Entries this day: designing-a-prevnext-class dream-karaoke-drink out-with-lin-and-nonie

designing a prevnext class

##18:28 Friday 10 May 2013

Today at work I had a brilliant idea to have prev(ious) and next buttons work as expected.

The blog entry index allows people to view e.g. only this category or that category or just this month or just last years entries.

Once they click the link to view a specific entry, the site has no idea what order nor what subset of entries was in the index. I've solved the problem in the past by storing in lawnchair a list of all the ids, in order, resulting from the search. With 60,000 entries, that makes the index page slow because all that data is being searched and processes in the background.

While looking for a faster way to solve it, I realized an ingenious solution!! I'll store in lawnchair the query and then just run the query with appropriate OFFSET and LIMIT to get the prev/next entries!

I got the query saved in lawnchair and was just about to AJAX the query to the server upon arrival at the blog entry page and I realized, OH CRAP!! What an excellent system for running arbitrary SQL on the server!!!

(For the lay reader, this is a Very Bad Thing)

Crap.

So I scrapped my code and went back to my flexible A4 sized drawing board.

I dug around on SO a bit looking for insight and pretty much decided there's no way to do it without storing the query. So the prevnext table was born.

Essentially, it's user_id and query_key as a grouped index, then a query as the query.

I've got a class that talks to that table, and I think I'm pretty close to having it work. If it does work as planned, I'll probably port it to the system with 60,000 entries and make its index wonderfully faster.

I probably would have finished it today, but it's Friday night and Lin and I are going out with Nonie in Tokyo.

dream karaoke drink

##07:42 Friday 10 May 2013

7:37am Friday 10 May 2013

_In karaoke, singing "The Last Blueberry" by Anikiko, I wanted to fast forward to the good part so quickly consumed the drink from the song carton. It seemed a bit strange, but the guy with me agreed it was the fastest way to fast-forward the song: fast-drink the drink!_

out with lin and nonie

##22:25 Friday 10 May 2013

5:25pm Sunday 12 May 2013

Lin met Nonie at 6pm in Tokyo, where I joined them around 6:30pm. We hadn't seen her for maybe a year since we saw her at Travis and Yumi's hike + overnight at some cabins somewhere.

Got to hear fun + weird stories about guests at Nonie's guest house in Chiba. She's invited us to live there while she visits Europe this summer! Interesting idea but not part of our reality yet; Lin's applying for a job that would preclude living in Chiba, but we'll see!

Ate surprisingly-expensive cheese and pizza at an Italian place, then not-surprisingly-expensive drinks at Starbucks, then inexpensive yummy ramen at another shop.