Fred and Loathing on The Internet

My Hardcore Punk Youth Has Become A Multicore Processed Adulthood

2023-Jul-18

This blog post comes with no updates to the codebase. At least not to this one. I’ve more or less decided to throw everything I’ve got into mastering Apache Spark. This blog post was spurred by my breakthrough in setting up a Spark cluster on a linux VM in local mode. I then downloaded a jar file that let the spark driver read my Sqlite3 database that I use for the website. Now I have some data that I give a damn about to test out these new Spark concepts I wanna try out, like array or map type data. My data is pretty meager so I’ll have to come up with some wild queries that make sure I use every core I have available at each stage. I suppose the data I’ll curate to make some static plots could be done better with Pandas, but that’s not really the point of installing Spark on my own machine.

That doctor book did introduce a less than badly idealistic medical professional. Despite that breath of cynical fresh air, the perspective has shifted to another doctor narrating into his childhood. I find the adult language with the first person pronouns jarring since they’re in present tense. Or are they not reminisces with a tense switch? Is the character just a precocious child? Whatever. I enjoy the sociopolitical grounding that happens every few chapters when the story brings the characters out of the mission hospital and out into the later days of Haile Sellase’s Ethiopia.

I also picked up reading a biography of Alexander Humboldt. I had not not known much about him except he was some luminary figure in Enlightenment era academics in Europe. Like the Cutting for Stone novel, I don’t particularly care much about hearing about his personal life. They are merely vehicles for allowing the author to talk about what was going on in the part of the world he was in at that time. Apparently he’s a big name in South America when it comes to street names or statues because of his extensive traveling and studies on that continent.