Cruisemaniac.com

Heylo people!  Its been quite sometime since I’ve posted here…  This time, I’ll blatantly accept the reason! I’m outright lazy… and things at work have been shit-busy!!!  Scary deadlines, lots of shitty re-work, delivery pressure, <<feel free to add other shitty IT terms here>>

But yeah, I’m more active on twitter and Posterous…

Twitter rocks!!! So does Posterous!

And I’m desperately waiting for the native S60 based Wordpress client…  That would help me put up thoughts here more often! Read Ewan’s account about the client here…

As they say, the most important feature in your product is Shipping it!  I love “The Cult of Done Manifesto“.  A truckload of thanks to Swaroop C H for blogging about it!  Its soooo much simpler to understand and adapt to.  It makes a truckload of sense, and more importantly, it fits me and my attitude towards things – It works if YOU work it. Shit happens, Forget / fuck it / move on!

I love the Nokia N900!!! I cant wait for the next generation Maemo / MeeGo / <whatever Mooo-thingy its called> class devices to hit the road! I absolutely absolutely DID NOT like the Samsung Galaxy.  Nice to see the traction android is pulling on, but sorry, it still doesnt cut it for me!  And no, Snapdragon isnt close to a statement in terms of validating performance! ARM is GOD!

And in other stuff, the iPad is in more instances than none, being mistaken for a sanitary product… I’m having trouble convincing people at home that its a computing technological device!!!  And in a very very long time, I admit, I love the look and feel of the 17″ Macbook Pro.  Saw it at fossiloflife’s place.  I just love the curves on it

And just so to mention, I’m listening to Laila O Laila as I type in this line

Ciao folks… Have a good one

Laila O Lailaaaaa

A customary post on my blog, I make it a point to jot down the crazy stuff I did over the year that was…  Nothing huge, but yes, its a pointer to remind myself of how bad I still am and how “badd-er” (I know thats not a word! ) I can get!

The post is also a very cheeky means to get one more post up on my blog… and make up for the lack of writing more and to please myself that I can write. You guys can definitely identify with the IT-manager-performance-biscuit part right???

So here goes, a quick round up of the worth mention stuff from 2009:

1. New years eve was awesome… Had a wonderful evening at @reinventin_self‘ s place. Played darts, bored holes through his wall
2. Gifted dad a shirt on his birthday… Usually, mom does the honours, this time around, it was me! Glad he liked it!
3. Got finally assigned on a project at Nokia.  Dream come true for a die hard nokia fan!  This has perhaps been the biggest highlight of the year.  Got to see the whole OS as it functions… Have been working there as a build and process engineer ever since…  Lovely life, got to learn some amazing things… phenomenally awesome team to work with everyday… lovely life overall…  This one point goes out to all those guys who I work with and have made my job something I just love! Thanx machan’s!
4. Got punctual… Personal best so far this year! I’m in office at 8.30 in the morning. DOT. Learnt to prioritize things and work smarter!  I think this was in the list a couple of years back!  Glad to mention I’m doing a good job at it now…
5. Was part of the team that put together BCB8 at Yahoo! campus in bangalore.  Awesome fun! Loads of stuff learnt… Worked with GOD level guys while putting together the BCB8 website… Interesting ride overall!
6. Moved into my own haunt at JP Nagar… Most of you guys know this already, we’ve had a couple of #technights here so far…
7. Got my own domain!  If you hit the website at http://thecruisemaniac.com, you’ve been redirected here to http://cruisemaniac.com. The new place where I hang out. Freaky shot at it, but hey, I AM CRUISEMANIAC! B-). Do read the interesting story behind the domain purchase…
8. Went on a nice long trip to Chikmaglur and got a sneakpeek behind how CCD works… credits to Swaroop!
9. Got myself a new LCD monitor! 22″ samsung glory on my computer table B-)
10. As you are reading this point, I’m at Goa enjoying the beaches and the new year After a hectic one year of a lot of work, this is intense respite!

Well, there does it! A nice, action-filled year has come to an end…  Quite a few ups and hence, the downs for the year have not been mentioned explicitly!

So… Here’s wishing you a wonderful year in 2010!  Have fun! And give it all you got!

As developers, we tend to keep writing a particular piece of code time and again… Not because, we want to, but because we have to… Called boilerplate code, this chunk is unavoidable, repetitive and kinda grows on you over time!

I was recently coding up a web app using PHP and MySql and, I set out to find a wrapper class that provides good and fast CRUD functionality for MySql.

What I found, I ought to share! This post is tribute to an amazing PHP, MySql wrapper class that I have come to use and love over sometime now. The code is by a developer on a website called ricocheting.  The php mysql wrapper code can be downloaded from here.

