Didn’t expect to find any books on our outing yesterday, but I had a pleasant surprise. Last week I finished my previous book on embedded Linux, which was a great case-study-esque intro, and Embedded Linux Primer will likely be a wonderful follow-up. Some of the chapters that caught my eye: Storage Considerations Systems on Chip Bootloaders Device driver basics Filesystems Busybox Development tools beyond gdb: cscope, strace (and others) Kernel Debugging Techniques Open Source Build Systems udev Test-Driven Development for Embedded C was a surprise as well.
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… that continuous spiritual deadening that the chirp of a child who you’re legally obliged to look after, in your right ear, constantly, and not letting up, and not letting you sleep … – From YLNT - That’s Babies
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What follows are thoughts while reading Embedded Linux - Hardware, Software and Interfacing. Really enjoyed it. It walks through planning for an automation system for a winter resort. Currently at chapter 6 and there’ve been a few things I’ve not done before. Right away I discovered you could use gdb remotely with gdbremote. Great for remote debugging of cross-compiled applications. I’ve done cross-compilation, albeit indirectly using buildroot, but I was still aware of what went on behind the scenes, aka: compiling gcc and glibc multiple times, the first being a way to bootstrap and create a more “pure” versions tailed specifically for the target platform.
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Read linked content The article hits home (click the title). And when you’re a creative type giving things away for free it can make you feel run-down and used. I’ve had a few thoughts for infusing my Flam Swiss “brand” with more value. Producing more content that teaches is one idea. Wish I could say I had others.
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Had the energy and focus to make more progress on my ideas for redis last night. See my previous post here if you don’t remember what those ideas were. The only things left to do: Fix freeSetObject() such that it frees intset and/or hash table memory that may have been allocated Fix code in rdb.c that’s responsible for loading the data from disk and writing to it when redis is shut down.
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Passed the most important milestone of my life last evening. I beat Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, the 1992 adventure game. Been playing it on my OLPC XO. Not sure which game I’ll start next. Maybe Full Throttle, Sam n Max, or another. Probably just go in order by release date.
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Had an idea for reducing the memory footprint of redis sets. A redis set may be encoded as an intset (if the set contains nothing but integers) or a hash table. But if a set contains integers and other values, you lose out on the benefit of intsets (speed and memory efficiency) and in some cases you have to wait while redis converts your intset to a hash table. This may not be a big penalty, but it all depends on the order in which you add items.
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Building upon Working Best at Coffee Shops, a great article with several possible explanations about why so many find it more enjoyable and often, more effective, to work in noisy public places. Another possible explanation: That working in an unpredictable, yet pleasant, environment keeps your energy levels up. Each person that walks through the door heightens your senses, provides a shot of adrenaline, and otherwise keeps you buzzing. And of course, there’s often a window with a nice view, which for me seems to benefit problem solving similar to pacing around an office.
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It was a week ago that I first felt the inevitability of my change of heart, and Sunday the camel’s back broke. I’ve since stopped offering my drumline music for free. The initial decision to offer my music at no cost wasn’t hastily made. At first, I priced my music between $3 and $10, which is what I thought it was worth, and had a few takers. Then I began split-testing to evaluate the effectiveness of “pay what you want” as well as “pay what you want with some proceeds going to charity”, with no takers.
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Pieter responded to my thread. He’s worked on compressed sorted sets recently, and while doing that he fixed the issue I was having with intsets. His code should be merged into 2.2 in a few weeks after enough people have tested. Apparently I’m the only one to report the problem with intsets. His branch’s code is similar to my approach, in that he also extended zsetopsrc with type and encoding variables.
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