Help

“How do I encrypt a user account on a Mac?”

The short answer is to use the FileVault. The drawback is that disc corruption will eat the entire home directory, instead of maybe just eating part of your home directory and leaving you some salvageable files. [Time Machine was also suggested as a possible solution for encrypting user data.]

Correction: TimeMachine, the back up util that comes with OS X, has trouble with the FileValut due to the encryption.

Interesting Things

• Erik Hanson points out that Amazon has released a web service called Elastic MapReduce which aims to “easily and cost-effectively process vast amounts of data [in parallel]“. It supports development in Java, Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, R, or C++. MapReduce is already being used to run a test suite by one of our clients.
• Related to MapReduce and Hadoop (the framework tused by Amazon’s MR) is Zvents’ HyperTable which enables the use of structured data with high performance. HyperTable will be presenting at GoGaRuCo.
• StackHub, a tool for making “the collection, analysis, reporting, and notification of your application logging events easy”, is looking for Beta users (Java only). Stack Hub is in the same category as services like HopToad, but promises to differentiate itself from the pack.