Month: April 2009

I love my MacBook although it’s a bit slow and has a smaller screen.

Its so cool because it is light on my back when carried around .. not 4+ kilos like my old HP Pavillion

Battery lasts for 4-5 hrs . Brightness of the screen has a direct impact on battery life .

I have converted it into a Desktop by connecting a Apple wired keyboard and Logitech wireless mouse ..

The best part is the 24 inch Dell monitor ..

For all of you who want a Mac desktop which can be carried around easily , this is a good solution ..

Mac Mini is cool and cheaper but its useless without a display.

There is often a misconception that Mac is just about usability and Graphics but the command line (Terminal ) in Mac OS is very similar to Linux. In fact Mac OS to built on top of BSD Unix

I just love it

You can work on any Linux web server over SSH natively.

Putty sucks big time compared to the Mac command line

Recently I was playing with the Linux command line and I was testing out a script which I was interested in.

I ran a wget command and download the file to the server and then extracted it using unzip

But the worst part is that the after the extraction I ran a mv command to move the files to root directory

And the command replaced the sites’ index.php .htaccess and robots.txt

I did not bother for a couple of days until I figure out that the site is not working as the main index file is broken and also google and other search engines started deindexing the site as the URLs were broken and worst part is that robots.txt had a Dissallow * line

Its a Very painful mistake both for me and the site ..

So the lesson learnt is that Never try out new things / change files on a live site without prior testing even if your confident enough ..

Such mistakes can cause irreversible damage to the site and might take days / month to discover ( glad I found in 2 days )

So having a Local , Dev or Staging environment .. even on same server or machine would make a HUGE difference in such calamities

Daily backups were disabled for this site as its small one .. and the weekly backup was taking ages to extract

Only the host Servint saved us from this disaster .. they restored the files needed from a recent backup and we were back on track.

We had about 10hrs of downtime due to this negligence .. Unforgivable !