April 2019

Lessons From The Website Downtime

April 27, 2019 Happenings

I had a harrowing time during my website downtime which took me by complete surprise. I was trying to understand the issue which was causing the problem and following up with the tech support team was nothing short of a nightmare. Here’s what I learned from my experience.

I wrote about my experience during the server downtime. It seems like a lot of time has passed and I have aged faster. But thank god, it’s just been three days, although the server issues don’t seem likely to be ending anytime soon. Hours after I wrote a long post on yesterday, the website went down again. Honestly, I had reached the end of my daily quota of patience and I wasn’t sure what support was the technical staff at Bluehost offering me. Last night, a scan was initiated and a malware infection was discovered on the server. A load of malicious .php files were scrupulously dumped in different folders on my site and I was tasked with deleting the garbage. To make the matters worse, the agents had duplicated the root folder so there were duplicates of the infected files that I had to remove. Bravo!

The site went down in less than 4 hours of cleaning the server of the malware infection, then rescanning it for any infected files — I’m still not told how the files got infected though I would see myself just staring at a white browser screen with every refresh. So instead of getting on the live chat and cutting corners, I spent the next hour on the phone speaking with the technical support. He found some plugins that were interfering with the functioning of the site. I had heard that statement so many times in the past 24 hours, but he deactivated the entire list of plugins, that resulted in my site going down again and the white screen reappeared. Then he brought the site up through writing some code in the .htaccess file but I could only see the textual content, not the beautiful theme that I had painstakingly worked on for the past many years. He advised me to activate one plugin at a time and check the website to see if it comes online, to find out the irksome plugin. That exercise took me another hour, in between all the other stuff that I had to complete before the day ended. With the instigating piece of code out of the way the site went up but only the textual version.

I went on the live chat again with the tech-support. This time my site was up and I wanted the theme back, and trust me, I was completely spent by now. I don’t know why but the agents had reinstalled WordPress, just too many times. I later found copies of older versions of zipped WordPress installation files in the File Manager suggesting, the tech support team had tried every trick in the manual to bring the site up. It was closer to midnight, yesterday when the website came up finally after a gruelling ordeal which lasted 3 days! Importantly, the website was online overnight, this hasn’t happened in more than 3 days and that was good news.

There are some positive lessons I learned from this morbid experience which I wanted to document.

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Site Downtime, Some Anxious Moments!

April 25, 2019 Happenings

Much to my dismay, I woke up yesterday to a horrifying situation that my site was down for almost 12 hours. To add to the remorse, for the past few days, I had been thinking of taking backups of my website content, mainly due to the lethal scars left from my past failures still weighing heavily on my brain. So, when the site wouldn’t load in the famed browsers I panicked and thought this was the end of it! My laxity had proved fatal and drowned me in immense pain and suffering yet again, I thought to myself. After all, this website has been my go-to place and a safe haven, for airing my views and opinions, for nearly 20 years.

Must say, yesterday’s was a rare occasion when the website wasn’t loading at all and I immediately counted a few possibilities. Technically, the website wouldn’t download if the server had crashed or had been hacked by overzealous techies — the latter seemed to be a rare possibility considering Bluehost’s market reputation, even being highly recommended by WordPress.org, though one could never stay so confident, then, by all means, I’d have lost access to the dashboard. And frankly, unless if I had left a security loophole in the platform or a plugin unattended by not installing the updates it’d be hard to blame the hosting service. Fearing the worst I attempted to log in, and to my delight, I realized that the dashboard was truly accessible. In short, it meant the server was in pristine health and most crucially, my content was safe. Through my observations, I clearly understood it was a technical matter which could only be handled by the technical staff of Bluehost, so I got on a live chat with one of them.

