Interesting Snippets from 2012-11-13

• Teaching Programming To A Highly Motivated Beginner | blog@CACM | Communications of the ACM

  In the past year, many CS professors and education pundits have written about how MOOCs are scaling up CS education to hundreds of thousands of students. I'm going to take a different approach here and tell the story of how I spent nine months teaching computer programming to one student.

• http - The definitive guide to forms based website authentication - Stack Overflow

  Form based authentication for websites Please help us create the definitive resource for this topic. We believe that Stack Overflow should not just be a resource for very specific technical questions, but also for general guidelines on how to solve variations on common problems. Form

• Measure Anything, Measure Everything « Code as Craft

  StatsD is a simple NodeJS daemon (and by “simple” I really mean simple — NodeJS makes event-based systems like this ridiculously easy to write) that listens for messages on a UDP port. (See Flickr’s “Counting & Timing” for a previous description and implementation of this idea, and check out the open-sourced code on github to see our version.) It parses the messages, extracts metrics data, and periodically flushes the data to graphite. We like graphite for a number of reasons: it’s very easy to use, and has very powerful graphing and data manipulation capabilities. We can combine data from StatsD with data from our other metrics-gathering systems. Most importantly for StatsD, you can create new metrics in graphite just by sending it data for that metric. That means there’s no management overhead for engineers to start tracking something new: simply tell StatsD you want to track “grue.dinners” and it’ll automagically appear in graphite. (By the way, because we flush data to graphite every 10 seconds, our StatsD metrics are near-realtime.)

• gurgeh/selfspy · GitHub

  Selfspy is a daemon for Unix/X11 and (thanks to @ljos!) Mac OS X, that continuously monitors and stores what you are doing on your computer. This way, you can get all sorts of nifty statistics and reminders on what you have been up to. It is inspired by the Quantified Self-movement and Stephen Wolfram's personal key logging. See Example Statistics, below, for some of the fabulous things you can do with this data.

• hadoop-20/src/contrib/corona at master · facebook/hadoop-20 · GitHub

  Hadoop Corona is the next version of Map-Reduce. The current Map-Reduce has a single Job Tracker that reached its limits at Facebook. The Job Tracker manages the cluster resource and tracks the state of each job. In Hadoop Corona, the cluster resources are tracked by a central Cluster Manager. Each job gets its own Corona Job Tracker which tracks just that one job.

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