I vaguely recall Cassandra being some clever non-relational database system and Hector being a rather awful query language for it. I wouldn't be surprised if both have moved on to become other things by now.
You can blame @acobley for this. He set the assignment at university all those years ago. I'm pretty sure he was just a bit excited at the idea of Cassandra at the time ;)
Twitter style site for posting quotes using Cassandra, Hector, JSON and JQuery.