Here’s where I believe Bluehost could improve its reputation of being a world-class WordPress platform further by serving its customers expeditiously, the response time of its technical support is sluggish and excruciatingly long. To give an instance, I spent half of my productive day juggling between work and household until a resolution could be found. For instance, it was a fairly simple issue at the beginning which got much complex, but I wouldn’t get any reply from the other end, or the representative would keep me on hold for “3-5 minutes” and disappear, which would be annoying. After spending more than 2 hours with the member of the technical staff I had to leave the chat because there were other things begging for my attention on my to-do list. As I was later informed, everything boiled down to a disused Lightbox plugin which the representative promptly deleted on my request. On a side-note, that’s the biggest advantage and a native problem with WordPress plugins that inserts code at places you may not be aware as a non-programmer, that breaks the website apart. But the Bluehost representative did something else which I had no clue until I discovered that the site wouldn’t come online even after 2-3 hours.

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India’s Lack Of A Batting Specialist

April 21, 2019 Happenings

The BCCI just announced a provisional team for India that would take on the best teams in the hope of lifting the 2019 ICC Cricket World Cup, and I feel, they have picked a decent team. Unlike the last time when we won, the matches this time are in a round-robin format so I’m expecting some fierce contest. There were no surprises as far as the composition of the team was concerned but the batting lacks depth. I feel they’re short of a specialist batsman in the English conditions which would mean there’s too much reliance on the middle order, half-bat-half-bowler batsmen like Jadhav, Shankar and Jadeja. Sparing a thought for Vijay Shankar who has been pushed into the spotlight for no reason, but his lack of ODI experience just pales in comparison to Ambati Rayudu for the big stage matches such as the world cup. I think Rayudu’s selection would have made a huge difference when you consider the vulnerability of opening pairs to the seaming balls in the English conditions. And it’s still a possibility because this is just a provisional team.

Let us look into the details. Not only have England changed as a world-class team but if you look at how the pitches in England have behaved since the last world cup and analyze them broadly from the perspective of the home series you’ll realize the gravity of what I’m talking. It’s noteworthy, that there have been no less than 20 occasions in the English conditions where teams have posted 300+ totals, most significantly, 3 of those high-scoring ODIs have been 400+ totals. Under the context, I am baffled with the logic of going to an important tournament with a batsman short. Rayudu could have provided that extra leeway in the middle-order whilst chasing 300+ scores or when the batsmen at the top are struggling. His average of 47.05 in 55 ODIs with three 100s and a strike rate of 79.04 makes him an indispensable no.4 of the Indian cricket team. Conversely, India’s dependency on all-rounders is a worthy gamble given the fact that the England middle-order has promoted the likes of Jason Roy, Jonny Bairstow, Jos Buttler, and Moeen Ali. It remains to be seen how our all-rounders manage the world cup expectations playing on their merits. I will be tuned in!

India Batting Depth Analysis
India’s Batting Depth Analysis for the 2019 World Cup

Starbucks Reserve @ Toronto

April 5, 2019 Happenings
Starbucks Reserve Logo
The ‘Star’ is discomforting!

Starbucks has transformed from serving caffeine into leveraging technology to deliver a delicious cup of coffee. It’s innovating the experience of coffee consumption by combining its products with an imaginative menu of beverages and using a well-integrated service design strategy with retail design in designing stores and more. For instance, not so long ago, they ventured with an innovative concept of giving coffee connoisseurs a peek into some of the finest javas on the planet in a relaxed, informal ambience, and they rightly named this experience ‘Reserve’ for the peculiar seating arrangement that resembles…you guessed it, a local bar! The first outlet opened in Seattle in 2017 and here’s what Starbucks has to say on its exclusive ‘Reserve’ experience:

Starbucks Reserve is a selection of the rarest, most extraordinary coffees Starbucks has to offer. It’s where we push our own boundaries of craft, developing a unique roast for each individual lot before experimenting with coffee as an art form—brewing, aging [sic], infusing and blending it into imaginative and often surprising creations. Through our Roasteries and bars, we share our discoveries and the enjoyment of exceptional coffee with the world.

As I said, it’s targetted at the coffee connoisseurs, so despite the excitement, I waited and finally got the opportunity today to visit the first Starbucks Reserve in Toronto. I had passed by this area at ‘Shops at Don Mills’ a couple of times, having read that there are only a handful of these premium Starbucks coffee locations around the world, I am lucky to experience the aura personally. There’s another retail concept on the same lines which is called the ‘Reserve Roastery’ that provides an immersive coffee experience to the consumers complete with freshly roasted coffee beans and a rare set of coffees from beans that are aged in whisky barrels (whoa!). I am longing to be there sometime in the future to wallow in the aroma of roasting java. (Tokyo, perhaps?)

