Lately, the thing I’ve wanted to yell most at people is “pay attention!” It should probably be prefixed by “slow down!” People don’t read. They don’t listen to what others say. They don’t pay attention to the details. They apparently think they’re effective at multi-tasking at light-speed.
Continue readingI continue to like Merlin Mann’s podcasts. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon Back to Work. Being familiar with You Look Nice Today I figured it had to be good, so I jumped in without a clue what it was about. Turns out to be centered on:
In episode 14, some things that really struck a chord with me were related to job unhappiness. It’s hard to describe my current situation to people. Most people don’t seem to get it. They seem to assume that programming is programming, and that if I enjoy programming, I should be happy programming. No. You wouldn’t question a construction worker that prefers framing over roofing, would you?
Continue readingBeen powering through Embedded Linux Primer. A few high-level things I’ve learned:
My first motivation for investigating redis was due to an optimization challenge at work. Our network of websites covers track and field and cross-country. We have a database of 13 million performance records, and naturally our site provides visitors with the ability to view up-to-date rankings. Currently we use Sphinx for this, but Sphinx is geared for full-text search, and was quite slow (we’ve since optimized sphinx further, which I hope to write about later). However, being able to produce rankings per education level, gender, season, event doesn’t require full-text search. It doesn’t require any sort of search. Instead, I decided to partition our performance IDs across several (about 60) sets and use zsets to do ordering by performance score. More about the specifics at the end.
Continue readingThe supression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge. There is no place for it in the endeavor of science.
– Carl Sagan (Cosmos Episode 4)
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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:
Test-Driven Development for Embedded C was a surprise as well. To be honest, I’ve never done much unit-testing for PHP or other web apps. And I’m not sure of the best ways to perform testing for C apps given the added step of compilation, so this book should prove quite valuable. Even if my next job doesn’t require TDD experience, it should help me write better code.
Continue reading… 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
Continue readingWhat 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.
Continue readingThe 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.
Continue readingHad 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:
So, it’s 95% working! Once I fix those things, “make test” should pass, and then I can get on with the task of benchmarking my changes against the main branch.
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