I really appreciate that the code is fully documented in terms of functionality provided and also has strict type checking (strip slashes, escaping data, et. al.) and error reporting on sql queries. A nice addon to the script is that it allows to force open multiple database connections to the same database from the same source.

I am not going to take time into rewriting all that wonderful help documentation the developer has produced on his website. So, go ahead and check it out there.

The code has been released under the GPL license so, all you code-monks are free to tweak and boost it! Do let me know if someone comes up with a similar / updated / more functional code-chunk for this purpose.

Chao…

A lot of us have blogs, websites and web applications. A good number of us use private hosting providers like bluehost / dreamhost / mediatemple as opposed to hosted services such as wordpress / blogger / gmail, etc.

When you’re with a private hosting provider migrating between providers is a common scenario that occurs on reasons of cost, reliability, performance, demand and so on…  Moving files across these providers is a breeze… FTP from one place to another…

The question that arises is, how do you move that huge mysql database??? I’ll walk you through two regular techniques that are generally used to move databases… And then the third technique that uses the BigDump tool…

All the three techniques require you to take a dump of the mysql database of your application(s) using phpmydmin / mysql CLI. Download the resultant .sql or .sql.gz (Compressed zip file) and keep it ready to move…

1. phpMyAdmin: Everyone knows this… and everyone that uses a private host has used it atleast one time…  Once you’ve created your new database at the new host, open up phpMyAdmin and navigate to the newly created database.  Click on the SQL link and click browse in the window that pops up.  Select the .sql or .sql.gz file and select Import.  The job is done!  The problem with this technique however is that it is limited by the memory limit imposed on PHP by the server.  Most cases, this is around 7-8MB.

2. mySQL CLI: This is the next advanced method of sql import.  This is from the commandline (SSH) on the server.  It is extremely simple and ready to go if you have shell access to your space on your server. The technique goes like this.  Upload the .gz file via ftp onto your new site and login to your server via SSH using putty or equivalent tools and navigate to the location.

1. Unzip the .gz file if you’ve used compression.
   you@host~ tar -xvf database.sql.gz
2. Dump the sql into your preselected database like so:
   you@host~ mysql -h mysqlhosturl.com -u yourmysqlusername -p yourmysqlpasswd -p yourdbname < databasedump.sql

3. The BigDump technique: The first technique works, as mentioned, works for very small database backups and restores. The second technique works when you’ve got shell access to your hosting space. The third technique works when your sql file is too large for phpMyAdmin and you do not have Shell access to your hosting space.

BigDump works by what is called staggered import of SQL. It breaks down and batches SQL imports into the database, thus maintaining the memory limits of PHP and also getting the job done via a simple web interface.

Getting it to work is very simple.  The script has only 4 parameters you need to configure: the mysql host, username, password and database name.  Once the info is keyed in, upload the BigDump.php (download) to the folder where your big sql file is. Chances are that its already in a .gz file.

Using your browser, open up www.yourserverpath.com/bigdump.php.  It automatically detects sql and .gz files placed in the current directory.  Just hit start import and you’re good to go…
A screenshot is attached below:

There. That does the post… I felt the need to post about the tool as it helped me out of a very cheeky solution yesterday.  And for the beta the developer calls it to be (Version 0.30 beta), the tool is amzingly stable. And it works like an absolute charm.

The developer website is here.

Till the next post…

Chao…

DISCLAIMER: This post is a Shameless self-plug!

On thursday morning, @Gauravonomics posted on twitter saying that he had added my twitter username to the list of must-follow Indian Twitter users and posted a link -http://bit.ly/ktjhS.

This came as quite a surprise for me. Its the first time I’ve appeared on a list anywhere… let alone a list of “Must Follow Indians” See dad!!! All that twittering works!!!  I’m there in that list, right at the bottom…  But hey, someone out there feels I’m worth the trouble and that matters a lot

One amazing thing this linking has caused me is a huge surge in the number of followers! And the best part being all of them being human I hope I do justice to all you people and keep you entertained!

Anyways, I wrote this post here for stating two reasons:

1. I’m in no way a celebrity!!! And by no means a big shot… There are a hundred other big shots in that list and I’m virtually a nobody!
2. And, I love you guys for having chatted up with me all this while on twitter… and more so now-a-days on facebook and posterous also!

Do check the link posted in the first para.  There are a huge bunch of really amazing and wonderful people that are worth catching up with!!!

And, You guys are the real celebrities!!! And Twitter Rocks!!! And oh! I’m @cruismaniac on twitter.

Chao…