weekends are for leisure

Recently I became aware that while teaching I sometimes go on and on for far too long. It usually happens when I realize a student isn’t “getting it” after a period of time, after the rest of the group has moved on. I address them personally, repeat the nugget on information, and then I may go into the “why” portion of what I’m talking about, after which I may go into variations that might be helpful to think about, and then I may go back to the original point and re-iterate.

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Couldn’t pass up Tina Fey’s new book, Bossypants. I’ll start by saying that 30 Rock is the best comedy show on network television. And I’d be right. The Office faded fast. Family Guy got old after the 1st season. The Simpsons was probably good 10 years ago (though I was never a huge fan). But I don’t want to write about TV.

So yes, Tina Fey… Heard her interview on Fresh Air and I had to buy her book. If you like Tina Fey, you’ll enjoy it. I’m especially glad she specifically writes about this 30 Rock line … it’s one of the all-time greats:

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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.

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I 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:

• fear
• happiness
• no-fluff life hacks
• creative work

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?

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Been powering through Embedded Linux Primer. A few high-level things I’ve learned:

• initrd is old, initramfs is new
• initramfs uses a CPIO image (a type of archive that was new to me) to hold the initial filesystem contents
• Using TFTP to boot from a remote kernel and ramdisk sounds like fun, not to mention provides great flexibility for debugging.
• It’s not so hard to add extra items to the kernel config menu
• Learned some ins and outs of Das U-boot, and that support for using RAM has to be initialized by the bootloader otherwise you can only use stack memory.
• JFFS2 can help increase the lifetime of flash memory
• The kernel boot process … through hardware-specific assembly files, common files, to the kernel C code, kernel subsystems, init.

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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.

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The 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:

• 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. 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.

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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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