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

Introduction to Pig from Prashanth Babu

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

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

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.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

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.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.

Eclipse Plugins

Eclipse was my main IDE for all my JavaEE and Web development all the time in my career. For all plain Java development and Android app development, I used to revert to IntelliJ IDEA Community Edition, which allows only plain Java development and not Enterprise Java development i.e. JavaEE or Web Development [Spring, Hibernate, Grails, etc]. For more info on what is allowed and what is not allowed in Community Edition, please refer this matrix on JetBrains website. Post the Mayan Doomsday Offer by JetBrains, thanks to the 75% steep discount on 20th December, I now have IntelliJ IDEA Ultimate Edition as well.

Eclipse is open source and is free to use. It is a thriving community for individuals and organizations which collaborate on commercially-friendly open source software. So, over a period of time Eclipse grew on all developers and almost everyone uses it as their main driver for development. And what's more with Scala, Groovy and Android teams giving support for Eclipse as the first IDE has given it a good momentum in the past few years. The plugin ecosystem is huge in Eclipse and in fact, these plugins have helped Eclipse grow as a platform what it is today. Such is the popularity of plugins in Eclipse ecosystem that they have also launched Marketplace for Eclipse plugins. If something is missing in Eclipse, don't worry, just check the Marketplace for the plugin or else you can develop a plugin in no time actually. That has been the mindset of a lot of Java developers in Eclipse ecosystem. There are thousands of plugins available for Eclipse right from customizing the IDE to Maven integration to Python IDE to Spring IDE, for Checkstyle, PMD, FindBugs, etc. 

With all my prior experience in using Eclipse, I have some goto plugins which I install the moment I get a brand new Eclipse version. Here is the list of all Eclipse plugins which I have used till now with a short description and the Eclipse Update Sites of the plugin.

Hope this was of some help to you.

Also, if you are interested in IntelliJ IDEA plugins, please check my earlier post which lists down all the IDEA plugins which I use.

Update on 05th April, 2015: After a fair bit of time here, I have moved on to GitHub hosted Octopress blogs. Please find me on http://P7h.org henceforth for all new updates.