Today I’m going to show you how to interface Python to Apache HBase using Facebook’s Thrift package. Hbase is a documented oriented database which is very similar to Google’s BigTable (in fact its more or less a clone of BigTable as seen in the BigTable paper). HBase has two primary interfaces - a REST API which is relatively slow, and a Thrift interface, which is recommended for high speed communication. For speed and other reasons, we’re going to be using the Thrift API. Read more

I get the occasional question about someone’s browser being seemingly stuck in “IGB” mode. Usually, its not actually stuck, the user was simply expecting some more graphical pizzaz out of EVE-Central.com. So, why is the interface so bland? Maintainability is the primary reason. The EVE-Online in game browser is a rather buggy, slow, and temperamental beast. CSS support is worse than Netscape 4, and performance is akin to a Pentium 66 rendering a huge table - it just can’t do it without a week long crunch. Read more

This one took awhile to figure out. In Tapestry, if a component is passed to another component (such as your main page layout component), you need to pass it as a Block parameter. The problem with blocks, there is no quick way to render them. You can use the @AfterRenderBody rendering stage annotation, but this gives you very limited flexibility in where the object will end up (or you make kludgy hacks to put this together). Read more