Opposable Thumbs

Just doing a bit of cleanup here and there, trying to get the blog back into shape. I’d love to make it halfway interesting to read and all that. But at this point, I’d settle for making it usable for me so I have somewhere to post random notes and thoughts again. We’ll see what becomes of this. I am on vacation, after all, so there’s no time like now to get this done.

Running Cloudera Hadoop VM on VirtualBox (revisited) In an earlier post I talked about getting the Cloudera training VM running under VirtualBox. Unfortunately, while the instructions were pretty straightforward for someone experienced with dealing with the various low level details of virtual machines, they perhaps weren’t exactly detailed and direct. So here’s an attempt to right that wrong.

Note: I’ve sinced installed VirtualBox 3.0 which was released shortly before I prepared this post. I’ll try to redo the screenshots at some point using the new version if I find that they differ significantly enough to justify it.

So, I’ve been keeping an eye on Hadoop for a while now. The whole idea of MapReduce is pretty cool and the fact that there is a free implementation of it is even cooler. Of course, as a busy developer, not to mention my many other duties as sysadmin, build engineer, etc. that seem to come into play on a daily basis, I haven’t had time to really dig into it.

Then Hadoop got even more attention this last week when Amazon announced their new Elastic MapReduce offering. Basically, they give you a nice API for quickly spinning up new EC2 instances running Hadoop. You upload your data to S3 and point your jobs at them. It’s brilliant really – I’m still trying to find an excuse to play with it.

Anyway… I was getting to something here… what was it? Oh yes, Cloudera. The Cloudera folks have very generously produced this excellent series of tutorials on running and developing for Hadoop. As a part of all this, they also created a rather spiffy prebuilt Hadoop VM to play with along with the tutorials. (The VM, by the way, is available for download along side the tutorials – I’m not going to link directly to it here in case my link goes out of date.)

There’s one problem with all this – they built the VM as a VMware image. I don’t really care for VMware much these days (long story, nothing personal, just my own preferences). I run KVM on my workstation and VirtualBox on my laptop. Both are really excellent options and I highly recommend them. But in order to work through their examples, I really wanted to spin up this VM and see what it was all about.

Thankfully, VirtualBox is very good at running VMware virtual machines. Here’s how to get it working:

1. Obviously, the first step is to download and extract the archive somewhere.
2. Once you’ve got the VM somewhere convenient, start up VirtualBox and go to the ‘File > Virtual Media Manager’ menu. From here, you can click ‘Add’ and point it at the file ‘cloudera-training-0.2.vmdk’ in the folder where you extracted the Cloudera archive. Then close that window.
3. Back in the main VirtualBox interface, click the ‘New’ button to create a new VM. Select the OS as ‘Linux’ and version as ‘Ubuntu’. Set the memory to 512MB. When you get to the boot disk screen, it should have auto-selected the new drive you added earlier. If not, select it and hit ‘next’, then ‘Finish’.
4. Select the VM you just created and click the ‘Settings’ button. Select ‘Network’ in the settings control panel and go to the MAC Address field. You’ll need to open the file ‘cloudera-training-0.2.vmx’ back in the folder you extracted earlier. Find the line labelled ‘ethernet0.generatedAddress’ and grab the MAC address that’s given there. You’ll need to remove the colons and then insert that into this field. This might not be strictly necessary, but it makes sure the linux image still has the MAC address it expects.
5. Next select the ‘General’ control panel and then the ‘Advanced’ tab. Check the ‘Enable PAE/NX’ box and then click the ‘OK’ button.

That’s it. You should now be able to run the VM just fine. You might want to install the Guest Additions package, too, but you’ll need to do a quick “sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get install build-essential linux-headers-2.6.27-11-server” in the VM first. Good luck and happy MapReducing!

DorkbotPDX 0×01 will be taking place on March 30th at the PNCA Graduate Studios building (1432 NW Johnson St.). Doors will be opening up around 6 — show up early if you want to meet other dorks or find out what makes us tick.

The lineup of speakers is:

• Cathy Swider – Using LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots with students to create art
• Ward Cunningham – What If Bacteria Designed Computers?
• David Frech – Bootstrap yourself into conviviality by writing your own Forth

Talk Descriptions:

Using LEGO Mindstorm NXT robots with students to create art. As alternative to competitive competitions or skill challenges, LEGO ArtBots facilitates students to learn basic programming and robotic mechanical design for the purpose of creating line drawings or watercolor paintings. Students write short programs and attach sub-assemblies to hold brushes and markers to create the art. The robot moves autonomously with the assistance of light, touch and rotation sensors creating interesting and sometimes unpredictable results. It is hoped this approach will generate interest in engineering and computer science among new groups of students.

