Lijeesh Blog

I was taking some photos while traveling to Trivandrum, from Sharjah Airport. It was a morning and view was amazing. It feels like moving from beauty of desert browns to the real greenery of Kerala. In middle it is blue see. Here is the photos

Today I added WPTouch plugin on my Blog, a popular iPhone theme for wordpress. It was just 2 minutes of job to make my site in this amazing theme. Following are some screen captures of my blog in iPhone now.

This weekend we went to Hatta mountains, A tourist place near to Oman and Dubai boarder. It was a pleasure trip through the Desert with all the great experience of a Desert safari and site seeing.

We started from Al Ghurair city, A shopping place in Deira, Dubai. It was 2 land cruiser cars. We went different places in Hatta, visited the natural swimming pools over the desert, mountain lakes, multicolor mountains and enjoyed the thrill of Desert safari. Here is some of the photos I took.

Imthiaz has posted a video out the photos he took on his blog post

This January I am completing Four years of my life in Flip Media – a company that works like my passions. This is like my second family with a lot of amazing people from around the globe.

I was at Flip Trivandrum – Flip Media’s Tech hub, in the beginning of my career. The late night hard works and Fun life we gone through, was a great experience in my life there. 2 years before I moved to Flip Headquarters at Dubai, to join the core products team.

Most of the time I was working on development of Navisite CMS and its predecessor Chameleon.Each and every day we were going through some state of the art new technologies and researching on the best possible solution for our clients.

Working with the amazing people in my team – Shuja, Imthi, Dinesh Lalvani and Yogesh, is one of the best experiences I am having in Flip. The stuff that changing day by day, Modern development procedures, constant flow of new ideas and concepts and “Have fun” kind of work life in Flip, made me love this company more and more.

In Flip everyone is known with their own special abilities, most of them has their popular blogs, twitter accounts, music career, cooking, traveling etc & etc .We share them and enjoy it here.

I have a lot of things to say about my company, but I can’t add all of them here. But you may experience it by joining Flip by checking any suitable positions opened at our Careers web page.

Sphinx is one of the high performance, free open-source full-text search engine with rich feature list. Recently I was experimenting, on this tool for developing a search platform, for big and complex databases. It is very interesting, and easy to setup a developing environment in Mac OS. Sometimes the compiling using the method specified in the documents of sphinx will not work that easily. I found it is super easy, installation using mac ports. Here is how I done it.

Installing Sphinx using Mac Ports

1. If you don’t have mac-ports installed, Install mac-ports downloading from their site.
2. If you not installed X code tools from Mac OS X, DVD install it – need this for compiling sources in a UNIX development way.
3. Now install sphinx using following command.

sudo port install sphinx

This will compile and install everything required for making the sphinx work.

Now sphinx is installed and we have ‘indexer’, ’search’ utilities and a ’searchd’ daemon.

Basic way to use Sphinx

Sphinx comes with a sample sql file to setup a sql-query based search (Simplest configuration). This SQL and a sample Sphinx sample configuration is located at

/opt/local/etc/sphinx

. Try following steps to make it running with your configuration
1. Create a directory some where in your system. In my case I created at desktop named ’sphinx’.

 cd ~/Desktop/sphinx 

2. Create ‘test’ database in your mysql server and import the Sample SQL.
2. copy sphinx.conf from sample /opt/local/etc/sphinx to this folder.

cp /opt/local/etc/sphinx/sphinx.conf.dist sphinx.conf

3. Now edit sphinx.conf and change the database Params and paths. In my case it looks like following. Edit the queries related to your custom databases to make it yours.

source src1
{
	type					= mysql

	sql_host				= localhost
	sql_user				= test
	sql_pass				=
	sql_db					= test
	sql_port				= 3306	# optional, default is 3306

	sql_query				= \
		SELECT id, group_id, UNIX_TIMESTAMP(date_added) AS date_added, title, content \
		FROM documents

	sql_attr_uint			= group_id
	sql_attr_timestamp		= date_added

	sql_query_info			= SELECT * FROM documents WHERE id=$id
}

index test1
{
	source					= src1
	path					= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/data/test1
	docinfo					= extern
	charset_type			= sbcs
}

indexer
{
	mem_limit				= 32M
}

searchd
{
	port					= 3312
	log						= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/searchd.log
	query_log				= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/query.log
	read_timeout			= 5
	max_children			= 30
	pid_file				= /Users/lijeeshms/Desktop/sphinx/log/searchd.pid
	max_matches				= 1000
	seamless_rotate			= 1
	preopen_indexes			= 0
	unlink_old				= 1
}

4. Create 2 folders, ‘data’ and ‘log’ inside the ’sphinx’ directory.

mkdir data log

5. Now run the indexer with the configuration we created from the test directory.

indexer --config /<path-to>/sphinx.conf --all

This will create the indexes based the confutation.
6. Now run the Sphinx search daemon using the same command.

searchd --config /<path-to>/sphinx.conf 

If everything is fine, sphinx search engine will start with the above index configurations. If any error happens you need to check the configuration for any errors.
7. You can now test a search with ’search’ command from terminal.

search <query> 

The results will be shown.

Once all the above is working, it will be easy to use any of the client libraries for PHP (or PECL), Python, Ruby or Java to search from a web or desktop based environments. Sphinx provides options to run multiple indexes and search on selected indexes, thus allowing one daemon to use with multiple type of searches.
Sphinx can index data from an XMLPipe, this is best for creating configurable search indexes from very dynamic datasources like a CMS or CRM.