time to let go of all we know

t-shirt: TWLOHA

shirt: River Island

cardigan: Tesco

pants: [Hong Kong]

Jewellery

Necklace

The MMM  H&M bracelet was the beginning... now I'm beginning to discover the type of jewelry I like. 

If I could afford it and if it were available to me, I would have staples from Harugin. Simple silver, skull motif.

I looked in vintage stores today. I like big statement necklaces and bracelets, which are somewhat unusual. Not too "glamorous" (too much bling or gold) or "ladylike" (too delicate or sparkly). Not too plasticky (I wish Fred Butler's designs were more backed with metals!). I discovered a Clare Bickford-Smith collection recently, which looked cool.

I fell into like with Vivenne Westwood due to the popularity of the jewellery in Asia and Japanese street fashion and J-rock/NANA, but I'm beginning to question it. It seems too common, not edgy enough - nice orb, but it's just "nice". Too wearable. 

MMM x H&M

Maison Martin Margiela x H&M

I really wanted the nude acrylic wedge shoes, but this is cool too! It's now a week past the launch, and with only one store carrying it in central Dublin, I didn't have my hopes up, so this was a nice pick-me-up. To be honest, the Anna Dello Russo collection caused me to ignore MMM, expecting the same (no offense, ADR, but there were like 50 of those gold flats on sale). I'll be more vigilant next time...

Dublin tidbits, summer 2012

Basics (plain t-shirts, etc.)

• M&S: Overpriced and boring; €8 for plain v-neck t-shirts.
• Penneys: The cheapest at ~€3.50, but they don't last long and have a strange choice - no v-necks but plenty of round-neck and long-sleeve t-shirts.
• New Look: Nice designs, but not much basics.
• Forever 21: Yes! Nice loose v-neck t-shirt for €4.75, looks hardier than Penneys quality. 

Dr. Jart at Boots

• Korean BB cream brand Dr. Jart spotted in Jervis Centre Boots for €28 - €30! There are four variants in the range, not exactly labelled Black and Silver Label as in Asia. But is it better value to order from a Hong Kong online store?? It's 168 - 188HKD from AdamBeauty.

Bubble tea

• New Vietnamese food and bubble tea place has opened next to my hair salon of choice, IS Organic. I think the name is Aoboba - who cares when they have refreshing green or black tea with fruity bursting boba! One drink with no extras is €3.50. 

Strawberry refresh green tea with strawberry boba.

The Lipstain craze

• I trekked into every Boots looking for the Revlon's Just Bitten Kissable Balmstain in Honey, but it was sold out everywhere...opted for Maybelline's Colour Sensational Lipstain instead in Tender Rose, and it turned out to be perfect! It's very sheer and a fun, buildable pink - lasting power isn't bad, either.
  

Tender Rose

Natural History Museum

• The Natural History Museum is surprisingly fun to visit with friends!

I'm leaving for Dallas, TX in four days - can't wait! Here's a photospam to make up for my absence...

Sheer "galaxy" top and burgundy shorts from Penneys.

Sunglasses from my old landlady, turquoise top from H&M.

Just got my summer haircut! 

My favourite Android photo apps lately have been LINECamera, Camera360, and PhotoWonder - all free :)

POP 15 Spring/Summer 2007

Agyness Deyn, New Club Kids theme

Anna Molinari

Pills by Chanel

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z.ky: Skin Profile April 2012

Check the "skin profile" tag for previous posts!

April 2012 Skin Routine:

Day
Neutrogena Multi-Defence® Daily Moisturiser SPF 25 (UVA + UVB)
Nivea Q10 Plus Anti-Wrinkle Eye Cream

Night
Trilogy Age Proof Replenishing Night Cream
Nivea Q10 Plus Anti-Wrinkle Eye Cream

I ran out of Pai Echium Organic Eye Cream and went for a cheaper but well-praised option, Nivea's Q10 eye cream. The Neutrogena moisturiser was chosen to due the relatively high SPF (it's difficult to find anything above SPF 10 or 15) and claimed defense from environmental factors and pollutants. It's very light and gives the bare minimum in moisture - therefore I will be ordering some Hada Labo lotion soon to try. I've been using the Trilogy night cream since the end of last year, and I find it excellent due to its blend of omega 3, 6, 9, hyaluronic acid, and various natural oils.

Pyramid Stud

Inspired by Bunney's high-polish pyramid stud accessories.

