Cassandra Archives - cahall-labs.com

Getting my latest NUC

I am pretty psyched to get my latest Intel NUC. The NUC7i7DNKE has an 8th generation Intel® Core™ i7 vPro™ 4.2 GHz “Turbo”, quad core processor with 32GB of DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and a 1TGB SSD drive. Not to mention built in 4K UHD video with HDMI ports and USB 3.0.

I will use this as my main development machine. It is crazy that I tend to run out of RAM on my 16GB machines running Ubuntu.

This will be my 9th NUC. Maybe I am a little too in love with these things. They make great clusters for home research and development on distributed technologies such as Cassandra and Hadoop. I have three nodes running Cassandra and Hadoop today – and am looking to add a 4th node when I free up my current development machine NUC.

Quiet, Low Power, great for clustering!

They are whisper quiet and use very low power. There are 5 in a stack sitting on my desk next to me as I write this, and they make less noise than a single standard PC. In fact, they seem to make no noise at all.

I also run Windows 10 on one as a home theater type of PC connected to a Samsung UHD TV via HDMI. These NUCs are awesome. I gave my old i3 core media NUC to my younger brother as a gift.

Here is an old picture of my early stack of NUCs. They are each 4″ x 4″.

Ted Cahall

New Blog along with some old content

As a past media executive at companies such as CNET Networks, Microsoft’s MSN, AOL and the early social network Classmates.com, I have operated a blog here and there over the years. Mostly to test out SEO ideas and cross link my sites, etc.

Started on LiveJournal in 2004

One of my unfortunate SEO decisions was using LiveJournal.com for my tech postings. In 2004 as CTO of CNET Networks, I was fortunate enough to meet Brad Fitzpatrick who invented LiveJournal (as well as memcached). Since we made a (failed) bid to buy the site, I decided I should use it and get to know it a bit. I had used it to blog about some of my non-proprietary experiences with technology and software from time to time.

My last post there was almost two years ago to the day. I was musing at the intersection of my auto racing hobby and my technology hobby. It was through a lack of automation of the points standing of my auto racing league that I had finally brought these two passions together. This was all enabled by Open Source, the Intel NUC computers (home data center), and Amazon’s AWS hosting facility. Resulting in the creation of the marrspoints.com race points tracking web application.

LiveJournal did not seem to get the SEO juice

Compared to modern blogging sites such as WordPress (which this blog is built on), LiveJournal never got the great SEO features that it deserved. Therefore today, I am moving my LiveJournal information over to a new home here at cahall-labs.com. All of the posts have been successfully moved here as of this post.

Open Source and my Home Data Center

I have a few tech topics that are of interest to me. They include:

My home data center evolution
The Open Source operating systems and application software I use at home
The marrspoints race track application I built

Cassandra and Hadoop

The marrspoints.com site was simple to build, but the back end tools to ingest all of the race data was a lot more work. I occasionally look at ways to change the data ingestion or analytics. Therefore I play with tools such as Cassandra and Hadoop on my NUC cluster in my home data center. In general, I will try NOT to blog about racing in this blog. That will move to a blog at either cahallracing.com or cahall.com.

Thank you LiveJournal – hello WordPress

So thank you to LiveJournal for the tools and time. It was a good 14 year run. There is also an old, outdated racing blog on WordPress. It will likely be moving to a new home in the next month or two. It will be good to get back to using the tool Matt Mullenweg built (WordPress). I had the opportunity to work with Matt at CNET when he spent time there for a year on his way to becoming famous. Clearly I wish I had made a blog tool. Some day I may even blog about Gavin Hall and Alex Rudloff. They built blogsmith. Blogsmith powers TMZ.com and most of the AOL blogs. I guess I met most of the people that built blogs… Very, very smart and talented people.