If you’re here and you don’t have a Nokia 6681, continue your journey across the web. This post is strictly for people who’ve been messed up in their minds about buying a newer phone, cause everyone else seems to be getting one of those shiny new S60s or Androids.

What the hell?

Why would you wanna continue using your five-year old phone, the grand ol’ Nokia 6681, you ask? Cause its a sweet phone, that’s why! The trick to save money from buying a new phone is to understand your exact use case.

Nokia 6681 - Still got it. Can even call 911 and prevent crime!

Sure your phone weighs about 140 grams and sometimes may have broken your wrist or pained your toe upon dropping, but if you’ve got here today it means you’re still having a working device. How solid is that? Mine’s been through being wet in rains, multiple dozens of floor-drops and still works.

What do you do with it anyway?

All I’ve noticed myself doing with my Nokia 6681 is send text messages, call people, and play an arcade game on those rare sleepless nights. But you can do virtually anything with it; it never had to deal with dearth of java and symbian apps.

Will a new phone with a hell lot of newer features change this? No. Cause that’s all I get to do with my phone in every 24 damn hours.

But what about the Web and Wi-Fi and 3G?

What’re you reading this article on, proud little Nokia 6681 owner? That’s right. Keep doing the same.

Its friggin’ slow. I get mad sometimes!

I agree with these lines. The phone does feel sluggish at times; but I remember the years when I did not feel that way, at all. How can that be, I wondered?

The solution is simple. Its your junk on the phone memory.

To solve this, its time you opened that rusty can of Nokia PC Suite on your (or on someone else’s) Windows PC and connect your phone. Head to its backup menu after connecting the phone and do a backup of stuff you require.

I recommend ditching all user files, notes and calendar entries. With a phone as awesome as 6681 who needs a calendar to remember things anyway? So go ahead and backup some vital messages you’ve stashed elsewhere and all your contacts (these are very important, for the human memory is poor).

Now (after ensuring the backup went okay) blindly follow my following advice. Remove your memory card and keep it aside. You can do that when the phone is ON itself (another killer feature from the phones of 2005 – the hot swap!). Get back on your keypad, and type in the following sequence on the home screen: * # 7 3 7 0 #. Press YES in the confirmation message and enter 12345 to confirm (or your set lock key).

Wait for a few minutes as you watch your beloved phone restart; then re-fill-in the timezone, time and date details it asks you upon the reboot.

Enjoy the snappier, formatted phone now. If you still need it, restore the backup you made on the phone back again. I’m not responsible for your backup laziness. Or you could restart your life with zero contacts and try contacting the numbers you can actually remember; and have fun reconnecting with people, this time without worrying about their phone being better than yours cause you’ve got your shiny, powerful Nokia 6681 back from the ages!

You absolutely rock!

Its not me, its the phone. Why do I keep reiterating that point over and over again? Kiss your phone and throw it in the air out of joy, it can withstand your exultation; really.

And congratulations, you’re now a modern-phone-society rendered outcast.

To fix it, first get the patch from MAPREDUCE-1280 (direct download here), and apply it into your Hadoop installation. The following commands describe the process for getting the plugin built:

$ cd $HADOOP_HOME
$ patch -p0 < ~/eclipse.patch
$ # The following is where my eclipse resides.
$ export ECLIPSE_HOME=/usr/share/eclipse
$ ant -Declipse.home=$ECLIPSE_HOME binary
$ cp build/contrib/eclipse-plugin/hadoop-*.jar $ECLIPSE_HOME/plugins

That’s it. The last line in the commands above had copied it to your Eclipse installation, which you can then restart and switch to Hadoop MapReduce perspective and run jobs flawlessly. Credits go to Alex Kozly for mentioning the solution here.

It looks like the following:

gitg - Rich visualizations for git workflow

Get gitg here. Or install it via your package manager and have fun pointing and laughing at your merge stupidness!