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When Google Announced Its Email Service

April 3, 2019 Happenings
Gmail Email

Everyone’s beloved email service turned 15 years old, and I have so little recollection of the launch of a new email service on April 1, 2004, except in that fledgeling Web 2.0 era, I was very excited about owning a piece of this Google innovation with an unimaginative name ‘Gmail’ (a portmanteau of ‘Google’ and ‘Email’). It also caught my fancy because of the staggering revelation that it offered, to my astonishment, an astounding 1GB inbox space!

Email Wars

Just imagine, in times of the domineering Hotmail and Yahoo defining the email experience in the market — by the way, you ought to have owned at least one email account with either of the two to keep up with the Joneses, the norms of those times provided the free user with a humble 100-200 MB mailbox which was considered good enough in the absence of any big market player, until Google broke the ground with Gmail they would delete the emails to free up space if you can believe me. In fact, so magnificent was the announcement of its 1GB space the tag line literally said, “never delete another email”. Yeah, that set the tongues wagging, the news spread soon, and there was a palpable rush on the Internet forums to get hold of a free invite to the beta version. Once you got an invite and the account subsequently you joined an exclusive club of honchos decisively controlling the distribution of invites to the hoi polloi. If I am not mistaken, you got about 15 free invites to hand out to friends and family. That Gmail ID is today worth its weight in gold and is your access code to the vibrant Google ecosystem.

But that invite-only element to secure a free Gmail account put a dampener on my enthusiasm, to be honest, least of all because, I had to wait until June of 2004 before I got a Gmail ID which really felt like ages when everybody else was trumpeting their prized catch. It was a friend’s generosity on a once lively designer’s forum called SurfUnion, (of which I was a proud co-founder and admin) who got me an invite and I entered the party as well. I also sent him a ‘thank you’ note, that was my first email from the fresh account. Oh, and back in the day, a free Gmail account offered a generous 1GB of space with a humongous attachment option to send. It was just mind-blowing, if you considered that one could only dream of that kind of luxury on a subscription account. Besides the point but Gmail usurped the competition in one swift blow, gaining millions of users within a matter of months after its launch. Amongst other things, it also featured better spam fighting capabilities, a clean user-interface (there were ‘Labels’ like tags and not ‘Folders’!), Gmail Labs to extend its functions (it was awesome), aside from Google’s iconic search engine potentiality to find your emails from the heap quickly. Albeit, all this did not come “free”, as it were since there were targetted ads in the mailbox raising concerns about email privacy shortly. In a series of improvements later Gmail introduced tabs in a bid to improve the email experience and I promptly posted my thoughts in a design case on tha feature.

The Next 15 Years

So that so-called “generous” 1GB space has now become 15GB and shared with Google Drive and the other apps but the Gen Zs have jumped on messaging apps. Email is passé for some nowadays, but Gmail made emailing a quiet and cool revolution for a generation that was struggling with a lack of good email platforms. Picture this, will ya? No matter what, you had no choice but to delete emails as soon as filled up the mailbox, you could not send large attachments or chat with your contacts while in the mailbox. Gmail freed my generation from that tyranny and, in fact, made emailing an informal yet refreshing activity for the pre-Facebook/WhatsApp era. Today, one might check Microsoft Office documents or PDF files without leaving the mailbox on Gmail, no need to own the software anymore.

Gosh! It’s been a magical journey the last 15 years, they just zoomed by, and I am eagerly looking forward to the next 15. Who knows, maybe we could have a Gmail with an invisible UI, with voice capabilities reading text aloud with help from a smart speaker with a human-like expression. Or maybe email would just vanish by 2034 and be replaced by VR so you’re talking to one another from across the globe. Whatever the case, and wherever technology takes us next, fasten your seat-belts for it’s going to be an exciting ride no questions!