MAHOUT-1529: third collection of various edits against private branch

Squashed commit of the following:

commit 4328aae135bc56c02b944c21af2cfd6629b262bf
Author: Dmitriy Lyubimov <dlyubimov@apache.org>
Date:   Mon Jul 7 13:13:26 2014 -0700

    Various 1529-related stuff collected from private fork