Disqus - Latest Comments for brycebaril

Re: PUBLISH – Redis

brycebaril — Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:54:30 -0000

FYI the reply is only the number of clients on the server you published to, it does not include slaves of that server which will have also gotten the message.

Re: iPhone 5 vs the competition: fight!

brycebaril — Wed, 12 Sep 2012 16:47:35 -0000

You forget that Apple defines Smartphone as "A phone running iOS"

Re: ZADD – Redis

brycebaril — Fri, 01 Jun 2012 15:49:43 -0000

Did some playing around with using ZADD to create a new ZSET of 10000 elements (using 2.6.0_rc3):

I created the data like so:
perl -le 'for (1..10000) { my $r = rand() * 1000; print "zadd testzset $r \"$_\"" }' > single

Then created three copies and modified them in vim:
"multi" (added multi to the top and exec to the bottom)
"combined" (block deleted the 'zadd testzset ' from each line, joined all lines and added 'zadd testzset ' back to the first line

(All time commands were done multiple times and timing was pretty stable per run)

Single ZADD statements:
time cat single | redis-cli
(integer) 1
(integer) 1
(integer) 1
...
real 0m0.497s
user 0m0.100s
sys 0m0.176s

reids-cli del testzset
(integer) 1

time cat multi | redis-cli
...
9998) (integer) 1
9999) (integer) 1
10000) (integer) 1

real 0m0.826s
user 0m0.112s
sys 0m0.192s

reids-cli del testzset
(integer) 1

time cat combined | redis-cli
(error) ERR unknown command '184'
(error) ERR unknown command '184'
(error) ERR unknown command '184'

Looks like there is a (length? buffer?) limit on a single line at about 4096 characters (for me) that impacts how many items you can add per ZADD.

After splitting "combined" into 59 zadds of length < 4096:
...
(integer) 170
(integer) 170
(integer) 87

real 0m0.120s
user 0m0.048s
sys 0m0.012s

I'd interpret this as the combined ZADDs (broken into the right-sized pieces) being the fastest, but not so far ahead of single ZADD statements, with the MULTI/EXEC being the slowest. In practice the speed/complexity of breaking bootstrapping a large zset into multiple combined ZADD statements <= 4096 characters versus single ZADD statements may be a wash. If you need it in a single transaction the MULTI/EXEC block is capable if slightly slower.

One more data point: I converted something that was creating a zset of about ~17000 entries from individual ZADD statements to the combined ZADD statements (based on my values I did 60 items per ZADD) and it cut the runtime roughly in half (~0.4s to 0.15s).

Re: ZUNIONSTORE – Redis

brycebaril — Thu, 31 May 2012 18:56:42 -0000

In terms of replacing one of the input zsets with the ZUNIONSTORE output, e.g.:

ZUNIONSTORE zset1 2 zset1 zset2

This appears to work (at least for trivially-sized ZSETs) -- has anyone used this feature before? Is it suggested, or does it have the potential for other problems?

Re: SRANDMEMBER – Redis

brycebaril — Fri, 18 May 2012 18:17:09 -0000

This could be pipelined, too, though it would be possible to return the same member multiple times. This is not really usable on its own as a shuffle function.

Re: IndyMac Foreclosed Detroit Property: $600

brycebaril — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 15:43:23 -0000

Buy the whole neighborhood then charge yuppies $300 an hour to "play" in bulldozers and knock 'em all down. Probably pay for the entire cost up-front, then you can just sit on it and redevelop in 10 years.

Re: SHARE your ideas (they are worth $0.0083333 each anyway)

brycebaril — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:09:35 -0000

I completely agree, other reasons I encourage others to be open:

* By sharing your idea over and over again other people's feedback will help you refine it and the way you pitch it.
* Secrecy is not a winning strategy. If you can't say why you'd still win if someone else executed on the same idea, you're going to lose anyway.

A post I wrote on the matter: http://brycebaril.com/post/...

Re: Bit.ly

brycebaril — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 00:24:33 -0000

My guess is those are people who followed the link in an application such as Twhirl or TweetDeck, as opposed to a link in their browser.

Re: My review of the G1 after 3 days

brycebaril — Sat, 18 Oct 2008 10:49:08 -0000

What has been your experience with the GPS? One of the things scaring me from the reviews is that the GPS either doesn't work entirely or never gets signals.

Re: Definitely Lost... What the Wall St. Fallout Means for Me.

brycebaril — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:01:58 -0000

I only know about jobs in the tech world, so that's the only place I can give advice...

