Met comrie and campoli at the Brookstreet

I bumped into Mike Comrie and Chris Campoli at the Brookstreet Hotel on Sunday, I was there for brunch. It’s surprising how short Comrie is for a hockey player and is considered  one of the gritty guys.

Picasa for Linux

I had been looking for a good photo manager for uBuntu but couldn’t find that one tool that did it all. I completely overlooked Picasa because I didn’t think Google had a Linux version, but they do which runs on wine and therefore looks just like the windows version. Great tool to manage albums and also upload them on picasaweb.

Google Gears for WordPress

Wow it does make a difference, I am running this on uBuntu 8.04 and Firefox 3.0.6. Websites like wordpress that are js and css intensive really benefit from Gears.

Completed Gears of War

The first game I completed on my xbox360 and it is one of the best games i’ve played. The gameplay is unique but once you get practice its awesome !! The background music is kick ass, graphics are phenomenal (back when it was released). I usually leave games unfinished but I completed this one because it kept me involved and entertained. Gears of war 2 has been released and considering how good this game was I am definitely going to try it out.

2009 F1 rule changes

My buddy at work sent me this video, explaining the rule changes for 2009 season. The cars defintely look cleaner but also uglier (looks are subjective) except a few like Ferrari and Williams ..

iPod Shuffle on Ubuntu with Banshee

My girlfriend got me an iPod shuffle on valentine’s day and I did not want to use iTunes (or windows for that matter) for managing it. I am running Ubuntu and use Banshee as my music manager. So I updated to the latest version of Banshee and plugged in my iPod, it was recognized instantly by Ubuntu and Banshee. The iPod status bar is like  iTunes and the rest of the interface is Banshee (example of copying what works well and still keeping its own identity).  Below is a screenshot :

UNION NLSSORT ORDER BY

I came across a bug in our codebase, the end user didn’t see the error message but just a empty result so it wasn’t considered high priority .. But anyways, after looking at the logs the problem was with the NLSSORT and SQL ..

The sql was generated dynamically so it was a bit tricky to debug, lets take a look at the valid sql below :

SELECT a, b FROM x, y UNION SELECT c, d FROM m, n ORDER BY a ASC

This worked fine but the error came up when looking at french content which was sorted using NLSSORT.

SELECT a, b FROM x, y UNION SELECTc, d FROM m, n ORDER BY nlssort(a, ‘nls_sort=french’) ASC

The above SQL is invalid because of the way NLSSORT works .. We need to explicitly select the columns needed from the result of the SQL, like this :

SELECT * FROM (SELECT a, b FROM x, y UNION SELECT c, d FROM m, n) ORDER BY nlssort(a, ‘nls_sort=french’) ASC