Wednesday, December 21, 2016

Elasticsearch analogies

I work a lot with Elasticsearch.

At my job we have migrated from using SQL Server to Elasticsearch for log storage.

Sometimes, when you're learning new grammar for a new technology you're working on it's nice to have metaphors or similes to use when learning the component parts.

One of the best similies I've heard of for what Elasticsearch represents is that it's like an index at the end of a book. Additionally, Elasticsearch by many, even those who work at Elastic, consider it not a DB.

If you start using Elasticsearch a lot more you'll begin to work with types, templates and mappings.

A type could be analogous to a regular SQL table.

Mappings could be similar to a a table column that stores a field a certain way that could be something like a string, int, varchar.

How mappings and settings are created and loaded has changed from Elasticsearch 1.x to 2.x+. Now that we use Elasticsearch 2.x we have to load template files that are used when new indices are created. They combine settings and the mappings for the fields that get parsed out and placed into an index.

Thanks to this website for giving me those Aha! analogies.

http://swops.com/blog/elasticsearch-mappings-and-templates

Rebuild project of 18 year old Mansfield Toilet

I just completed a toilet rebuild last weekend. The toilet began leaking a year or two ago; especially during warm weather.

Although I wasn't working the whole time the total time from start to finish was a half day. I did initial work and investigations starting Friday night, I let the tank dry out overnight, and I finished about 1 PM the following day having started around 10 AM with the installation of the new parts on the tank.

Actual time working was probably around 4 hours.

Work entailed replacing the fill valve, flush valve, new bolts attaching the tank to the bowl, new shutoff valve and supply line too.





New shutoff valve
New Supply Line to Tank
All parts replaced in dry tank
Tank full with water

All parts were ordered from Mansfield and the cost was just under 50 bucks. I went to Home Depot for the new shutoff valve and supply line.

Total cost was about 60 bucks.

Issues encountered after the replacement was slight leaking from one of the bolts, which I had to tighten down more to prevent further leakage.

As mentioned on my Twitter post, I'd say this home project was a 2-3 out of 10.



Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Perl : subroutine redefined, prototype mismatch

I was refactoring my code and placing some common methods into a base module in my Perl lib directory.

Unfortunately some of my new method names had name collisions with possible subroutines in other packages.

I was able to rename the methods that I was exporting for use in my PL files and the errors went away.

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Python Indentation Error

I've only been using Python for a year.

Before that, my focuses were Java and Perl.

An interesting error I came across, since Python has stricter criteria for formatting was: "IndentationError: expected an indented block"

The code in question:






The error might be considered a red herring since the problem with the else: statement was that there was no real code to run after the if statement.

Once I added a logging statement:






The error went away.

Exploring ELK (Elastic) Stack for hack-a-thon

At my current gig, our group finally got to do hack-a-thon week and I joined a team project that tied together a few of the technologies I&#...