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Yahoo! Open Hack is back…

June 15, 2011
Category: Events, Yahoo Open Hack India 2011 | Leave a Comment

Just announced:  Yahoo! Open Hack India is back, on July 30-31, 2011,  Bangalore.

Its going to be 2 days of hacking and lots of fun..

#openhackindia2011  yahoo-open-hack-india-2011

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Tech.Ed India 2011, Bangalore

March 29, 2011
Category: Events, Tech.Ed 2011, Xbox 360 | Leave a Comment

I attended Tech.Ed India 2011 last week in Bangalore, It was a wonderful experience.

 Tech.Ed is the largest technological event organized in India, it lasts for 3-5 days, covers latest and up-coming tools & technologies.

This year’s Tech.Ed was held between 23-25 Mar, at the Lalit Ashok Hotel. It included keynote speeches by top executives, technical talks by experts, hands-on lab sessions and a product display expo.

 It was a huge event, there were 3147 participants, 107 speakers, 136 tech sessions, 141750 live attendants, 8 conference halls and 2 labs. And journalists, reporters, camera crew etc..

 Some of the top executives at the event were:

There were celebrities too, like Anil Kumble and Gaurav Kapoor. 

 The event was covered online by Times of India, Facebook and MSN.

 I attended as a developer. Developer sessions covered the following topics:

(I am not going into technical details in this post.. will cover them in another post.. )

 There was a product display expo too. All the latest and soon-to-be released products were kept on display. The main attraction at the expo was Kinect and Surface. Kinect’s stall was always over crowded.

Intel’s parallel studio, MS Azure, Intel AppUp and Capgemini’s stalls were also interesting.

 And as always, there was lot of networking, socializing, great food, goodies, music, DJ and loads of fun..    Overall it was a fantastic experience. I would encourage all to attend it next time.

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Nokia and Microsoft: Whats cooking ?

February 9, 2011
Category: Mobile, Windows Phone 7 | Leave a Comment

I’ve been hearing a lot about Nokia and Microsoft recently. Last week i read an open letter to the CEOs that talked about a possible ‘Team up’. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop, a former Microsoft executive, said last week that Nokia “must build, catalyze and/or join a competitive ecosystem” to adapt to a faster-moving industry. His comments fanned speculations that Nokia may adopt Windows Phone 7 or Android for its devices. [more on Times of India] 

Today Engadget published a 1300 word memo written by Elop to Nokia’s employees. [Engadget.com: Stephen Elop's memo to Nokia employees]
Some highlights:

So, now everybody is waiting for the big announcement, whatever it is, its going to be interesting  It’ll either be Android or Windows Phone 7, lets see..

But one thing is very clear: Symbian and MeeGo are going to die it seems..  Symbian was no 1 in terms of units sold, but it was never a great platform that iOS, Android, or WinP7 is. Developing on Symbian has been a pain and still continues to be same.

This whole thing also reminds me of recent sequence of events, like Microsoft’s strained relationships with Intel because of Intel inclination towards MeeGo and MS’s refusal to support Atom processors for Windows Phone 7.

Waiting for feb 11….

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Converting from MyISAM to InnoDB in MySQL

November 10, 2010
Category: Database, MySQL | 1 Comment

MySQL logoRecently i had to convert a MySQL database from the MyISAM engine to the InnoDB engine. Although it looks like a complicated job but it is easier than you think.

First, some background information

One of the distinguishing features of MySQL is its ability to support multiple storage engines. Since each storage engine comes with its own set of features, strengths, and tradeoffs, the ability to use/switch between engines gives flexibility to the database designer.

InnoDB

According to MySQL 5.5 reference manual, the InnoDB is a transaction-safe (ACID compliant) storage engine that has commit, rollback, and crash-recovery capabilities. InnoDB stores user data in clustered indexes to reduce I/O for common queries based on primary keys.
InnoDB is the default storage engine as of MySQL 5.5.5.