Another way to dig into the data is by looking at SCM file-level data such as Author, Domain of an author, Distribution of commits over the week, etc. There are two tools available for this, Gitstats and Gitstat. I liked the former for its ease of setup and the number of statistics shown. The latter is a fairly more advanced tool but with fewer features and requires a Database to work over a web server.

gitstats - Statistics for # of commits over a week's days (For the git project itself)

Get gitstats here and just do a ‘gitstats [cloned directory] [output directory for html files]‘ or get gitstat here and have fun setting it up. I’d recommend adding the former as a cron job based on your commit interval statistics and getting done with it.

Note for some: I’ve added an ‘I‘ by the way, in case you didn’t notice this time.
In very fine print cause that’s how some seem to like things.

rdist is a wonderful tool for either of the above, and largely unpopular by certain standards. RDist can be found here (also installable as a package in many Linux distributions). Beginning to use rdist is a little overwhelming at first but easy once you get the syntaxes right.

As an example, imagine you have your user home directory ($HOME) as /home/lost across all hosts. Now, on your master/main/primary host (say master.lost.com) you have created a folder named ‘season_1‘. You want to propagate this folder and all its contents to your other hosts (imagine 5 of them, slave1 through slave5.lost.com).

The directory structure of ‘season_1‘ looks like:

season_1/
--jack.txt
--locke.txt
--deadguys/
  --artz.txt

If you’d like to copy the entire directory over to all the slave hosts, create a file ($HOME/distfile in my case) with the following contents:

SLAVES = ( slave1.lost.com slave2.lost.com slave3.lost.com slave4.lost.com slave5.lost.com )

# Lets push our season_1 for all slave hosts to see!
season1: (
    /home/lost/season_1
) -> ( ${SLAVES} )

That’s all you’d need if you want to transfer the entire tree to all the hosts. To begin the distribution, simply do the following and follow the output which gets printed:

rdist -f $HOME/distfile

That’s it, as simple as that. Now lets get a little complex.

You suddenly decide that you don’t want to let the slave hosts to see the deadguys folder. In this case you can do:

SLAVES = ( slave1.lost.com slave2.lost.com slave3.lost.com slave4.lost.com slave5.lost.com )

# Lets push our season_1 for all slave hosts to see!
season1: (
    /home/lost/season_1
) -> ( ${SLAVES} )
except /home/lost/season_1/deadguys;

As you’re about to finally begin the push, you get a request from a friend who’s connected to the network as well (friend.lost.com), asking you to push all your season_1 updates ALONE to him. And you also decide that slave4 should not get this push update. With these new rules you’d do:

SLAVES = ( slave1.lost.com slave2.lost.com slave3.lost.com slave4.lost.com slave5.lost.com )

# Lets push our season_1 for all slave hosts to see!
season1: (
    /home/lost/season_1
) -> ( ${SLAVES} ) - ( slave4.lost.com ) + ( friend.lost.com )
except /home/lost/season_1/deadguys;

Likewise, when you have a new folder season_2 needed to be pushed in the future, you edit your distfile as (notice the minus and plus added to destination):

SLAVES = ( slave1.lost.com slave2.lost.com slave3.lost.com slave4.lost.com slave5.lost.com )

# Lets push our season_1 for all slave hosts to see!
season1: (
    /home/lost/season_1
) -> ( ${SLAVES} ) - ( slave4.lost.com ) + ( friend.lost.com )
except /home/lost/season_1/deadguys;

season2: (
    /home/lost/season_2
) -> ( ${SLAVES} )

I hope you got a hang of the rdist destfile syntax by now. You can read its manual for more advanced options that allow notifications (mails), timestamp based pushing (::), and many other options you may need for bending around the corner and taking the shortcuts.

Note: You can also push incremental updates by issuing rdist again — only the changed or new files will be pushed, neat huh? Don’t bug me about the security and setup pass-phrase-less ssh keys on all hosts for hassle-free shoot-your-feet setups.