Vasquez Rocks and Channel Islands

It's 3 months too late, but better late than never eh? We did a trip to LA during the Labor Day weekend. Naturally, we had to visit Vasquez Rocks, it being one of the most featured rocks in Sci-Fi films.

We still had plenty of daylight, so we decided to drive up the famous Mulholland Drive, which proved to be quite disappointing.

The main attraction was Channel Islands. We had to book our boat ride tickets well in advance.

Remember to carry sandwiches, snacks, water and sodas with you as there is nothing available on the island. The cliffs overlooking Potato harbor are great to stop for lunch. But the harbor itself is inaccessible from the top. The only access to the water is by boat.

Hiking at Pinnacles National Park

We spent the day after Thanksgiving at Pinnacles National Park. The weather was crisp and cool, with very light traffic, probably because everyone else was busy shopping.

We did a 5 mile hike via the reservoir to Scout's peak and back to the visitor's center.

I would love doing this hike again, but probably not during the warmer part of the year. It was great to see 23 million year old lava formations but scary to know that it's so close to the Bay Area.

Fall 2015 tech reading

Java:

• Large HashMap overview: JDK, FastUtil, Goldman Sachs, HPPC, Koloboke, Trove - January 2015 version  - Java Performance Tuning Guide
• Taming GC Pauses for Humongous Java Heaps in Spark Graph Computing-(E…
• JVM Mechanics by Douglas Hawkins as Presented at Silicon Valley Java User Group by Azul Systems on Vimeo
• Nitsan Wakart on Illusion of Execution
• java - HttpClientError: The target server failed to respond - Stack Overflow
• Exceptions & Streams
• Java 8 allows to cast to a pair of interfaces
• jdk 8 frame pointer - Google Search
• spinn3r/noxy
• Parallec.io: Fast parallel async HTTP/SSH/TCP/Ping client java library.

System:

• New ScyllaDB benchmarks - Google Groups
• Reducing system jitter - LMAX Exchange Opinions
• Technical Itch: Reducing system jitter - part 2
• Linux Page Cache - Google Groups
• Gc-and-pagescan-attacks-by-linux
• The real problem is not tinygram prevention
• The story of one latency spike
• mmap(2)
• Someday Never Comes: Debugging tip: How to simulate a slow hardisk
• Project Clearwater » Adventures in debugging: etcd, HTTP pipelining, and file descriptor leaks

Big systems:

• Cassandra and security
• It's All Relative: Why Bios Settings matter (and not size)!
• One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale
• MySQL vs something else. Evaluating alternative databases, Mark Callaghan (Facebook) on Vimeo
• Hardening cassandra for compliance or paranoia
• Counters At Scale - A Cautionary Tale
• Spark Dev Ops Training
• Copycat - Progressive, feature-complete implementation of the Raft consensus algorithm for Java 8
• Cassandra Summit 2015 - Scylla • 1 Million CQL operations per server
• Cassandra Summit 2015 - DataStax • Extreme Cassandra Optimization - The Sequel
• DataStax: Extreme Cassandra Optimization: The Sequel
• SmartStack: Service Discovery in the Cloud - Airbnb Engineering
• Blog | InMobi Technology | Real-Time Stream Processing at InMobi- Part 4
• Mac Browning - Bringing Consul to Production
• Experiences with AWS immutable deploys and job processing
• Faster, Cheaper and Safer: Secure Microservice Architectures using Docker

Misc:

• Frame of Reference and Roaring Bitmaps | Elastic
• Secondary indexing with Redis – Redis
• Nuts and bolts: our routing algorithm
• Short history of routes computation

Until next time!