /Users/marius/.rvm/rubies/ruby-1.9.3-p0/bin/ruby extconf.rb
creating Makefile

make
sh: make: command not found

don't worry, just run the GCC Installer once again.

©the-chosen-pessimist

My "Top Five" IT trends of the next half decade

Big data alone is not information, it's not enough to transmit the message over to your reader. You need visualization to leverage the bandwidth of the visual system to move a huge amount of information into the brain very quickly.

Infographics versus Data Visualization

The other day I started reading about Designing Data Visualizations and I discovered some key criteria to differentiate Infographics from "real" Data Visualization:

Infographics: aesthetically rich, relatively data-poor, specific to the data at hand, manually drawn.

Data Visualization often aesthetically barren, relatively data-rich, easy to regenerate with different data, algorithmically drawn.

The "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade

Today I was reading about the "Big Five" IT trends of the next half decade:

1. mobile,
2. social,
3. cloud,
4. consumerization,
5. big data.

And yes, it was their infographic that inspired this article altogether:

It does a better job at transmitting the idea than the list preceding it, doesn't it?

From Big Data to Information

You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'd put big data first! And moreover, regardless how big is your data set, data alone is just stark. I believe that big data alone not enough to transmit your message over to your reader: data alone is not information.

It's the visualization that can leverage the incredible capabilities and bandwidth of the visual system to move a huge amount of information into the brain very quickly.
So, if we are to talk about the top shifts in Information Technology, I would definitely add visualization to the list:

Big Data + Visualization = Information