weekends are for leisure

Redis Ooops

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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PDX Hackathon

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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Hacking on Redis source code

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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Crush It

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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litl disappointed

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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Hope to contribute to Redis

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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Migration Marker

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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Readings

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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Writing More

I haven’t been writing enough lately. Facebook’s 2-cent interactions haven’t satisfied, and I’ve noticed myself having a harder time organizing and explaining complex thoughts. That needs to change.

On a related note, initially I thought it was a good idea to separate my blogs into technical and non-technical. My intent was to be considerate of whatever audience I may have, to let them know what to expect. But that’s proving to be a pain in the ass because sometimes my posts are a blend of tech and non-tech. And it also means I have multiple places/accounts/sites to keep track of, but that’s more of a mental hangup that an actual hardship.

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Spam Comments ... Best Of

Every now and then a spam comment gets through Akismet and awaits moderation. Here are a few of the funnier ones. Of course, I’m not posting the links or websites they originally attempted to link to.

B says:

It can provide additional storage space. Occasional table is the term used for any small table but, more generally for a cocktail, end table and sofa. It never occurred to me to use the Ghost Chair! Please login for country specific pricing. She chooses to feature items that embody what she feels is the modern spirit: Each [redacted] piece is built to our clients requirements and then is stained or painted and finished in one of our finishing shops.

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