What do you do when you have a data set too large to fit into RAM? You could just use disk directly, so instead of a dict you use a shelve or bsddb, however the problem with that is that you then have a performance hit as all operations are disk based. You could have [...]

I just rediscovered Draegers in Menlo Park. Informally the prices are just as high as Williams-Sonoma at the Stanford shopping center, however Draegers is open later (10pm nightly), seems to easily have more specialty food items than WS, and upstairs at Draegers they have a good selection of cooking items.

I’ve realized that I understand things best when I implement them myself, and I was recently reading Trevor Strohman’s dissertation, intriguied by TupleFlow, a kind of more elaborate and improved MapReduce, and was about to write my own toy impl of TupleFlow when I decided to simplify and just for fun write MapReduce in Python. [...]