Ben McCann

Co-founder of Connectifier.
Investor at C3 Ventures.
Google and CMU alum.

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2011

Migrating from MySQL to Percona Server

12/11/2011

Percona Server is just MySQL with a few extra options added in by Percona. It’s backwards compatible and based off the same code base. If you’re not familiar with Percona, they are the world’s leading MySQL consultants. The main reason I switched is because Ubuntu uses an old version of MySQL. Ubuntu is about a Read More

Running Ubuntu on VirtualBox

11/30/2011

I had to figure out a few things to get Ubuntu installed and working well on VirtualBox. I had to enable virtualization technologies in my BIOS. I have a Lenovo T520 and did this by pressing F1 during startup and then going to Security > Virtualization. If I did not do this then I would Read More

SSL on localhost with nginx

11/14/2011

Install nginx if it’s not already installed: sudo apt-get install nginx You must have the SSL module installed. The nginx docs say this is not standard. However, it does come installed on Ubuntu. You can verify by running nginx -V and looking for –with-http_ssl_module. Next up is generating the SSL certs. Follow the Slicehost docs Read More

Embedded Tomcat

08/28/2011

Earlier in the year, I posted a quick writeup on how to run an embedded Jetty instance. Today, I’m posting basically the same code showing how to run an embedded Tomcat instance. The embedded Tomcat API is much nicer since it matches closely the web.xml syntax. However, the embedded Tomcat instance takes much longer to Read More

Installing CUDA 5.0 and Theano on Ubuntu 12.04 Precise

07/09/2011

Theano is a very interesting Python library developed mainly for deep learning, which can run calculations on some NVIDIA GPUs by using the CUDA library.  Setting up Theano to use the GPU can be a little tricky and take a bit of work. Install the pre-reqs sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev build-essential libx11-dev libxmu-dev libxi-dev libgl1-mesa-glx Read More

Getting started with Git

04/11/2011

I’ve recently started using Git, which I’ve found I much prefer to Subversion for two reasons. The first is that it’s really fast since almost all commands are run locally. The second reason is that Subversion litters your source code with .svn directories and should you accidentally delete or move one then you’re in for Read More

Sed Cookbook

03/31/2011

The Linux sed command is a stream editor. What that means is basically that you can do a regex operation on each line of a file or a piped stream. You can also use perl like sed. Sed does not use the extended regex syntax. Sed regex reminders: You need a backslash before parens in Read More

Using the Guice Struts 2 plugin

03/29/2011

Guice 3.0 was released a few days ago!  One of the easiest ways to use it in your web server is to use Struts 2 with the Struts 2 plugin, which is available in the central Maven repository. This tutorial assumes familiarity with Guice and Struts 2. In order to use it the plugin, your Read More

Latent Dirichlet Allocation with Mallet

03/10/2011

We recently had a PhD candidate from UCI come in and speak to the AI club at Google Irvine to speak about her research on Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). LDA is a topic model and groups words into topics where each article is comprised of a mixture of topics. I was interested to play around Read More

Remote Java debugging in Eclipse

03/08/2011

To debug a Java program being run on the command line from Eclipse you can start the Java program in remote debugging mode: java -Xdebug -Xrunjdwp:transport=dt_socket,address=8000,server=y,suspend=y -jar myProgram.jar The program will wait for you to attach the Eclipse debugger to it. Open Eclipse and choose: Run > Debug Configurations… > Remote Java Application > New Read More

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