MyISAM

 According to MySQL 5.5 reference manual, MyISAM is the storage engine that is used the most in Web, data warehousing, and other application environments. MyISAM is supported in all MySQL configurations, and is the default storage engine prior to MySQL 5.5.5.

Why convert?

Although MyISAM has its own set of advantages over InnoDB, but one of the most common reasons to convert from MyISAM to InnoDB is its lack of advanced features like transactions, rollbacks, and row-level locking.  Another common reason is to maintain compatibility with existing databases in your application.

Converting from MyISAM engine to InnoDB engine in MySQL

Using ALTER TABLE

One way of doing this conversion is to use ALTER TABLE to change the database engine.

ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE = InnoDB;

If the table is large, this may take some time and will consume fair amounts of CPU. You can speed up things slightly by arranging the database before converting it so that the primary key column is in order.

ALTER TABLE tablename ORDER BY 'primary_key_column';

So, to sum it up, here is what you do:

ALTER TABLE tablename ORDER BY 'primary_key_column';
ALTER TABLE table_name ENGINE = InnoDB;

Using mysqldump

Another quick-hack-hassle-free way of doing this is to dump the database into a .sql file, then edit the file and change the engine to InnoDB, then restore the dump to a database.

Use mysqldump to dump the MyISAM database:

mysqldump --user=username --password=password --add-drop-table --databases MyISAMdb >MyISAMdb.sql

This will create a dump named MyISAMdb.sql. Open this file in a text editor, look for table definitions and change the table type to InnoDB.

Example:

CREATE TABLE table_name (
E_ID int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
FIRST_NAME varchar(50) default NULL,
LAST_NAME varchar(50) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (E_ID)
) TYPE=ISAM;

Change TYPE=ISAM to TYPE=INNODB

CREATE TABLE table_name (
E_ID int(10) unsigned NOT NULL auto_increment,
FIRST_NAME varchar(50) default NULL,
LAST_NAME varchar(50) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (E_ID)
) TYPE=INNODB;

Now restore the dump

To increase the speed of restoring, add the SQL command SET AUTOCOMMIT = 0; to the beginning of the dump file, and add the COMMIT; command to the end. When Autocommit is on every insert statement is executed and written on the disk before starting with the next statement. This adds extra disk IO and slows down the whole process.

You can also disable keys before restoring and re-enable it again after the restoration. This will also speed up the process.

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SEO and best practices for WordPress Permalinks

February 10, 2009
Category: SEO, WordPress | 20 Comments

Permalinks are the permanent links to content on your wordpress blog. Other bloggers or websites will use the permalinks to point to your post. Permalinks are also very usefull if you want to be able to share your posts because the URL to each post remains permanent.

WordPress comes with a set of default permalinks and also allows you to create your own structure of permalinks. This gives rise to the question:

The default structure

To start with, the default permalink structure that comes with wordpress is not very good in terms of SEO.  No wonder wordpress calls it the “Ugly” permalink. It looks like:

http://yoursite.com/?p=post_id

Although this looks simple but it can get really confusing with long URLs  and this is difficult to remember.  From SEO point of view this URL is not good because it does not tell anything about the page content.

The PATHINFO

 Another slightly better way of creating permalinks is by using the actual path. PATHINFO permalinks looks like:

http://yoursite.com/index.php/yyyy/mm/dd/post-name/

Note the “index.php” in the URL, typical of PATHINFO permalinks. Although PATHINFO permalinks are better than the default structure but still they are not very SEO friendly. Most bloggers prefer to use a structure called the pretty permalinks discussed below.

Pretty permalinks

In pretty permalinks you can create your own permalink using structure tags. Most common form are:

http://yoursite.com/category/post-name/
http://yoursite.com/year/month/day/post-name

This gives lot of flexibility but also creates concerns about SEO. So keeping SEO in mind what is the best way to create a permalink?

SEO and Permalinks

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