Open Source licenses

Understanding Open Source licenses turns out to be rather too difficult. At least I always have had issues in understanding which Open Source license is too restrictive and which is a bit liberal.

After looking around for some time, I found the following 3 alternatives for easily understanding the terms of few of the Open Source licenses.

Alternative#1

+Brian Fitzpatrick and +Dan Bentley have made a brilliant flow chart for Open Source licenses. It is pretty simple and easy to understand.

Alternative#2

+Marakana have another interesting flowchart for understanding Open Source licenses.

Alternative#3

And finally another option to understand Open Source licenses is tl;drLegal Website, which summarizes and explains Open Source licenses in simple terms and in plain English. Its a pretty decent website which is fast and also very intuitive and easy to use. Just key in the name of the License you want to read about. The website will do the rest with a quick summary and also the full text of this particular license.

I always look up to one of these alternatives when I am in doubt about licensing terms of a particular Open Source License. And when I need to check the complete text of a license, I usually use tl;drLegal Website.

Hope this is of some help to you too.

My presentation on "Introduction to Pig"

Few months back, I conducted a 2-hour workshop on "Introduction to Pig" at Fifth Elephant, Bangalore, India on 26th July, 2012. This is a community-powered conference on the Big Data ecosystem.

As part of this workshop, I have touched a bit on Hadoop, MapReduce and Hive. But as the title says, the focus was on Apache Pig. I have also demoed few usecases of execution of Java MapReduce, Hive and Pig. And also a brief overview and demo of Twitter's Ambrose UI for visualizing Pig MapReduce jobs.

Here are the slides of my presentation. This presentation gives a basic understanding of

1. Big Data
2. Basics of Hadoop and MapReduce
3. Landscape of Hadoop ecosystem
4. Introduction to Apache Pig
5. Basics of Pig and Pig Latin
6. Pig vs. Hadoop MR
7. Pig vs. SQL and Pig vs. Hive
8. Twitter Ambrose for visualizing Pig MR Jobs

I have also posted the same slides on Speaker Deck.
Code developed for the demos in this workshop can be found on Github.

Aaron Swartz Memorial at New York

Aaron Swartz, a very accomplished and a highly talented nerd committed suicide last Friday, i.e. 11th January, 2013 at an young age of 26 years. So many people have written so much about him. Check the complete Wikipedia page and check the References section of his Wikipedia page for more info and other articles written by his friends. He has left wonderful impressions on Reddit, Creative Commons, SOPA, Markdown, RSS, web.py to name a few of his outstanding contributions.

Aaron's memorial was held on Saturday, 19th January, 2013 at Cooper Union, New York. Here is the complete set of recorded videos from his memorial which are hosted on livestream. There are totally 6 videos which you must checkout to understand what are his contributions and how talented a person he was and what impressions he has left people with, even such an young age.
If you are hard-pressed for time, then ensure you at least check the message from Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, partner of Aaron, embedded below. It is really inspiring.

Rest in peace Aaron!!

Eclipse startup options or JVM Settings

In continuation to my other post on Eclipse, in this post I am detailing the startup options [which are also called JVM Settings] on Eclipse IDE. Eclipse startup is controlled by the options in eclipse.ini file present under Eclipse installation folder [i.e. $ECLIPSE_HOME]. By default, Eclipse comes with a set of values in this file. But those values are not optimized and might cause issues and / or hangs in large projects which might have huge codebase. These can be tuned further for better performance.

My startup options in my current version of Eclipse Juno i.e. v4.2.1 are below:

Please use these options as a reference and update eclipse.ini file [please do take a backup of this file prior to updating it]. Also, one more important point to note is, use the latest Sun / Oracle JDK for starting Eclipse. This also has a profound effect on the Eclipse startup time as well as the IDE functionality with a decent sized codebase.

Finally, in case you were looking for tuning the startup options of IntelliJ IDEA, please refer my earlier post which details the parameters for IDEA.

The Dark Knight Rises ultimate trilogy trailer

Wonderfully put together ultimate trilogy trailer of "The Dark Knight Rises", Christopher Nolan's Batman series.

Christopher Nolan's taking is brilliant as always. Apart from him, Hans Zimmer's background score is excellent. I concur with the comment in the below Youtube page which says: "Without Hans Zimmer this trilogy wouldn't be nearly as epic as it is". If you have any doubts, you should check out the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack of The Dark Knight Rises on Amazon or Flipkart.

The only thing I missed in this trailer is the voice of Bane i.e. Tom Hardy.