Photo from the Austin Java Users Group, March 25, 2014

Tyler Hobbes spoke to 85 Java developers about Cassandra, the NoSql database created at Facebook, but used by Netflix, reddit, ebay and instagram. My bullet points:
Cassandra has no Master-Slave architecture, but instead has a network of peers all sharing data.
Cassandra is fully distributed and has no Single Point of Failure (SPOF).
They use Murmur to build 64-bit hashes.
Yuki Morishita talked about Cassandra Query Language CQL.
You can use sqlsh, a command-line version of CQL.
Cassandra is not good for ad-hoc queries, the database structure has to be designed for your planned queries to be useful.

Mezer Tools for Screen Capture and Measurements

A friend recommend Mezer Toolkit, an excellent utility for Windows screen capture and measurement. Selecting Windows-S brings up the app which lets you choose two corners of a rectangle to define which part of the screen gets put in the copy buffer. Saves lots of time. No more ctl-alt-shift-prtscrn. Mezer will also let you measure items on your screen.

Pictures from Austin .Net User Meeting - Overview of Fiddler with Eric Lawrence

Eric Lawrence gave an overview of "Debugging with Fiddler" to 60 people at this month's Austin .Net meeting. Eric has a light, breezy presentation style which makes listening enjoyable. Fiddler was Eric's hobby project for years before Teleric offered to finance the project. Fiddler (download) really is a Swiss Army Knife for http investigations. My jumbled notes:
The command line has mucho power like ">50K" will only show data more than 50K
Alt-Click on a column shows all other lines with that value.
Fiddler runs on Windows, Linux Mint, and Ubuntu, but just barely on the Mac.
Fiddler can deal with HTTPS encryption and HTML5's WebSockets
It has an image inspector to give info on images
It has Regular Expression based HTTP rewrites
You can remap domains and ports - useful in testing to map a test server to the live server's domain or port
HOSTS command to reroute ip addresses since the HOST file in certain situations is not read
Autoresponder allows you to replay http sessions very fast for demos
FiddlerScripts let you write programs in Fiddler
It has lots of insertion points for adding customized code (AOP)
Watcher x5s is also a good tool websecuritytool.codeplex.com
Lastly, the entire core of Fiddler is available as a library for use in your programs.