Running my first Cassandra cluster

I like the idea to scale horizontally, and noSql has some db:s that helps with the concept of partitioning data... So here is my first cluster, up n running. For the shaped eyed person you can see that all nodes are on the same host i.e. 127.0.0.x, but to my defense it's only a lab..

/**
  Address         DC          Rack        Status State   Load            Owns    Token
                                                                               163797825623819365665351379564473550862
127.0.0.2       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.29 KB        50.00%  78727233893584749799507727706531497998
127.0.0.4       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  15.73 KB        12.50%  99994881826143403765968640671017011214
127.0.0.5       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.29 KB        12.50%  121262529758702057732429553635502524430
127.0.0.3       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  11.33 KB        12.50%  142530177691260711698890466599988037646
127.0.0.1       datacenter1 rack1       Up     Normal  15.7 KB         12.50%  163797825623819365665351379564473550862

Simple Made Easy

I saw this presentation a month ago... When you see something that won’t leave your mind for weeks, it's worth sharing. Rich Hickey talks about the idea that even thought a solution looks simple it is not always easy to accomplish, if you turn that around, things that seems like the easy way don't always turn out to become the simple solutions.

This will take one hour of your life, for some of you he may state the obvious, but sometimes it's nice to have words for that thoughts that you may have :
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Simple-Made-Easy

Post discussion:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3135185

Session state?

Every time I have used the Session["key"] in ASP.Net it has created a hell for the user and me! I have to promise my self to never use it again... I ought my self to build a class that makes cookies equivalent to sessions storage in ASP.net, so that I can search and replace them in legacy code.

The point with session[] is to save the client's state between calls (for one session dho!) and why do that on the server when there is a way to save the state in the client... And the talk about that some client can choose to not use cookies... Yeh right, try to use Internet without cookies!

A simple ticket system, for free.

Here is a solution for a simple ticket system. Sometimes the customers don’t have any ticket system available for the current project. To pass around mail with status of each task is cumbersome and hard to track and will eventually end up with undone tasks. The alternative to use an online system that cost money can sometimes be a political issue and it has to be approved by the project. And to make things harder, the nature of a ticket system, is that it is shared by many peoples and many peoples means many opinions.

This is a pragmatic approach, DropBox! Use it and share it in the project, eventually it will be adopted.

• I have downloaded and modified a spreadsheet from http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/
• You can download it here http://dl.dropbox.com/u/18883163/%C3%84renden.xlsx
• Created a DropBox account.(It's free upp to 2gb)
• Created a folder and shared the folder to all members of the project.
• Copy the spreadsheet to shared folder; it will automatically be synchronized to all members of the shared folder when the file is saved.

• Here is one of the most important steps. For each project there is a RSS stream that you can subscribe to; add the RSS feed to Outlook (or your preferred RSS reader that you use). If you don't have events shown in a way that you are used to, you will forget to check if the document has been updated.
• When somebody updates the excel spreadsheet you will get a notification in the Outlook client, and you can instantly see the changes in your synchronized DropBox folder.

The down side is that DropBox is considered as "unsafe" but I can assure you it is not more unsafe than passing the excel file through mail on the Internet. Another downside is that if you have a synchronization conflict, you probably have type in your changes again.