The Blog

[ratings]
I have no idea who these guys are but they’re brilliant.

I almost screwed this here blog up an hour ago. Imagine, you could have lost salambazar, the blog that you adore, forever! Well, maybe I’m dramatizing it a bit too much, but it was a bit scary. I clicked on the Upgrade button and went about my business. I’ve done that many times before. But this time, absentmindedly, I decided to log into WP Admin while it was upgrading the database tables. A very bad idea, to say the least. I got a weird and peculiarly cryptic error message which I couldn’t be bothered to read in detail at the time. Next thing I know, I am seeing all kinds of gobbledygook when I browse to the blog. No amount of praying, begging or hacking would work. I even started talking myself into believing that maybe it was for the better…maybe its ok to lose 5 years worth of what I consider to be a blogging masterpiece. To make the long story short, a half hour later, I was manually executing SQL scripts on the phpMysql interface for each missing or malformed table, dropping it, then recreating it and populating it. Finally, everything was working as it should. Lucky as heck I had a recent backup of the entire blog database on hand to do this from. I love the WP-DB-Backup Plugin. The default export functionality that comes with WP for XML backup never seems to work for me. Phew! Tattoo this to your arms folks: back it up. I suspect my webhost has a backup too, but how embarassing to ask for it and let them laugh in the background.

Update:

Great backup options offered by the WP-DB-Backup plugin. Check out the screenshot below…

I can’t believe I hadn’t heard of Flock until when I was reading an article in technology magazine today. Apparently it has been around for sometime and boasts itself (and rightfully so) as the Social Networking browser of choice. Flock packs Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube and a lot of other Social web sites and services into what seems to me to be a pretty light weight browser and an instant winner for me The first impression is really good but I have to use it for a few days before I can write a useful review on it.

The IT Conversations Network featured this amazing key note speech by this California VC. I simply loved it. Even if you’re not a techie type, give this a chance. You’ll enjoy the insight and the humor. The Art of Innovation.

Old Karachi

Originally uploaded by Raja Islam

Just a nice shot capturing the reminders of the good old days. I have been in buildings like this in Karachi…absolutely a surreal experience: old styled stairways, dark interiors and an aura of the old age.