After a week of OS/X mail, I'm (almost) pining for Outlook

Because networking from the hotel room last week was limited to a tethered 3G phone, I switched to a local email program for my messages, saving bandwidth and allowing offline use. That email program was Apple Mail for Mountain Lion. I then decided to follow through by using it for a whole seven days. Never again.

First, the UI isn't that great. The most glaring problem is that it's read/unread marker is a small pastel coloured blue dot to the left of the summary -a summary that has the sender in bold, the first couple of lines below. Every other modern email program (outlook, thunderbird, gmail, Y! mail, live.com) uses bold to mean "unread", but no Apple think "bold is for the sender", and "unread can be a barely visible dot to the side".

I could maybe get used to that. What I can't get used to is the way that emails on a gmail account seem to magically get deleted, even though I didn't delete them. It looks a bit like there is some auto-aging feature, but it deletes entire conversations, and does it without warning. Fortunately, very fortunately, gmail moved the messages to the "bin" folder, where I've been able to select them all and restore them to the inbox.

It's destroyed my trust in the program. If you can't rely on it not to discard conversations, you can't rely on it. At which point, it's in the do not use category.

What does that leave for the machine. Thunderbird, and, er, Outlook for OS/X. Having the latter installed, I'm considering that with IMAP ->Gmail. This could be some leftover from my time at HP; I am secretly missing large ppt-ware and msword documents hitting my inbox, maybe even missing the bizarre dialogs that would pop up.

My past issues with Outlook on Windows are well documented. That set of blog entries are the best argument as to why I shouldn't try Outlook on OS/X.

[photo: jamaica street; painting the lamp post to match the wall is becoming a tradition. It makes for better front-on photos if they've done it right, as the lamp post becomes invisible]

Microsoft and Hadoop: interesting

I am probably expected to say negative things about the recent announcement of Microsoft supporting Apache Hadoop(tm) on their Azure Cloud Platform, but I won't. I am impressed and think that it is a good thing.

1. It shows that the Hadoop-ecosystem is becoming more ubiquitous. Yes it has flaws, which I know as one of my IntelliJ IDEA instances has the 0.24 trunk open in a window and I am staring at the monitoring2 code thinking "why didn't they use ByteBuffer here instead of hacking together XDR records by hand" (FWIW, Todd "ganglia" Lipcon says it aint his code). Despite these flaws, it is becoming widespread,
2. That helps the layers on top, the tools that work to the APIs, the applications.
3. This gives the Hadoop ecosystem more momentum and stops alternatives getting a foothold. In particular the LexisNexis stuff -from a company that talk about "Killing Hadoop". Got some bad news there...
4. Microsoft have promised contribute stuff back. This is more than Amazon have ever done -yet AWS must have found truckloads of problems. Everyone else does: and we file bugs, then try to fix them. I could pick any mildly-complex source file in the tree, do a line-by-line code review and find something to fix, even if its just better logging or error handling. (don't dismiss error handling BTW
5. If Amazon have forked, they get to keep that fork up to date.
6. If MS do contribute stuff back, it will make Hadoop work properly under Windows. For now you have to install Cygwin because Hadoop calls out to various unix commands a lot of the time. A windows-specific library for these operations will make Hadoop not only more useful in Windows clusters, it will make it better for developers.
7. MS will test at scale on Windows, which will find new bugs, bugs that they and Hortonworks will fix. Ideally they will add more functional tests too.
8. I get to say to @savasp that my code is running in their datacentre. Savas: mine is the networking stuff to get it to degrade better on a badly configured home network.  Your ops team should not encounter this.

It's interesting that Microsoft have done this. Why?

• It could be indicative of a low takeup of Azure outside the MS enterprise community. I used to do a lot of win32 programming (in fact I once coded on windows/386 2.04); I don't miss it, even though Visual Studio 6 used to be a really good C++ IDE. It is nicer to live in the Unix land that Kernighan and Ritchie created.(*)
• Any data mining tooling encourages you to keep data, which earns money for all cloud service providers.
• The layers on top are becoming interesting. That's the extra code layers, the GUI integration, etc.
• There's no reason why enterprise customers can't also run Hadoop on windows server within their own organisations, so integrate with the rest of their world. (I'm ignoring cost of the OS here, because if you pay for RHEL6 and CDH then the OS costs become noise).
• If you are trying to run windows code as part of your MR or Pig jobs, you now can. 
• If you are trying to share the cluster with "legacy" windows code, you can.

Do I have any concerns?

• Somehow I doubt MSFT will be eating their own dogfood here; this may reduce the rate they find problems, leaving it to the end users. Unless they have a fast upgrade rate it may take a while for those changes to roll out. (Look at AWS's update rate: sluggish. Maybe because they've forked)
• To date, Hadoop is optimised for Linux; things like the way it execs() are part of this. There is a risk that changes for Windows performance will conflict with Linux performance. What happens then?
• I forsee a growth in the out-of-depth people trying to use Hadoop and asking newbie questions now related to Windows. Though as we get them already, there may be no change.
• I really wish Windows server had SSH built in rather than telnet. Telnet is dead: move on. We want SSH and SFTP filesystems, and an SFTP filesystem client in both Windows and OS/X. It's the only way to be secure.
• I hope we don't end up in an argument over which underlying OS is best. The answer is: the one you are happy with.

(*) At least for developers. I changed the sprog's password last week as were unhappy with him, and when I passwd'd it back he asked me "why do I use the terminal?". One day he'll learn. I'll know that day as I he'll have changed my password.

[Artwork: unknown, Moon Street, Stokes Croft]