300 pyramid studs for €2.22 from eBay!

No need for a scalpel or pliers - these are 10mm and the prongs were pushed in (and pried up...) easily with a drawing clip, which happened to be in my pencil case. There are now three Bunney-style studs in a row on my pencil case, and above is my boyfriend's scarf which I decorated in the midst of a computer graphics lab.

Pyramid studs are commonly associated with punk subculture and fashion, but as Bunney has proved, a few well-placed studs can spell polish and minimalism. Now I'm on the hunt for conical gold studs à la Burberry Prorsum:


Source: Neiman Marcus

Cloudera's Hadoop Demo VM with VirtualBox: Running WordCount.java on the VM, a Step-by-Step Tutorial for Beginners

___ABOUT_THIS_TUTORIAL___

NOTE: Work in progress, please report any errors while following this tutorial in the comments! (v2.0)

I found setting up and running Hadoop on the free Cloudera VM very frustrating. For a while, I was stuck with a problem where map and reduce were both stuck at 0%, and the VM would eventually crash. I found out that it was due to a heap space error, but that didn't help as I was running mapreduce on two text files, each consisting of one line.

After a lot of trial and error, and reading of misleading, meandering, and incomplete "tutorials" online, I've written my own which I hope will help anyone trying to run Hadoop using the Cloudera VM without any problems. I did learn a lot and get familiar with the terminal again, so it wasn't a waste of time...but I spent an embarrassing amount of time searching for the cause of my failure to run WordCount - when it was all due to incorrect setup.

All commands are to be typed AS IS, unless there is text in this format: .

I guess it's still a work in progress in terms of clarity and beginner-friendliness, and feedback is welcomed.

__________________________

Versioning:
Tutorial 1.0
VirtualBox 4.1.8
Cloudera VM image download date: 17/02/2012, size: 3.64GB

Prerequisite knowledge
Background knowledge of MapReduce and Hadoop is needed. Basic knowledge of Java is also needed to understand the WordCount example.

It is assumed that you have basic familiarity with using Linux OS and the terminal, especially commands such as: cd, ls, man, rm, mv, cp, etc. Googling what you're trying to do or the commands mentioned will generally yield the command you're looking for. Using the Tab key for autocompletion will save a lot of time and effort.

If you get "stuck" inside a command or want to terminate any running command, use Ctrl + C.

DOWNLOADS
Install either VirtualBox, KVM, or VMware (compatible with Mac), and download the appropriate image from the Cloudera Hadoop Demo VM page.

--

ADVANCED: You may use WinMD5Sum to check the downloaded image with the hashes provided.

--

◇ ◇

STARTING UP VIRTUALBOX, VM SETUP
Start up VirtualBox: create new virtual machine using the New button.
Type the name for the VM, and choose Linux and Ubuntu.
Set the amount of memory dedicated to the VM. Do NOT drag the slider below 512MB. Choose Use existing hard disk, select the image on your local disk, finish.
DO NOT START IT YET. Go to Settings > System, tick Enable IO APIC.

ALTERNATIVE: STARTING UP VMware, VM SETUP
VMware does not appear to need any additional setup; just run the image using VMware Player.

◇ ◇

RUNNING THE CLOUDERA IMAGE

Start the VM.
Once the VM has booted up, open up the terminal. You are using the CentOS distro (distribution) of Linux, Xfce desktop environment.

--

ADVANCED:

$ sudo -s

This gives permanent root privileges. If you do not do this, you must prepend most commands with sudo.

--

Input the following commands (yum is like apt-get). Prepend commands with sudo if they do not seem to work, or require permissions (unless you've entered sudo -s previously).

$ yum update
$ yum install gcc
$ yum install kernel-devel

◇ ◇

SETTING UP HADOOP

Open a web browser and download the latest stable release of Hadoop here. For this tutorial, I downloaded hadoop-1.0.0/ (15-Dec-2011 16:51).

Save the tar.gz archive to your Desktop.

Move it to /usr/local and untar it using the commands below:

$ mv hadoop-1.0.0.tar.gz /usr/local
$ cd /usr/local
$ tar xzf hadoop-1.0.0.tar.gz

This command should now show the Hadoop commands:

$ hadoop

Check where Java is installed, and which version, with:
$ which java
$ java -version

--

VI CRASH COURSE:

vi is a text editor within the terminal. You can use emacs, vim, etc., but vi is used throughout this tutorial.

