Flip Media Logo

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.

Flip Media CMS - Navisite logo

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.

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.

Mumbaikar iPhone application by Flip Media

Wow…We did it. After months of hard work, our first iPhone application, Mumbaikar, is now available at the Apple app store. The application is an interactive map with everything and anything you need to know about Mumbai, from geotagged restaurant, blogs and store listings to events and neighborhood crime alerts

on Blog Post at Flip Website .

You can install the application from this link

Here is the simple steps on how to do it.
1. Install ‘Picasa Image Express for Wordpress’ plug-in – download from plugin site. Only limitation of this plugin is, it cannot show the unlisted albums from picassa.

2. Install ‘Light box Plus’ plug-in from http://www.23systems.net/plugins/lightbox-plus/. You can do more interesting stuff with this.

Some of my configuration you can see from following screens

Here is a video of the full event

I find out Shiretoko recently it works amazing,

Shiretoko Firefox Mac

Download it here

Porticus for Macports

Setting up Porticus for the first time – snow leapard

1) Install macports, downloading the dmg – checkout Macports website for updates

2) Install Porticus downloading from  Porticus website

That is it. It is realy usefull tool to try free software on mac. Feels like one of the software package management GUIs Linux users enjoy