An all too brief stop over in Tainan (台南)

by dennyglee Categories: Foodie Friday · Travel TuesdayTags: · · · · 6 Comments

For anyone who regularly visits Taiwan, the city of Tainan can easily be missed with the other three major cites of Taipei, Taichung, and Kaohsiung.  Yet that would be a grave mistake if you consider yourself a foodie.  A word of warning, driving in Tainan is atrocious – there are only two major roads going into the city off of Highway 1.  Yet if you brave the driving conditions and/or decide take the train (HSR or TRA), make your way to the old historic district and you will be pleasantly satiated with all sorts of Taiwanese small eats (台灣小吃).  This…

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Taipei Main Train Station has some good eats!

by dennyglee Categories: Foodie Friday · Travel TuesdayTags: · · · Leave a comment

Like many other big cities, the Taipei Main Train Station is a major transportation hub that handles the Taiwan High Speed Rail (HSR), Taiwan Railway (TRA), and the Taipei Mass Rapid Transit (MRT) Subway system.  But in all of the chaos and craziness of moving thousands of people daily is a gold mine of great Taiwanese food – also known as Taiwan Small Eats (台灣小吃).   Here are a couple of my favorites. Potstickers and Hot & Sour Soup This little shop on the 2nd floor of the train station is technically a dim sum restaurant called 小南門點心世界（微風美食廣場）.  Its been around…

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Installing Spark 0.6.1 Standalone on OSX Mountain Lion (10.8)

by dennyglee Categories: BigDataTags: · 2 Comments

Spark is an in-memory open source cluster computing system allowing for fast iterative and interactive analytics.  Spark utilizes Scala – a type-safe objected oriented language with functional properties that is fully interoperable with Java.  For more information about Spark, please refer to http://spark-project.org.  To test out Spark, you can install the stand-alone version on Mac OSX. Install Scala 2.9.2 The first thing you will need to do is to install Scala 2.9.2 as Spark 0.6.1 is dependent on it.  As of this posting, the current version of Scala is 2.10 but there are some issues with Spark 0.6.1 and Scala…

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