Author: Varun Krish

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 !

Varun Gandhi and the controversy surrounding him is making my name famous LOL !

I m seeing a downtrend in the no of people asking me repeat my name wherever I talk be it over phone or in person.

Varun has become very popular over the last few days/

But I was upset when I saw the ticker on a famous news channel ” Varun goes to Jail “

Time for a name change ?

After SearchCamp.in, the Facebook Developer Garage is all set to happen in Chennai.

Well its the first Facebook Developer Garage to happen in the city.

TKF or Knowledge Foundation in which organizes all the great events in the city including SearchCamp, BlogCamp, WikiCamp and MoMo is organizing this workshop along with Social Media

Venue:

Photon Infotech Private Limited
(Right next to Arvind Theatre)
No. 2/102, Photon Towers,
Old Mahabalipuram Road,
Karapakkam, Chennai – 600096

Venue map
Photon on Google map

When
Sunday, the 15th March 2009. 2.00 p.m. – 5.00 p.m.

Hosted by
The Knowledge Foundation, Social Media Group & Business Blogging

Head over to the event page to register

I am back in India after spending a good time in Uncle Sam’s Country

It was a great place indeed,  It was fun meeting new people and being there.

But home is home and India is the best place whatever it is!

I am currently traveling in sub-urban Chicago on the metro.

I have been outside the country for nearly 6 months now.

Life has changed a lot and things are moving really fast and I hardly blog here. You can find me on twitter varunkrish

I have also been doing a lot of work for FoneArena

I just got my hands on the first Google Android phone the G1

I have not been blogging for quite some time now. Blame a hectic work schedule, cooking and too much partying !

Another reason for me to stop blogging is that I have become really too lazy to login to my blog and write a new post and publish it.

I prefer twitter these days.

The past few months have been really exciting for me personally.

A lot of travel, working with new technologies, ROR , PHP .. worked on a Facebook App and an iPhone app.

Right now I am using JQuery working on a site using OOJS and also working on performance tuning for a couple of sites.

I am at the Chicago Linux meetup and I m seeing an interesting app being discussed.

Its an application launcher for Linux GNOME called Do.

Its something similar to QuickSilver for mac osx which I have been trying for the past 1 week.

Get it on your Linux box

Time to setup a dedicated Linux box at Home

I am indeed surprised at this move by Google to launch a browser product.

Google Chrome was released a few hours back for download.

Google did it first with Google Talk, reinvented IM. Some people felt it lacked a lot of stuff, but for me Gtalk is my primary IM now .. its just simple and clutter free..

Now Google is doing the same thing with Chrome. The main idea behind the product is to simplify Web Browsing and they have done a great job , the initial version of the product looks impressive.

I am a Web Developer and I was impressed when I saw that development tools came bundled . Also there’s a fancy task manager which I have not seen in any browser so far.

Change is inevitable

I was using Perforce for the past 3 months and now I have to use Subversion at my new project

I have used Subversion in the past but I started liking perforce due to its ease of use and simple commands

Only pain was having to do a p4 edit on each file before editing it

I stumbled upon this nice article about Perforce to Subversion migration

Although the article is mainly about migrating code , it also talks about equivalent commands in perforce and subversion.

I found it really useful

Also theregister had a nice comparison

Version Control was not a big thing as long as I was doing freelance development. But once I got into the process of working with a team I realised that a team programming without source control is useless.

I started using CVS with the WinCVS client. Then moved on to use Subversion with the TortoiseSVN client.

I spent most of the last 2 years in Microsoft world, so Team Foundation Server was the system.

Right now I’m on Ruby and we are using Perforce which is actually damn good!

The user interface is damn simple although it might look a bit funny.

It’s one of the systems used by development teams which work on various platforms. I can check in code from my Windows box and get latest on my Linux box / server. This is really cool !!