After the command

$ vi

is entered, you are in the vi editor.

Hit the I key to start typing (INSERT mode).
Hit Esc to get out of any mode (e.g. INSERT mode).
When not in any mode, type :wq to write (save) and quit. In case of conflict, type :q! to force quit (changes may not be saved).

See this page for a more comprehensive guide to vi commands.

--

Go to /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0/conf (note: it is NOT the directory /bin/hadoop-1.0.0) to change the JAVA_HOME variable in hadoop-env.sh to the information you just displayed (remember to uncomment it by removing the "#"), for example, at the time of writing:

$ cd /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0/conf

Make sure to use sudo, since the file is set to readonly.

$ sudo vi hadoop-env.sh

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/java/jdk1.6.0_21

RELAUNCH THE TERMINAL.

Try this command, it should display information about hadoop:

$ hadoop

--

Troubleshooting note: If there is ANY problem with the bin/hadoop command, i.e. it returns "No such directory", then check the path of the java jdk, check that you've uncommented the line in hadoop-env.sh. It MUST be /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0, because the directory /bin/hadoop-1.0.0 is NOT checked.

--

Open bashrc:

$ vi ~/.bashrc

Paste these lines into bashrc:

export HADOOP_HOME=/usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/
export HADOOP_VERSION=0.20.2-cdh3u3

RELAUNCH THE TERMINAL.

◇ ◇

SETTING UP THE CANONICAL MAPREDUCE EXAMPLE, WORDCOUNT
Make these directories on the Desktop:

/Desktop/wordcount/wordcount_classes/org/myorg

Inside /myorg, make WordCount.java, pasted from this page.

Compile WordCount.java:
$ javac -classpath ${HADOOP_HOME}/hadoop-${HADOOP_VERSION}-core.jar WordCount.java

ssh into localhost:
$ ssh localhost

cd to /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0.
$ cd /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0

Make the HDFS directory used in the tutorial:
$ bin/hadoop dfs -mkdir /usr/joe/wordcount/input/

Use this to check that the input folder is there:

$ bin/hadoop dfs -ls /usr/joe/wordcount/

Make the two input files used in the tutorial locally somewhere (e.g. in the LOCAL wordcount folder:

$ vi file01

Containing one line: "Hello World Bye World"

$ vi file02

Containing one line: "Hello Hadoop Goodbye Hadoop"

cd back to /usr/local/hadoop-1.0.0.

Put them on the HDFS:
$ bin/hadoop dfs -put /home/cloudera/Desktop/file01 /usr/joe/wordcount/input
$ bin/hadoop dfs -put /home/cloudera/Desktop/file02 /usr/joe/wordcount/input

◇ ◇

RUNNING WORDCOUNT

Go to /Desktop/wordcount/ and make a jar (should be local) from the compiled WordCount.java:
$ jar -cvf wordcount.jar -C wordcount_classes/ .

View contents of jar:
$ jar tf wordcount.jar

Run the jar:
$ sudo bin/hadoop jar /home/cloudera/Desktop/wordcount/wordcount.jar org.myorg.WordCount /usr/joe/wordcount/input /usr/joe/wordcount/output

--

Note: If you get a FileAlreadyExistsException relating to /usr/joe/wordcount/output, it means that the HDFS output directory /usr/joe/wordcount/output must be deleted with the following command before running the program again:

$ sudo bin/hadoop dfs -rmr /usr/joe/wordcount/output

If any other error comes up while using bin/hadoop, try prepending sudo to the command, or give permanent (session) root privileges.

Also, check paths with:
$ pwd

as you may have chosen different locations for files; do not blindly follow this tutorial! Keep in mind that versions may also change with updates and new releases, e.g. Java, Hadoop, etc.

