lunatechian (lunatech-ian) (Entries tagged as geek)

The Governor is Gone

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:26:18 +0000

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

ops is not a dirty word

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:24:11 +0000

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

Using llm to understand large codebases

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:45:49 +0000

From Martin Fowler :

One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.

There’s a general point here:

Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.

mysql startup debugging tip

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 08 Jun 2011 07:19:03 +0000

If you are not able to start the mysql daemon repeatedly using your linux distribution init scripts and you are ready to pull out your hair in frustration, here is a tip that might help you in finding the problem.

Try running the mysqld_safe from the command line (without using the init scripts). Try running /usr/bin/mysqld_safe -v, which should spit out some debugging information.

If that fails, try calling the mysqld daemon directly from the command line, with the "-v" option . mysqld is usually present under /usr/sbin/mysqld. mysqld can be called with --print-defaults to get the command line options it would be run with.

/usr/sbin/mysqld would have been started with the following arguments: --user=mysql --pid-file=/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.pid ..... --max_binlog_size=100M

Try adding the -v option to these options to get more verbose details. When run from command line, mysqld will not detach from console and will print debugging info that might be useful in finding the cause of the error.

I suggest using 3 terminals to figure out what is going on

one terminal with tail -f /var/log/mysql/mysqld.err
one terminal with tail -f /var/log/messages
one terminal where I ran the mysqld_safe / mysqld command

The init scripts are usually good for day to day work. However, sometimes the init scripts can impede a innodb crash recovery process on a large database. Some init scripts have timeout built into them and they can kill mysql while the innodb is still trying to recover its tables.

Humor in the bookstore

nospam@example.com (moblog) — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 01:00:34 +0000

"Atlas Shrugged" placed in the Humor section in the bookstore. The book on the left is "Undateable" and on the right is "11002 things to be miserable about". I salute the joker who did this - I liked the joke.

Release of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 aka. SuperSunday release

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 01 Apr 2007 17:50:41 +0000

What is PythonOnPlanes ?

PythonOnPlanes is a rapid development framework for Python which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC. Our primary goal is to provide a structured framework that enables Python users at all levels to rapidly develop robust web applications, without any loss to flexibility.

See the Features list below to learn more about the framework.

Release Announcement

The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 , the latest release of the PythonOnPlanes Stable development branch. Since PythonOnPlanes-1.3.06 release we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and mod_snake_oil support for Apache web servers, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes.

Major highlights in the release include Active Scrum Manager 1, Sanity Preserver 3.13 and Lart 22.21. This is also the first release with the PythonOnPlanes Live CD Installer officially debuting on the x86 platform.

Features

The software development world is moving towards AGILE DEVELOPMENT, WEB-2.OH, GURU PRESENCE and LEAN SOFTWARE. Our Framework is geared to support all these features.

"Out of the box" features available

Out of the box PythonOnPlanes supports

Sprint Management
Pair programming using an editor that can be shared by 2 developers. We have named it ALN (Analog Large Notebook)
LoC2LoC to generate a report on each developer's productivity.
Active Suggest DESIGN PATTERN (ASDP). This feature will make your refactoring efforts a snap

Beta Experimental Features

These features are not enabled by default and you have to enable them by editing the configuration file.

Developers' Blog . Each developer in the team is given a blog which he can update. If enabled, PythonOnPlanes will generate a daily report of the developer activity log and post it on the blog too
CutesyErrorMessages-0.0.1-BETA. This replaces stern error messages with very user friendly messages

GET PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 IN NO TIME

Download PythonOnPlanes-1.3.07 from <http://pythononplanes.com/>

fun with about:*

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 24 Jan 2007 11:29:23 +0000

Mozilla family of browser supports a variety about: commands. Today I searched inside the source code to see where they have been implemented and the complete list of the commands it supports. Here is the list Firefox supports. Type these urls in your Firefox browser for countless hours of fun (for very low values of fun).

about:config
about:credits
about:plugins
about:mozilla
about:logo
about:buildconfig
about:license
about:licence
about:about
about:neterror

Link: source code

ingenious use of the HL engine

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 12:03:01 +0000

This looks very obvious in hindsight, but I am sure not many would have thought about this. This guy uses the HL's source engine to produced a model of the Kaufmann House by Frank Lloyd Wright. Using the Source Engine, as opposed to more traditional Architectural Software, allows the use of dynamic lighting and a real-time walkthrough of the scene in high resolution.