For now, at least here in Seattle, there are still a lot more open positions at startups than can be filled. It is too early to see how the WaMu failure impacts that, but I'm guessing that it won't impact the startup world too much. For the most part, people from WaMu who are qualified or have the right skillset and mindset to work at a startup will probably start their own. I'm guessing most of those people wouldn't have been at WaMu in the first place, that isn't the kind of environment that either encourages or cultivates that type of person. My guess is this applies to most large banking establishments.

Startups will be more capital conscious, however after being burned during the dot com burst, most have been operating under that assumption since 2001. The better ones will already have war chests and sane spending plans and should be carrying on more or less the same.

If you are considering this route, you should hone your coding skills. Saying they are no match for a CS major doesn't mean much-- almost none of the most skilled coders I've met are CS majors. The majority of the technologies that a startup will be interested in aren't taught in school, anyway. Try out all of the various 'new things' out there, set up an EC2 cluster and run Hadoop on it. Build something on the Google App engine, write a simple facebook application... Having done any one of these will put you a step ahead of most people who are looking for jobs in the startup scene.

This is important even if you elect to go the product route. The first issue is most startups are too small to have a product position; the vision and product decisions are made by the founders and team. If you are to land a product position at a startup, coding experience will go a long way. A product person who understands what it takes to build something, and could possibly help out at times is a pretty sweet deal.

Re: SkyGrid raises $11M to gather news for investors

brycebaril — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 12:08:36 -0000

My understanding is that Monitor110 was looking more into the web at-large to find opinions and sentiments of entities, as in 'people seem to like the iPhone' or 'people like the new iPhone less than the old iPhone' whereas SkyGrid takes news feeds and assigns sentiment scores to them. Thus, so far as I can tell, the biggest difference is the source material.

Re: Daily Dopeness - The Impending War Over Social Data

brycebaril — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 17:01:57 -0000

I completely agree with you on the needs for housing the data, but my opinion differs that I think an open source cloud-based system is the only way to actually achieve the top-notch security, scalability and dependability you'd need, and it has an added bonus of privacy.

It isn't that important, though. For the sake of this we can consider how the data is stored and encrypted as a black box.

The real difference comes from the fact that with my proposal nobody could do data mining to extract the value from the data as a whole. This separates me from most of the people who feel that aggregate data is the way to monetize social networks. My feeling is that there would be enough value with lowering the barrier for people to connect their existing social network to developer's apps that they can accrue and get value out of users via interactions and engagement rather than data acquisition and mining.

Regardless of what approach would be taken -- closed or open --, it would be next to impossible for such a service to start up and accrue users. While once constructed it could easily help application developers with their own chicken-egg problems, it has that problem on its own, and I don't think any of the companies that already have their chickens (Facebook, MySpace) are going to go in this direction; they don't need it.

Re: Daily Dopeness - The Impending War Over Social Data

brycebaril — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:49:02 -0000

This is a problem I've also put some thought to.

What I'd love to see (and would enjoy building if I had the time) would be some sort of open source cloud solution to solve the social data problem.

In this model, no corporation owns the data, it is all stored encrypted, distributed around user's computers all over the world.

For example, when you go to Etsy, Twitter, McDonalds, your local dry cleaner's site, wherever, you can log in with your social profile there and still maintain control over what information you expose, or what friends of yours you want to invite to use the same landing spot. This would put all data access in the explicit control of the user and allow everything to be opt-in.

I believe the reality is that for any of these services to become mainstream and ubiquitous the creating corporation must let go and turn the service into a protocol.

The most apparent current example of this is Twitter-- they have created something beyond their ability to control or even maintain. While they have made a slight step in this direction with their API, their framework is still a bottleneck to the degree they have to throttle their API into uselessness to stay alive. As the current market leader, if they moved toward making a twitter protocol (think email or XMPP) they could tap into the common interests of their competitors and all could benefit.

If they don't, they could very well be crushed by their own success and be locked out of the game when everyone leaves to go to their competitors. Sharing some of the users now may help them remain in the game long enough for the big win: mainstream use.

Re: Why I will NOT use stops…and you shouldn’t either!

brycebaril — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 23:53:43 -0000

Excellent. Looking forward to your thoughts on options spreads.

Re: If You Could Hate One Stock…

brycebaril — Tue, 27 May 2008 10:50:48 -0000

I'm right with you on this one; it seems the innovation team at Comcast (CMCSA) is on a roll when it comes to new ways to torture its customers.