--

Check the logs using the web interface:
http://localhost:50030/logs/

--

Tutorials followed:

http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/single_node_setup.html#Prepare+to+Start+the+Hadoop+Cluster
http://icrushservers.blogspot.com/2011/12/running-first-hadoop-job-with-clouderas.html
http://www.cloudera.com/blog/2009/07/cloudera-training-vm-virtualbox/
http://www.michael-noll.com/tutorials/running-hadoop-on-ubuntu-linux-single-node-cluster/
https://ccp.cloudera.com/display/SUPPORT/Hadoop+Tutorial

--

Other commands that may be useful:

$ bin/hadoop job -list-active-trackers

Scripts to restart everything:
$ /usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/bin/stop-all.sh
$ /usr/lib/hadoop-0.20/bin/start-all.sh

z.ky: Two Vintage Shirt Finds

Look at the amazing print! I'm so in love with it. It's so diet punk! €10


So pretty! It could be worn as officewear (maybe?), casual (with trousers, tied at the bottom)... €20

z.ky reviews: L'Oréal Double Extension: Beauty Tubes Technology; Nourishing, Ultra-Lengthening Mascara

I bought this as my HG mascara, Imju Fiberwig, is running out. I encountered it via Ava Yu Kiu's beauty videos and thought I'd give it a shot. It's a tad more expensive than the average drugstore mascara, at almost €17, but I've had disappointing results with almost every drugstore mascara I've ever bought, so I'm willing to pay for something that might actually work. That said, Fiberwig is significantly cheaper.

My first HG mascara was Benefit's get bent (same formula as BADgal, different/bent brush), which was stiff enough to hold the curl of my naturally very straight and long lashes, though it drooped at the end of a moderately long day. Then I discovered Fiberwig when I was in Hong Kong, and have stuck with it ever since. I love how the fibers are removed with warm water, less rubbing of the eyes with alcohol-based removers.

POINTS:
- The formula is moderately wet, which worried me at first as I prefer stiff formulas like Fiberwig.
- It's very lengthening, but not volumising.
- I had to curl many times before and after application of each coat to get my lashes to hold shape, but I think it will stay after that.
- I would say that this is another version of Bourjois' Coup de Théâtre mascara - which actually works. (I see the packaging got revamped since I bought it almost 10 years ago...I wonder if they changed the formula, which was too weak to hold curl, back in the day.)
- Individual lash definition is very good.
- It looks natural enough to be worn without any other eye make-up.

BEFORE:

Bare eye with Maybelline's Pure.Cover Mineral concealer in 01 Nude Beige and Benefit High Beam on the tearduct and nose.

AFTER:

One coat of the white base, and approximately three coats of the black mascara (in quick succession, not left to dry in between).

FREAKY COMPARISON PICTURE:

OVERALL:
If you're looking for length but not volume, and average curl hold, this is perfect for you. If your lashes are very thin, this may not work well. Only get this if no other drugstore mascara works for you, as it's among the most expensive - I think it may actually be more expensive than Benefit's offerings. It's essentially a more expensive and less volumising version of Fiberwig.

LMF 傲氣長存 Lyrics English Translation

LMF - 傲氣長存 (Persistent Self-Pride) English Translation

Chinese lyrics: Chlyrics
English translation by z.ky. Do not reproduce without permission.

WARNING: Extreme profanity. Translated lyrics after the cut.

Wintertime: Dry, Flaking Patches of Skin on Face - REMEDY!!

Last week, I had a problem with small dry patches of skin on my face with flaked and were a pain to use BB cream on. My usual serum and moisturiser didn't seem rich enough, and the central heating craze at the beginning of cold weather wasn't helping.

I've heard of crazy old ladies slathering Vaseline on their faces at night and tips online involving Vaseline masques resulting in dewy, glowing, even skin, so I tried putting a layer of Vaseline on the dry patches on my face under moisturiser. No dice - expected, since Vaseline is completely useless on my lips and seems to dry them out rather than do anything beneficial.

I was considering shelling out for a higher-end, richer moisturiser as I've never really experienced this problem before, and it was making me panic. The dryness began to itch and spread. However, I seem to have stumbled upon a remedy, which I'm going to share:

Palmer's Cocoa Butter Formula Swivel Stick - on targeted areas, under your usual moisturiser.



It's literally Palmer's (which I already use on my body) in stick form. It doesn't feel as greasy/gloopy/sticky as Vaseline (it's sticky, but it's a bearable kind that you'll forget about in a few minutes), it doesn't leave a high-gloss sheen (annoying), it's easy to use (swivel and swipe - no need to rub in if you're lazy), and after two days of using it, there are no more dry patches on my face!

It's great for protecting vulnerable areas of your face from harsh central heating and cold winds during the Winter. It smells gorgeous, melts into skin, and soothes dry skin effectively! It doesn't slide around like Vaseline will, moreover it will last all day. Please do try it if you're having the same problem with dry skin!