Links: the HL map for Kaufmann House and a walk through available here

stuff that sucks

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 11:57:51 +0000

Small list of stuff everyone thinks is cool, but I did not find them worth the price all the electrons had to pay

Second life - seriously people, what is so great about it that you are paying real world money for virtual stuff.
A-list Bloggers - some of them are a bunch of pretentious idiots. Enough said.
Orkut

mysql slave problem

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:55:34 +0000

If you are seeing the line received 0 length packet from server, apparent master shutdown in your mysqld.err file (when your mysql server is a slave), check the server-id of the machines which are replicating from the same server. Most likely, you will find that there are boxes which have the same server-id

Yet another expansion for IRC

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 28 Nov 2006 06:02:57 +0000

Alternative expansions for IRC (as seen in the #phpc@irc.freenode.net)

Tetraboy :  Internet Relax Chat
lig           : Instant Resource chat

emails and IM

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 03:27:23 +0000

Dina points to "email is dead" in reference to teens by Danah Boyd

"Now, let's talk about youth. They have email accounts. They get homework assignments sent there. Xanga tells them that their friends have updated their pages. Attachments (a.k.a. digital Netflix/Amazon packages) get sent there. Companies try to spam them there (a.k.a. junk mail). Sifting through the crap, they might get a neat penpal letter or a friend might have sent them something to read but, by and large, there's not a lot of emotional investment over email.

That said, take away their AIM or MySpace or SMS or whatever their primary form of asynchronous messaging with their friends is and they will start twitching and moan about how you've ruined their life. And you have. Because you've taken away their access to their friends, their access to the thing that matters most to them. It's like me taking away your access to blogs and email and being forced to stay at the office just because you showed up late for work.

There is a difference that I see in the way IM and emails work. On an IM, you get messages from a set of accepted people - who talk about stuff that (mostly) matters to you. On the other hand, your email account is a dropbox for a bunch of uninteresting stuff - mostly spam. However, if you think about it, email has its advantage too - it can be archived, encrypted, signed, personalized, sent across networks (i.e. your gmail.com account can send an email to yahoo.com email id, but you cannot chat with your yahoo! messenger friends from gtalk.

Maybe something equivalent to your IM-buddy list can be done for emails too. You have an email account and that accepts emails only from a whitelisted set of email-ids. Whenever you get an email from a new id, you can either add him to the buddy list or you can report the message as a spam and block the email id. Next step would be to integrate the notifications of new messages into you own desktop and an online presence indicator.

Just some food for thought .

breaking the tv addiction

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 03:25:18 +0000

When I moved to Bangalore, my brother and sister came here with me. However, sometime back both of them got admitted into MBA colleges in Pune and Mumbai respectively and I have been living alone. This has lead to a sort of tv-addiction. I come back from work and switch on the tv and bham! two hours have gone past just like that. Or on a weekend I take my lunch and sit in front of the tv and bham! it is soon dinner time.

To get out of this groove, I unplugged the cable that brings me cable television from the TV. Then I went one step further. I took a bit of string and the cable to one of the window rods. Now when I want to watch the tv, I will have to get up, untie the knot and plug the cable into the tv. Since this is too much work, I will not do it . However, there are some serials (like Simpsons) for which I would do that much work. This will reduce my casual tv surfing to null.

It has been two days now and this experiment has been successful till now.

s9y's xml-rpc interface

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 Nov 2006 20:52:39 +0000

I have been playing with s9y's cml-rpc interface for a few days now. Here is a small article on how you can post to your s9y blog using the command line.

iWoz

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 17:25:28 +0000

If you have not yet read the book iWoz, you have to go out and get this book and read it cover to cover. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. It is an amazing book and I could not put this book down once I started reading it. Woz is an excellent storyteller and his tone of writing is conversational. Every engineer should read this book. It tells the stories of sleepless nights and how much they are worth. It talks about persistence and passion and how they really make a difference. One of the profound statements that Woz makes is " I chose to be happy ". The book ends with Woz's thoughts on being a great engineer:

Don’t waver.
See things in gray-scale.
Work alone.
Trust your instincts.

One surprising thing in the book is the absence of any mention of the EFF, of which Woz was one of the founders.