Benchmarking the performance of Java & web Frameworks/Platforms

The guys over at TechEmpower put some of their time to great use for the benefit of the community and put together a meaningful test to benchmark the performance of Java and web frameworks / platforms that are popular these days. The results were very surprising - Netty, Vertx and Servlets outperformed all others by a very big margin!

However, one of the major eye-poppers was raw PHP (no ORM framework) and MySQL database with multiple queries per request - which is likely the practically used business case - performed amazingly well! Add to this the dearth of available good PHP programmers and low hosting costs, no wonder many small businesses opt for rolling their own custom PHP apps & websites than going for big frameworks.

Check out the full blog post with the graphs and details of the test in the TechEmpower blog post here.
You can also check out their code on Git here and join in on the conversation at HackerNews here.

Let the flame wars begin!  :P   ;P

Count distinct values of a field in a text file on Unix

Here's a simple command to count the number of distinct values in a field in a delimited text file on *nix.
For example, we can assume that the text file is comma separated and the field being counted is the second field.

cut -d ',' -f 2 /files/data.csv | uniq | wc -l

On the other hand, if you also wanted a count of how many times each value has occurred, then use the following command:

cut -d ',' -f 2 /files/data.csv | uniq -c

Simple does it - no need for awk or sed!

Interesting fact about the Bluetooth logo

An interesting background about the Bluetooth logo that we see almost every day - quoted from Wikipedia.

The word "Bluetooth" is an anglicized version of the Scandinavian Blåtand/Blåtann, the epithet of the tenth-century king Harald I of Denmark and parts of Norway who united dissonant Danish tribes into a single kingdom. The idea of this name was proposed by Jim Kardach who developed a system that would allow mobile phones to communicate with computers (at the time he was reading Frans Gunnar Bengtsson's historical novel The Long Ships about Vikings and king Harald Bluetooth). The implication is that Bluetooth does the same with communications protocols, uniting them into one universal standard

The Bluetooth logo is a bind rune merging the Younger Futhark runes  (Hagall) and  (Bjarkan), Harald's initials.

You can read more details about Bluetooth on Wikipedia or the official Bluetooth website as well.

40 tricks to arm yourself for the new year

Gizmodo has a nice list of 40 very useful tricks for solving everyday problems. Check it out here.

Blogger keeps getting better

Blogger is getting better and more integrated with Google & Plus with the following new & useful features:

• Dynamic Views, 
• New & Improved mobile Apps,
• Easy sharing of posts on your G+ feed and now,
• Mention people in your posts by adding "+" before the name!

Good to see so many good features being added to blogger towards the end of 2012.

Hope 2013 makes it even better.

Google extends free GV calls to US & Canada through 2013

Google has announced the extension of free US & Canada calling using Google Voice through 2013!
Read the terse "official blog post" if you wish to hear it from the horse's mouth!
Yaay for all us Obi+GV users!

How to find if a port is in use on Linux/Unix

You can use the two below commands to figure out if a particular port is in use on a Unix/Linux box:

sudo netstat -tulpn | grep [port_number]

Or you can also use the following expanded command:

sudo netstat --all --programs --numeric-ports | grep [port_number]

If these commands return something, then the port is definitely in use. You could also use the above commands without sudo but then you might not get all the details of the process that is using the port.

Android Apps for 25cents

To celebrate 25 billion app downloads, Google Play (App Store) is offering great apps at a discounted price of $0.25 each. Check out the apps here. You can also read more on the office blog here.
Keep an eye on the play store, as they also plan to:

offer some special collections like 25 movies you must own, 25 banned books, 25 albums that changed the world and our 25 top selling magazines, all at special prices

OVH USA Alpha Servers

A couple of weeks back I was given an Alpha Server for testing by OVH US who are well established in Europe and are starting a new data center in North America.

The Manager back-end is very simple and makes re-installs / re-boots a breeze. They provide a choice of OS images if you want to re-install: Solaris, Windows, FreeBSD & Linux. Choosing Linux provides a plethora of options, notable among them is Linux Hadoop Cloudera CDH3 "pseudo-distributed"

Here are the server specs:

Part	Spec
Processor	Intel Core i3 2130 2x2(HT)x3.4+ GHz
Architecture	64 bit
RAM	16 GB DDR3
HDD	2 x 1 TB - SATA2
RAID	SOFT - 0/1
NIC	FastEthernet

So far the network speed has been very good, but the Hadoop image had a very basic thing missing - JAVA_HOME and HADOOP_HOME had not been setup in the default shell.
Also, this image did not contain Mahout which had then to be downloaded and installed separately. But then again these are just Alpha servers and such simple problems are to be expected.

Delete first and last line of a file

To delete only the first and last lines of a file on *nix, you can use the following sed one-liner

sed "1d;$d" < inputfile.txt > outputfile.txt

Similarly, you can extend this example to other specific line numbers in the file as well.