lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Imagination

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 19:08:21 +0200

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 ..

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 14 Jun 2009 20:55:20 +0200

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.
The iphone + google maps app + at&t data plan make a great way to explore new places. My wife and me used it when exploring places in San Francisco.
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.

A Hard Day's Night

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 07 May 2009 17:16:12 +0200

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

git-svn on macports

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 11:09:22 +0200

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.

nice facebook error page

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 08:59:00 +0200

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

Happy Holi at Stanford, California, USA!

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:42:39 +0200

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.

optmizing ORDER BY in MySQL

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 15:36:16 +0100

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.

interesting spam

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 14:51:25 +0100

This is from a spam I got recently. It had "Viagra" spelled out using table (like an 8x8 display). Interesting

quote of the day

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 19:54:05 +0100

Question: If Jesus Christ comes back, will he enjoy Family Guy? Answer: No

ILUG Bengaluru Meetup - Saturday 21st February 2009

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:12:07 +0100

Linux User Group, Bangalore have a meetup at the ThoughtWorks office on Saturday 21st February 2009, 4:30 PM onwards. The details of the meeting are here. There are 2 talks lined up- "Introduction to the Android Platform" and "Device Mapper - How it works and why you should be using it". And there will be a key signing party as well.

Go, check it out and help revive the LUG meetings at Bangalore.

Un-minimizing apps in Mac

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 00:06:35 +0100

This tip saved a lot of pain.

If the application you're switching to has windows that are minimized, you can unminimize them by holding the option key, then letting go of the Cmd key.

7 things

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 23:12:33 +0100

Thanks to Lig for tagging me. 7 things you may or may not know about me:

I started a company, along with my friends, after I passed out of college. We just made one sale. Our project was made using mysql-3.x and VB. The implications here are - I have worked on VB, I know how to make mysql & VB work together and I know how to generate nice reports with the VB report generator.
I have worked in Goa. In my opinion, Goa is the best place in India that I have ever stayed in.
I used to own a Bullet 350 CC motorcycle. It is a great piece of machinery and in fact, it is the only vehicle which I DON'T consider to be a part of the "Get-me-from-point-A-to-B" class
spo0nman referred my name to Yahoo! and he gave me the boost of confidence when I was unsure if I am good enough to be even interviewed by them.
When I joined Yahoo!, I had to move from Delhi to Bangalore. However, the truck transporting my household stuff was burnt on its way to Bangalore. I had to start with a clean slate.
I had to clear many hurdles to get married. It was a constant 2 year struggle with my family, my wife's family and random circumstances. However, the end result was well worth the struggle.
I sometimes cry at movies and I find those sort of movies emotionally draining.

happiness is ..

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 21:05:17 +0100

knowing you can still understand output from diff, even though it has been months you touched any code.

installing linux "these days"

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 20:17:03 +0100

I tried installing linux on my SO's (significant other) laptop today. WHAT IS WRONG WITH UBUNTU!! It takes ages to load up and the install process is resource intensive enough to make the laptop totally unresponsive. Finally installed Fedora and I am not happy with it. I will install debian for her, once I find out where to get blank CD here.

Contributing to a Project with a Maintainer Who Doesn't Merge Contributions Quickly

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:30:32 +0100

I saw this mail in one of the mailing lists I am on and thought it might be useful to a wider audience. This reply was given by Ben Finney

   I have some ambitious plans for enhancing the module, but I feel
   that it won't be practical to do it in the current conditions. I
   tried to soft-talk the maintainer into giving me repository access,
   but then the conversation got diverted into applying my latest
   patch, which he said he'd like to perform the next day. He didn't
   and it's been at least two weeks since then.

Since you talk about asking for âcommit accessâ, I presume it's in an old-school centralised-only VCS. I'll assume Subversion.

What are your thoughts about a situation like this?

Use a distributed VCS to track your changes. I prefer Bazaar, so I'll discuss that below.

Use Debian GNU/Linux, âlennyâ or later.
Install the necessary packages: $ sudo aptitude install bzr bzrtools bzr-svn svn
Get a local Bazaar checkout of the upstream Subversion branch so you can track upstream's changes discretely and easily: $ bzr checkout svn+ssh://vcs.example.org/foo/trunk/ foo.trunk/
Bazaar uses the âbzr-svnâ plugin to work with Subversion repositories. It has its foibles, especially with writing to Subversion repositories; but for tracking an upstream Subversion repository against your Bazaar-managed branches, it's excellent.
Branch from upstream so you can track your changes: $ bzr branch foo.trunk/ foo.interesting-new-feature/
Work on your interesting new feature, committing often:

    $ cd foo.interesting-new-feature/
    $ emacs spam.py  # hack hack hack
    $ make test  # or however you run your full test suite
    $ bzr commit --message "One-line description"

When upstream has new revisions in their repository, update your checkout:

    $ cd foo.trunk/
    $ bzr update

When you want to send a patch of your current work against upstream, generate a Bazaar âmerge directiveâ (a patch bundle):

    $ cd foo.interesting-new-feature/
    $ bzr send --output ../foo.interesting-new-feature.patch --no-bundle

This makes a patch against the parent of the current branch (by default, since no other branch is specified), which is the ?foo.trunk/? branch you originally branched from. The --no-bundle option turns off the ?patch bundle? blob, which would be useful to a Bazaar-using remote user to merge the resulting patch and have identical revisions to you. Since you'll be sending it to a Subversion user, that blob won't be useful to them so we disable it.
Send the âfoo.interesting-new-feature.patchâ file to upstream attached to an email message that explains what the changes are.

The Bazaar documentation, both online at <http://bazaar-vcs.org/> and in the bzr help foo commands, is comprehensive and should fill the many gaps I've no doubt left from the above explanation.