weekends are for leisure

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. It caused me to reflect upon my audience, which is largely high school drummers, and the fact that they they most certainly don’t have much income to part with. So, given my audience and the state of public school music programs, I decided to be generous and offer the music for free to those who need it.

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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. But he took it further with a set of iterator functions that work with zsets and both set encodings. Very nice!

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At Thursday night’s PDX Hackathon I worked more on the redis changes I wanted to make. I mostly completed them, and announced my progress on the mailing list that night. Seems no one was aware that zinterstore was broken for a set encoded as an “intset” (a more efficient way to store sets of integers). So yay, I found a bug! But now another programmer has alerted me he’s made progress in another area of the code that should be relevant to me, so I’ve got to check that out.

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Spent another hour reading the redis source today, and I’m beginning to feel more enlightened. I’m thankful for the comment at the top of t_zset.c that describes how sorted sets are implemented with a hash and a skiplist. Weighing that knowledge against the t_set.c code for un-sorted sets, it’s now much clearer how the two types are alike and how they differ.

This is all in an effort to teach redis to zinterstore sets against sorted sets. The difficulty is due to the fact that sets can be “encoded” as a hash table, OR as an intset. So the zinterstore logic needs to be taught how to deal with un-sorted sets more completely.

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Knocked out Gary Vaynerchuk’s Crush It book a few Saturdays ago. Of course, this got me thinking once-again about other ways I could make some money.

Flam Swiss is fulfilling, but since by choice I’m targetting the high school level, there’s not a whole lot of opportunity for making money. Or at least not that I’m seeing right now. Most schools don’t have the funds to pay for music, and even fewer high school students are able to donate or purchase.

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I’m disappointed that litl’s webbook is so dependent upon flash. It appears they support it exclusively. Of course, I’d rather they supported open standards and open tools like JavaScript, with CSS and the canvas element, but maybe they’ll go in that direction soon.

However, I do find it endearing that they “… hate computers. At least the mainstream ones that we’ve been using.”

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Yesterday, during lunch, I read through these blog posts that walk through the redis source code:

http://pauladamsmith.com/articles/redis-under-the-hood.html

http://pauladamsmith.com/blog/2011/03/redis_get_set.html

I won’t go into the details now, but while investigating redis for work I saw a use case where being able to intersect sorted and unsorted sets would be nice. Un-sorted elements would have a 0 score (even better if it were customizable). Redis doesn’t currently support this, so I hope to contribute by adding this feature.

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Posts beyond this point were migrated to tumblr from my two previous blogs. Was tired of using wordpress and, more importantly, having my writings spread far and wide.

Thank you very much.

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Too many URLs fly by me in a given week. Sometimes I take the time to digest them, usually after the tab’s been open for a week or more. Lately I’ve been making more of an effort to really think about what I read, to take notes, and share what I’ve learned.

Here are things I’ve read lately, along with the bits I found the most interesting.

10 Business Models that Rocked 2010

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