What If Bacteria Designed Computers? This talk explores Bynase, the biologically inspired protocol that Cybord computers use to signal values amongst themselves. The primary value of Bynase is that it drives system designers into novel tradeoffs with analogies in biological systems. A second value of Bynase is that it encourages casual small-scale hardware/software projects suitable for one-off art or educational projects.

Bootstrap yourself into conviviality by writing your own Forth. Forth is a simple language that yet has enormous expressive power. This paradox invites investigation. In this talk David proposes to explain – abstractly at first by talking about some philosophical ideals that Forth embodies, and then concretely by giving a short tutorial of the language that I implemented, muForth – how Forth can be both simple and powerful.

Speaker Bios:

Cathy Swider is the Project Administrator for the Oregon Robotics Tournament & Outreach Program (ORTOP), a program of Industry Affairs, Oregon University System. She has been involved with LEGO Robotics for seven years as a FIRST LEGO League Coach, co-founder of the LEGO Robotics Day Camp for Girls and Girl Scouts-ArtBot Camp. She is currently working with Saturday Academy and Grant High School to introduce LEGO ArtBots to more students.

Ward Cunningham, best known as the inventor of the Wiki, is a computer programmer who takes inspiration from life’s processes ranging from cell signaling to cultural evolution. His day jobs include serving as Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a growth company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward also co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as a Director of the Eclipse Foundation, an Architect in Microsoft’s Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

David has been tinkering with computing devices since the mid-70s, starting with a Motorola 6800 evaluation kit and an Altair 8800. He was introduced to Forth in 1980; didn’t understand it completely until about 1990; and since then has implemented Forth at least four times. He is currently interested in using modern functional languages (such as Haskell and OCaml) as target compilers.

I’m not big on resolutions or anything, but sometimes I feel it’s good to draw an arbitrary line in the sand in order to make changes you’d like to see in yourself, your life or whatever. So here’s a few thoughts on what I’m going to take a stab at doing in 2008. Maybe none of these will work out or maybe they all will, who can say. Some of them are just half-formed ideas afterall.

I’d like to make this the year of green tea for me. I know this sounds silly, but having once been a near green tea junky, I’ve since slid back to being a devoted coffee drinker. Mind you, I don’t plan to stop drinking coffee or anything. I just hope to at least get back into the habit of starting my day with a small pot of the green stuff.

My back is in awful shape. I regularly suffer from headaches and all sorts of other discomfort becuase of a bad back. Part of this is just a life long habit of poor posture, but it was made worse by a rather nasty car wreck I was in nearly 10 years ago. No permanent damage was done, so really it’s just a matter of training my muscles to do the right thing. I’ve done physical therapy and chiropractic and all that, but I’m now convinced that building core strength using some rather simple and well-tested approaches is the right thing to do. That leads me to…

Re-establishing a regular exercise habit. I grew up as a weakling. I was never good at sports. However, I found out in the latter part of my twenties that not only can I do exercise, but I actually really enjoy it and my body type is such that I respond to it quickly. Who would have thunk it? I’ve been pretty lax about doing any real consistent excercise for a long while, but my goal is to get back into regular strength training and then add in a good bit of cardio over the next few months.

Related to that, I need to spend a lot more time outside. It’s a dangerous trap when you’re a technical sort to get caught sitting in front of the computer for FAR too many hours a day. This isn’t itself a bad thing (well, one could argue about that), but the problem is when it takes away from doing other things. Like breathing fresh air, getting exercise, etc. My goal is to start taking a nice walk outside at least once a day. Of course, having dogs makes that a lot more likely and easy, but I’m talking a real serious walk. Something that gets the lungs pumping a bit and clears the head.

Reading is something I love doing, so this one will be easy: I’m hoping to start reading a lot more regularly. I’d like to quantify this and say I’ll read a book a week or something like that. But it’s not easy since so much of what I read takes other forms (online, printed material, etc.). I’ll just leave this one be in terms of setting goals and promise myself that I’m going to read as much as possible.

The next one is also pretty hard to put into specifics, so I’m going to leave it for another post. To sum it up, though, I have a plan for an autodidactic program I’ll be putting myself through. It’s not fully expanded, yet, but I’ll try and get it into more complete terms as I talk about it in my later posts.

Again, something to be expanded up on later: the “career” plan. I’m not sure how much I’ll spell out here in terms of what I want to be doing, but I’ll definitely talk a bit more about what I’m going to do to get there. Expect more on the subject in the near future.

Ok, that’s quite a list. As I said, I don’t really expect all of these to be stunningly successful this year, but I also don’t think any of them are that far from the direction I’m already moving in. so it shouldn’t take huge leaps to make things happen.

Here’s to another great year. Happy 2008!