Provident fund transfer .. what a pleasant surprise

In the past, after changing jobs, get your EPF transferred to the new employer, used to be a big pain. Figuring out where the process is stuck itself would take years. I have personally had to collect documents from previous employers and submit them to ensure the transfer goes through fine.

But the recent experience was just awesome. With the introduction of UAN and electronic settlement of EPF dues by employers, company accounts with EPFO are getting settled on a time.

This means, that once you have a UAN number and your organization is making remittances electronically, transferring EPF from one company to another is lot more simpler.

In my case, moment the new employer, linked the new EPF number to my UAN, since the previous employer had already filed up to date, the PF transfer was initiated automatically!!

An SMS notification and a week latter, the money is now in my new EPF account and visible in the passbook!

Good job EPFO :-)

Run Rails application using unicorn in RubyMine

In the Run Menu choose edit configuration and define a configuration as per the screenshot below.

Here is a minimum functional unicorn-dev.rb

worker_processes 4
listen 3000, tcp_nopush: true
timeout 60
pid ~/tmp/unicorn.pid
stderr_path "~/tmp/unicorn.stderr.log"
stdout_path "~/tmp/unicorn.stdout.log"

Urdu poetry at its best!

These three poets are legendary in Urdu literature .

ग़ालिब(1797 -1869)
इक़बाल(1877-1938)
फ़राज़(1931-2008)

Ghalib started it......
“ज़ाहिद, शराब पीने दे मस्जिद में बैठ कर...
या वो जगह बता, जँहा खुदा नहीं”

Allama Iqbal was not convinced. He decided to reply about half a century later, his poetic reply to Ghalib.

“मस्जिद खुदा का घर है, पीने की जगह नहीं...
काफ़िर के दिल में जा, वहाँ    खुदा नहीं”

Faraz had the last word. (Later half of 19th century) .
“काफ़िर के दिल से आया हूँ, मैं ये देख कर फ़राज़...
खुदा मौजूद है वहाँ, पर उसे पता नहीं”

The elegance of urdu at its best !!

How to mount a ntfs drive on mac

Connect your hard drive to your mac.
Open a terminal window and type
> mount

You should see all your drives listed. In my case the external hard drive is listed as
> /dev/disk2s1  on /Volumes/Elements

Unmount the drive
> sudo umount /Volumes/Elements

Create a mount point. In my case I am creating a mount point in my home folder. The name of the mount point can be anything
> mkdir ~/Elements

Mount the drive on on this mount point

> sudo mount -t ntfs -o rw,auto,nobrowse /dev/disk2s1 ~/Elements

Book Review: Hadoop In Practice (2nd Edition)

This is a book review for Hadoop In Practice (2nd Edition)

Definitely not the first book you should read for understanding Hadoop. The book's author recommends Hadoop In Action, but I personally believe that Hadoop in Action is a bit dated, its being updated (as per Manning's website), till then, I would recommend Hadoop The Definitive Guide (3rd Edition). 

The  book is broken up into four parts, with part one providing some background on Hadoop.

The book assumes basic knowledge of Hadoop and Hadoop Ecosystem, the first chapter quickly runs over the basics. The second chapter introduces YARN (Hadoop 2.0 resource negotiator)  and explains how MR (Map-Reduce) works as a YARN application.

Part Two deals with Data in Hadoop, the different data formats,  organize and load data into Hadoop. If you have every wondered how to create InputSplits for XML files in a MR task, chapter 3 answers it.

Part Three deals with Big Data patterns. For me this section is the reason to buy the book.  The part on Graph Traversal and other Graph Algorithms (like Friend of Friends) were really useful.

The book closes out with chapters on Hive and how to write YARN applications. 

The first edition on the book had chapters on recommendation engines and integrating R with Hadoop, these are now available as free chapters on the book's website.

All in all it’s a practioner's book explains in comprehensive details and good examples the different challenges developer's face with Hadoop. All the examples in the book are updated to run with Hadoop 2.0. At different points in the book how other components like Apache Girafe, Mahout, Hive, Parquet work with Hadoop. I would say the book is an essential reference for any developer who is working with Hadoop on a regular basis.

Ubuntu update cheat sheet

Ubuntu forces you to update almost every 1 year. In the process of doing these updates, I have finally hit upon doing the updates with good success... here is my cheat's guide

• At the login screen press Alt+F2. This will take you to console login
• Login at the console and then type do-release-upgrade
• This will start the release upgrade script. Just follow the script and the update is seamless.

Ubuntu does tend to change things in the UI every release which will annoy you. But this process ensures the update goes thru every time with no hassles. Previously, I used to try and run the update from my KDE or GNOME shell and that upgrade would invariably go wrong. 

View from Sinhagad Fort

View from the top of Sinhagad (सिंहगड) Fort