Cassandra – Command Line Operations

1. Install Cassandra 2. Start Cassandra Using Brew: Without Brew: 3. Check if it's up and running Using Brew: Without Brew: 4. Stop Cassandra Using Brew: Without Brew: 5. Start Cassandra Query Language Command Line Tool 5. Create KeySpace A keyspace is the top-level database object that controls the replication for the object it contains …

Paper Review: Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge

This paper was published by DeepMind to describe how its AI-powered Go program AlphaGo Zero has evolved from its predecessor AlphaGo Lee which was explained in "Mastering the Game of Go With Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search" published in 2016. AlphaGo was already able to beat several human players in the past. For example, …

Design Principle #2: Consider using the builder pattern when there are many constructor arguments

Before jumping on to builder pattern, let's talk about telescoping constructor (anti)-pattern and JavaBeans pattern. In Java, it is not possible to set default values for constructor parameters. This is where the telescoping constructor pattern comes handy. A class has multiple constructors, where each constructor calls a more specific constructor in the hierarchy, which has …

Design Principle #1: Consider static factory method pattern instead of constructors

In some scenarios, instead of having a constructor, it is better to have a public static factory method that returns an instance of that class. For example, the below method returns an instance of the Boolean object when given boolean primitive type. public static Boolean valueOf(boolean val) { return b?Boolean.TRUE:Boolean.FALSE; } This method has the …

Paper Review: Efficient Coflow Scheduling Without Prior Knowledge

In this paper, the authors have given an approach to solve the problem of efficient coflow scheduling without prior knowledge.  Inter-coflow scheduling improves application-level communication performance in data-parallel clusters. However, existing efficient schedulers require prior coflow information which limits their applicability. Schedulers without prior knowledge compromise on performance to avoid head-of-line blocking. The paper discusses …

Paper Review: Dominant Resource Fairness: Fair Allocation of Multiple Resource Types

The motivation behind writing this paper is to solve the problem of fairly sharing multiple resources when users have heterogeneous demands in them i.e. each user may have different demand for each resource. The authors propose Dominant Resource Fairness (DRF), a generalization of max-min fairness approach to multiple resource types. The most widely used allocation …

Paper Review: Heimdall: A Privacy-Respecting Implicit Preference Collection Framework

In this paper, the authors present Heimdall, a tool for preference collection in a privacy-respecting manner. This tool can be implemented in IoT devices as well. Many applications, be it mobile or web applications rely on the users' feedback and reviews for suggestions of online recommendation systems. These systems access to certain implicit information like …

Paper Review: Building Web Applications on Top of Encrypted Data Using Mylar

In this paper, the authors developed and present Mylar, a web platform that protects confidentiality against full server compromise. Most web applications currently are dependent on servers to store and process confidential information. But in case an adversary gains access to the server, they can obtain all the data present on the server. Mylar prevents …

Paper Review: Online Tracking: A 1-million-site Measurement and Analysis

In this paper, the authors performed the largest and most detailed measurement of tracking conducted on top 1 million websites. For each website, they have measured 15 features including stateful (cookie-based) and stateless (fingerprinting-based) tracking, the effect of browser privacy tools, and the exchange of tracking data between different sites (“cookie syncing”). There is no …

Paper Review: Block Me If You Can: A Large-Scale Study of Tracker-Blocking Tools

In this paper, the authors have tried to measure the effectiveness of third-party tracker blockers. First, they analyzed the architecture of different blocking solutions and then discuss the pros and cons of each method. The analysis also measures the protection offered against trackers present on more than 100,000 popular websites and 10,000 popular Android applications. …