Minn Myat Soe :: His Notes

Haiku is another open source operating system, and IMO we can say it continues from where BeOS left off. I haven’t had a chance to try BeOS, but read about what it was supposed to do and some beautiful screenshots. BeOS was a closed source OS, and some loyal users tried to re-create the OS under OpenSource license.

And there came Haiku OS, an open source OS, and it released its alpha version on 09/2009. It is written in C++. The ISO image, as well as qemu/vmware images are now available to download. I just did a test run via their live CD image, and I would say I’m quite impressed. I wish it’d continue to R2 release soon.

I’ve moved this site over to the cloud servers, by Rackspace from my previous shared host. Actually I was looking for a cloud server and cloud space so that I can play with Hadoop. I found Amazon EC servers and S3, but their services charges are expensive for me. While searching for alternatives, CloudServers caught my attention.

It is cheaper than Amazon services, but at the moment I don’t think I can test Hadoop on CloudServer and with CloudSpace. I’m using it more like a virtual private server, that gives me “root” access. The good thing is you can modify the resources as you wish, so I would say it’s quite scalable. You are also charged by hours (uptime). Rackspace will also charge you even if you turn off the machine. They will not charge after we have deleted the server. If you want to test something for a project, you can just subscribe for desired amount of memory and disk space. And delete the server after it’s been used. We will only be charged for those period. That’s the flexibility that I prefer.

I’ll see what I can do with my server, and update the blog again.

Recently I’ve applied for entry visas for four of my relatives, about two or three weeks in advanced, and the visas have been approved by ICA.

Just one a day before the flight, one of my relatives has learnt that her daughter (2 years old) need to obtain visa and air tickets. I opened up the SAVE application website and made the application for the baby. Travel arrangements have already been made, and they were worried that the visa approval might be late, and they would have to rearrange the flights. It usually takes one business day to process. But to my surprise, ICA approved the visa within 3 hours after submission, and it has relieved all the worries of the families.

I really would like to give my heartfelt thank the officers at ICA who are working hard and understanding the need for urgency.

To those who want to submit visa application from the web:

• Online visa application can be found on the home page of ICA, which is http://www.ica.gov.sg
• Or do a seach on the google for “save singapore”, and follow the links.
• Please have your Singpass ready. If you don’t have one, it’s a good idea to make a request at http://www.singpass.gov.sg.
• The application will require a fee of S$30, which is payable by eNETS (Visa/Master)
• Please have the applicants information ready. Most data can be found on the passport, plus current address in home country, educational qualification. And a digital photo.

Last week, I went to a branch to open XtraSaver account. As usual, their personal banking consultant asked me if I wanted to open their Supersalary account. I said no and told him I just wanted XtraSaver account. Then he tried to open an account for me, and suddenly he had to see his manager for some verification. About three minutes later, he told me that the burmese are disallowed to open an account. Well, they were not supposed to tell me this, and they had a right to disapprove my application without giving any reason. But it was good to hear their reason for the reject.

I just left the bank, and checked online website to see if they have any written information about this. I couldn’t find it and I sent them an email inquiring about account opening, stating my nationality and residential status.

A few days later, a girl called me and asked me to open an account at Six Battery Road. I was surprised, and she arranged me an appointment with the staff at the branch.

It was my fault I didn’t check thoroughly with her, and I blamed myself for trusting Standard Chartered Bank again. This time, I wasn’t told the reason, and I was only told due to some policies. It might the same reason. I’m not interested in their policies. All I know is Standard Chartered Bank just wasted my time and resources. The bank doesn’t seem to have connections/communication between their departments. Although I wasn’t allow to open the saving/checking account, he asked me if I was interested in Fixed Deposits. Huh. I’m done with that bank. I also should warn the nationality of Myanmar should not be wasting time going to the bank and open an account.

I understand that the burmese people can be rejected by any US or Europe financial institutions due to sanctions. If this is the case, my enquiry should be returned with negative reply so that I wouldn’t waste my time going to the standard chartered bank.

These days, something relates to software platforms that perform distributed computing on a cluster, catches my attention, and this led me to:

• Hadoop/Hbase/Pig and
• Mapreduce/Sawzall/Bigtable

Hadoop platform is just the open-source implementation of Google’s Mapreduce.

I think the most basic ingredient for the this platform is distributed file system. Basically MapReduce framework works in two steps, it Maps and then it Reduces. At the end of the workflow it writes the output to a distributed file system (GFS for Google or HDFS for Hadoop). GFS is proprietory to Google, and it’s implemented in userspace as opposed to be in kernel. Please find Google Research Publication for GFS here.

Some people say that the implementation is low-level and some tried to add more layer to original implementations. For example, Facebook layered Hive on Hadoop engine.

MapReduce framework is supposed to handle huge amount of data, so in general we will need a data structure that can hold/process this amount of data comfortably. Google implemented BigTable, and HBase is the open-source alternative from Hadoop.

I think I’ll look into Hadoop (Java implementation) and Qt Concurrent (Qt C++ implementation) of MapReduce.

Last.fm’s bashreduce look interesting, too.