The odd things you encounter reading novels: I’m reading a novel called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore which is a quirky, light, magical, mystery, apparently bordering on science fiction, and perhaps something of a cult-book for some people.
Kat, who works at Google, and Lenny, the narrator, who works at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, are in Kat’s bedroom. They want to put a thick hand-written ledger on the computer in a hurry:
She’s sitting on my lap, leaning into her MacBook. She’s explaining OCR, the process by which a computer transforms swoops of ink and streaks of graphite into characters it can comprehend, like K and A and T.
“It’s not trivial,” she says. “That was a big book, and bad handwriting.” But Kat has a plan. “It would take my computer all night to process all those pages,” she says. “But we’re impatient, right?” She’s typing at warp speed, composing long commands I do not understand. Yes, we definitely are impatient.
“So we’ll get hundreds of machines to do it all at once. We’ll use Hapdoop.”
“Hadoop?”
“Everybody uses it. Google, Facebook, the NSA. It’s software – it breaks a big job into lots of tiny pieces and spreads them out to lots of different computers at the same time.”
Hadoop! I love the sound of it. Kat, you and I will have a son, and we will name him Hadoop, and he will be a great warrior, a king!
Best description of Hadoop I ever read!
Saul