geek stuff - 6

This is a recommendation for my fellow geeks who enjoy sci-fi series. You should check out Sliders. The premise of the story is that a college genius invents a machine that gives him the ability to travel between dimensions. There are infinite number of worlds and there are an infinite number of story-lines to go with it. With his friend Wade Wells and Professor Arturo, Quinn (the college genius) decide to take a spin round the universe and due to some accidents, they are not able to get back to their home.

We see universes where alternate outcomes to world changing events have happened and things are different from what they are "back home". The pilot episode deals with the possibility where communist ideology has won the cold war.

One of the episodes that I enjoyed was "Eggheads". This is a world where intellect is prized and nerds are heroes. You have billboard of Einstein modeling for Gap in khakis, and a sports guide written by Stephen Hawking. The best part of this episode were the "bad guys", who threatened using Latin phrases!

I am still on Season 2 (netflix disk 1). Go check it out.

I have been thinking that sometimes personalities of the speaker affects the way I perceive his ideas. i.e. if the speaker has a pleasant personality, and presents his ideas with a calm demur, I will be more agreeable with his point of view and I will take in his evidence with an open mind. However, if the speaker is unpleasant or if he is not calm and confident while presenting his ideas, I sometimes dismiss his ideas and evidence as unworthy of my attention.

I think I might have found a workaround for this issue. Whenever I find myself strongly agreeing or strongly disagreeing with someone's ideas, I would do a "vice-versa" on the speaker's personality and see if I still agree with the evidence. What this means is, if I find myself strongly agreeing with someone, I will imagine him presenting his facts and ideas at the top of his voice or in a very shaky voice. Similarly, if I find myself strongly disagreeing with someone's ideas, I will imagine him talking in a calm manner and in a strong voice.

The idea here is to try and subtract out the effect of personalities when listening to new theories and ideas.

Today morning I came across this piece of writing - Does GPL still matter?. The whole article is based on a few anecdotes from CEOs and marketing droids. They have gotten quite a few points wrong in the article.

GPL is a developer friendly license. The basic premise of the GPL is that the user should not subtract from the freedom he gets when redistributing software. GPL is not restrictive. It merely insists that whoever takes from the common pool must contribute back to the pool.

I would like to point to these 2 articles in support of GPL -

• GPL-Virus Or Vaccine
• Why I (A/L)GPL

I attended the Hackers and Founders meetup yesterday. It was a high energy meetup and I liked it. When I walked in, I was already 2 hours late but there were still quite a few people around. I walked in, took a name tag and tried to "merge in". Merging was easy - the folks were friendly and did not mind if you joined the discussion.

Some observations

• I did not have a good answer for "what are you working on right now" . This made me realize that from a technology perspective, I have not worked on anything interesting for some time now. I have tinkered with a few things in the past 6 months (man!), but have not really done a deep dive on any of them.
• There was a focus on programming language in the group. I am not sure if the choice of a programming language is really a big deal when creating a webapp. Rails, PHP, Python, Perl, Java - all have a good web framework. One of the arguments was that it would be difficult to organize PHP code in a coherent manner. In my opinion, that is a matter of discipline instead of language.
• I did not find people thinking of totally different ideas. Or maybe, the folks were not telling those ideas . The ideas floated around ads, community, social networking, websites etc.
• I am not a unique case when it comes to the case of creating a startup. A few folks there had a regular job and were planning on side projects.

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

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

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.