Today I accidentally gzipped a file and copied it over my original….(I won’t get into how I managed to accomplish this). I hadn’t realized my mistake until I checked in the file into “trunk”.

After a brief moment of panic I had a the original restored, after re-applying my local changes.

Changeset #2301 is the bad file that was committed to trunk erroneously.
Changeset #2300 is the most recent “working version” of the same file.

$ svn merge 2301:2300 ./path/to/file

The arguments are explained better with “svn help merge” display. The command will merge the newer version with the older version for the given file path.

The one problem is that I lost all my local changes on the file. Be sure to check your changes in frequently…if you work on a feature that is not going to be done soon (a day or less)…then perhaps branching will be a good idea so you can retain revision history on files before they are ready for “trunk”.

If you need to save the changes in the file you checked in, prior to reverting (merging) back to the previous version, make a backup of the file that was checked into trunk accidentally.

We will assume you checked in “foo.html” on accident, but still want to keep your changes to the “working copy”:

$ cp foo.html foo.html.new
$ svn merge -r 2301:2300 foo.html
$ svn st
   #=> M foo.html (it is modified -- back to its original state)
$ svn ci -m 'reverting accidental checkin' ./foo.html
$ mv foo.html.new foo.html
$ svn st
   #=> M foo.html (it is modified in your working copy, containing the changes you reverted from trunk)

Now you are back at the original state — a locally modified “foo.html” with the original back in “trunk” where it belongs.

Picking a domain registrar can be a difficult task. I look for ease of use, affordability, and privacy options.

1. NetFirms

   My current favorite, but is very limited. Privacy on .net and .com is free.

2. MyDomains

   A good domain selection tool written in AJAX that will suggest other extensions if the one you want is taken. Also has a suggestion tool that will mix-up the words and find similar words.

3. GoDaddy

   my current registrar, privacy doubles the cost.

4. Yahoo

   was $1.99, but required a renewal for another year. Privacy is extra, and must have valid whois information. Also after transferring my domain, they continued to bill me 2 years in a row.

The simple answer: You must allow the xml file to be cached.

This could be a security risk in the situation where the chart data is sensitive. IE7 still suffers from this problem however.

Not only should the flash file itself “charts.swf” be cached, but the XML file used to generate the file needs to be cached as well.

All you need to do is remove any type of “no-cache” headers that are sent for those two files.

Cache-Control: no-cache #=> remove this line (http 1.1)
Pragma: no-cache #=> remove this line as well (if present - http 1.0)

There is a solution though that can still retain some security: limit the cache time to a few minutes or seconds.

That way if the user logs out from a public terminal, the cache would expire shortly — so the next user of the public terminal should not be able to see the chart data by hitting the back button or viewing the cache on the hard-drive.

Cache-Control: max-age=0

More info can be found about Cache-Control HTTP headers from the official spec.