Author Archives: greenido

cloud

How to Install Spark on Google Compute Engine

gce+sparkWhat is Google Compute Engine?

Compute Engine is an infrastructure as a service that lets you run your large-scale computing workloads on virtual machines hosted on Google’s infrastructure. Btw, if you wish to have a new machine under your arms in less than 5 minutes – It can be done in 5 easy steps.

What is Spark?

Apache Spark is an open source cluster computing system that aims to make data analytics fast — both fast to run and fast to write. To run programs faster, Spark offers a general execution model that can optimize arbitrary operator graphs, and supports in-memory computing, which lets it query data faster than disk-based engines like Hadoop.

So in order to enjoy from both worlds, we can  leverage the great options of large-scale cloud that Compute engine offer us and install Spark on it. Here are the few steps you will need to follow in order to do it.

Installation steps Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Chrome DevTools Tips

DevToolsA (good) web developer use several tools in order to be productive and built amazing projects. I guess, you can find advocates for Vim or Emacs but after you pass the phase of writing the code, it’s time to check why it’s not doing what you wish to see. You can find on Opera Dragonfly and in FireFox land there is Firebug. But, as you might guess already, my favorite tool is Chrome DevTools on Canary.

What are DevTools?

The Chrome Developer Tools are a set web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome. The DevTools provide web developers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.

(!) If you are a front-end developer you should use Google Chrome Canary. It is easy to install it side by side your regular Chrome and it will give you the latest and greatest features with frequent improvements. This post is not a replacement to the one ‘source of true‘ but more of an update on the new features we have today (OCT 2013) in Canary. Checkout the pictures below with the green arrows that show you some of the interesting feature you can use. Continue reading →

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Business, life

Startups Secret Strength

SFO bride to startupsIn this TED talk, Malcolm Gladwell shares with us a new point of view on the famous story of David and Goliath. This new angle to look at the situation(s) reminds us of the state any startup is facing. It takes a lot of work to build a new service/product and sometimes to create or educate a market. However, again and again, startups do it while the significant (well-funded) organizations need to catch up. What looks, at first, as a disadvantage (e.g., limited budget, small teams, members that need to do ‘everything,’ no support from other players in the market, etc.’) is a true advantage when you look deeper.
It forces the startup to be frugal, think out of the box, and be as productive as possible.

There is a nice phrase in Hebrew that, in a direct translation to English will look like this:

“We do the most difficult things immediately. The impossible takes us a little longer.” Continue reading →

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HTML5, webdev

Google App Engine Intro

App EngineIn this episode of Google Developer Live Israel I’ve covered in the first 6min how to work with Eclipse and Google plugin. This plugin is a great way to manage your app engine projects and to push your code to google cloud. The main goal of this video is to show developer how they can have a server up and running on Google App engine in few minutes. From 6:47 mark you can hear this explanations in hebrew… This part of the talk is tailored mainly for the developers/gamers that are coming to a hackathon event we have during this weekend around Hangout APIs. I am looking forward to see the cool games that will be built on this API…

Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, webdev

Google Cloud And Mobile Web

Screen Shot 2013-09-26 at 9.41.45 AM

Two talks in one day…

That’s what I did yesterday for Google Developer Group (GDG) Athens, Greece. It was a great opportunity to talk about the new cool aspects of google cloud platform (Yep, checkout things like: NodeJS on Compute Engine, App engine new support for technologies, Monte Carlo Simulations with App Script, Cloud storage, Big Query and many more). We talked for the first 25min on the new aspects of developing mobile web sites (and/or mobile web apps). In one word – go check out yeoman.io. Of course, there are many more aspects that are in the slides, so feel free to browse them and please let me know if I’ve missed something important that you are using in your mobile web project. Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript, webdev

Raspberry Pi And Google Coder #socool

The Web is awesome and this week I had the pleasure to play with a new ‘face’ of the web platform. It’s built for Raspberry Pi and you can take it as far as your imagination will let you.

Coder

Coder is a very cool project that aim to be a simple way to make web stuff on Raspberry Pi. Short and sweet. It is also an experiment for Raspberry Pi that give you a free piece of software that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple, personal web server and web-based development environment. Basically, all that you need, for crafting HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript.  Plus, it’s an open-source project so you could fork it and learn from the source on http://googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/ Continue reading →

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Chrome, HTML5, JavaScript

Mobile Web App – Real Life Example

App scriptThis week in Google Developers Live Israel, we showed a live example of a mobile web app that is built in two ways. One we used jQueryMobile as our UI framework and for cases where we need to support IE we used bootstrap. All the code can be found on github. The nice aspect in this real demo is that we used google sheets are our ‘server side’ and since its got a cool way to publish their content to the web as RSS, ATOM, XML, JSON feeds we could work with them from the web/mobile apps. The three main elements we used are: Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Install NodeJS On Compute Engine

NodeJS

In the past, I’ve showed how to run a NodeJS application in Compute Engine. It’s a good case where you wish to test ideas with App Script but when you move them to ‘production’ – NodeJS is the answer. After the Google Developer Live show we had at the end of August, I got few questions on how to install NodeJS inside Compute Engine instance.

Here are the (easy) steps I did before the show in order to save us time: Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Debug NodeJS Like A Pro

NodeJS Debugging with Chrome

NodeJS Debugging with Chrome

Anyone who is building an application find out that, what is starting as ‘small project’, becoming very quickly bigger and bigger monster. You can use console.log on small projects but as they are growing you will need better tools. In the arena of “JavaScript on the server” there weren’t many tools to debug your code effectively. However, with the power of open-source projects like: Node, Blink and others there are few powerful ways to debug you code like a pro.

First, for the one that are a bit confuse about NodeJS. Well, it’s not a “JavaScript web server” but an environment to run JavaScript on the server. It is using V8 engine so the performances are very compelling. After using NodeJS inside Compute engine I got few questions about the debugging options. In the past, developers needed to use console.log and similar ‘printing’ commands in order to understand what is going under the hood of their script. But as we mention, when you get out of the area of 100 lines script and your application contain different modules and many more lines of code. You need a debugger (and hopefully other tools like profiler) in your hands. Luckily, we can use Chrome (=Blink) dev tools for your NodeJS applications.
Here are the main steps and the ways to leverage your new ‘hammer’. Continue reading →

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Chrome, JavaScript, webdev

Yahoo Finance API With NodeJS

nodejs logoIn the past I’ve wrote this post on the different options you can use with Yahoo Finance API. It is time (4 years later!) to a followup post on how to gain more data but this time with NodeJS.
The first idea was to be able to gain information by using different parameters and downloading csv files from Yahoo finance. Something like this GET request will do the magic:

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=NFLX&f=snd1l1yr and from there you can work with the data.

However, there are cases, where you wish to have information that is not part of this set of arguments. Here are two quick examples for such cases: Continue reading →

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