lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Imagination is your key to unlock the hidden wonders of our world. Imagination is the beginning of creation. You imagine what you desire, you will what you imagine and at last you create what you will.

OMFG!! Is that a Romulan Warbird decloaking in front of us. OMFG!! They are hailing us.

Actually, no. It is just me posting to my blog. I had a busy month and hence my website and my blog took a backseat.

So what all have I been up to -

• Facebook is the new Orkut. I find myself logging into FB every day now.
• Yahoo!'s iphone app is great.
• Finally got myself a postpaid AT&T connection, with their data plan. In my opinion, it is easier to get a phone connection in India than it is in USA.
• I am now cycling to work! After some research, I bought myself a Schwinn Frontier bike and I am pretty happy with it. The only problem that I see in this bike is its hard seat, but from what I heard, this is not a bad thing. This review pretty much sums up my opinion about the bike as well.
• Oh yes - Star Trek!! I saw this movie and I was impressed. In fact, I was so impressed that I clapped when the movie ended (oddly, very few people clapped)
• GIT. That has been a new addition to my programming arsenal. Git is really nice and I am loving it. I have to deep dive into the git branches, but even the basic stuff from git have made source control easy.
• Oh yes - I checked out Songbird music player. If you are already using Amarok, don't bother with Songbird. Amarok is way ahead of it. If, on the other hand, iTunes is the only player you know, then give Songbird a spin. It is much nicer than iTunes.

This song is dedicated to my pager and my wife. This song needs to be sung in the same tune as A Hard Day's Night

It's been a hard day's night, and the beeper has been beeping like a ticking clock
It's been a hard day's night, I should be sleeping like a log
But when I get home to you I'll find the pager beeping off some more
It Will make me feel like a dull robot

You know I work all day to get you money to buy you things
And it's worth it just to hear you say you're going to give me everything
So why on earth should I moan, 'cause when I get you alone
You know I feel ok

If you are using macports, you will notice that git svn init will give you this erro git: 'svn' is not a git-command. This is because the default build of the macports git does not build git-svn. You can do the following steps to fix this

sudo port deactivate git
sudo port install git +svn

Be preapeared for a long build - this will pull in svn and related dependencies.

So, if your user agent is curl or lynx, you will get this facebook error page.

You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it real with one of the following browsers:

• Mozilla Firefox
• Opera
• Safari
• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Flock

Holi is one of my favourite and I really love all aspects of it - colours, the burning of the bonfire the day before Holi (Holika Dahan), Bhang and the food! I had not had a good Holi celebration after I moved to Bangalore (2005).

However, I had a GREAT Holi yesterday when I joined thousands of others from Bay Area in the Asha Stanford's Holi celebration. I had tons of fun coloring my wife, friends and random folks, having yummy food and enjoying a beautiful day in the sun.

We had planned to take the train to one of our friend's (N) place and then accompany him and his wife to the Holi celebrations. The day started at 8 AM and we had a hiccup when we missed our train to get to our friend's place. We had to wait another hour to catch the next train. However, things started looking better after this incident. We ran into another acquintance Of ours on the train station and they got on the same train as us. We passed them a few tips about which places to visit in San Francisco (they were on their way to SF for some tourism).

We got down at our station and N. came down to pick us up. We went to his house, chit-chatted for a while and then started off for the venue to Stanford.

I was expecting a jolly good time and that is what I got . The holi was in full swing when we got there. One of the playgrounds had been cordoned off for the holi festivities. We took our tickets and jumped into the festivities. There were lots of colors and lots of people. After we had colored each other, we started putting colors on random people. After 30 minutes with colors, it was difficult to recognize each other. There were some dance performances by some Stanford groups. And then the dancing started. And then we put color on more random people. The festivities ended around 3 PM. We had some food and then we came back home. Back home, we had to scrub ourself for around 15 minutes to clean out the colors, but it was a minor hassle.

Overall, I had a very good time and I hope to go back to the Holi celebrations again next year.

A few days back we were trying to optimize a sql query that was using an ORDER BY clause. When we ran an EXPLAIN on the query, we saw that the query was Using filesort and Using temporary. Since this query was run quite frequently, there was a benefit in optimizing this.

I had been under the impression that if your query uses filesort and then has to use temp tables for sorting, you cannot do much to save the query. However, that is not the case. If you have an index on the column being used to do the order by , mysql will use that index for sorting. Of course, there are caveats to this, the most important one being

The key used to fetch the rows is not the same as the one used in the ORDER BY: SELECT * FROM t1 WHERE key2=constant ORDER BY key1;

Hence, if you have a query which requires to be sorted, and it is being run quite frequently, it makes sense to add an index on the column on which you are doing the sort.