Thankfully the WordPress DB was still there but the custom theme and various uploads and other mods (local plugins) are still gone. I’ll have to see if I can drag those out of a backup tonight.

Update: Most (hopefully all) images restored.

Update: I guess DH purged the content because it got hacked? I don’t remember ever being notified about them doing such a thing, unfortunately, so either they never did, or it got lost in my spam folder. Found a rogue wp-content/plugins/SK2/sk2_plugins/doc.php and several other rogue files. The words this sucks massively don’t come even close to describing how it feels to see this now. I’ve configured the WP installs on DH to be upgraded automatically from now on and will try to figure out if this was a problem with SK2, WP, or something else.

As far as I can tell I gained over 10 GB of space. Not sure how to fully explain the difference with the 6-7 GB number that has been mentioned by Apple. Could be that I had a lot of virtual memory files that got cleared up by the reboot, and of course I haven’t put the machine to sleep yet so there’s no sleep-image yet (that’s 2GB right there).

Some casualties:

• MarcoPolo is limping along because it can’t get a list of visible WAPs anymore. No update available yet.
• MiniBatteryLogger crashes upon launch. No update available yet.
• One of the Dashboard widgets, AirTrafficControl, crashes. Probably for the same reason as MarcoPolo having issues. I seldom used this one anyway, so no big loss.
• I was initially unable to mount network shares (remote server runs Debian with the Netatalk package). Apparently the upgrade caused the afp_cleartext_allow setting for com.apple.AppleShareClient to be reset to false (0). Setting it back to true allowed me to mount these network shares once again.
• The 1Password plugin in Firefox worked. Launching the 1Password app itself prompted me to install a beta (which I haven’t done yet).

Applications that do work, as far as I can tell:

• Firefox
• Thunderbird
• iTerm
• Things
• MarsEdit
• NetNewsWire
• DestroyTwitter (AIR based)
• MoneyDance (java based)
• Adium
• VMware Fusion

Little change(s) that I don’t recall seeing mentioned yet:

• The CLI tool top has two new lines for network and disk statistics. Handy! There are more changes than that. Apparently someone had a bit of fun improving/polishing this tool!

Now running the first Time Machine post-upgrade (on a network share, which is why it was important to get that to work again)… the progress bar with a slightly more detailed indication of what it is doing is certainly helpful. Time will tell if future backups will also be faster as promised, because most of the time the network (802.11g or gigabit ethernet, depending on where I am) will be the limiting factor, I’d imagine. First backup’s size is around 8.5GB, so I’m glad I’m doing this one over gigabit ethernet.

For starters, I’ve been a happy NetNewsWire user for several years. It was recommended to me when I started with OS X on a Mac Mini (the original PPC version) when it was still developed independently and had a lite and full (for pay) version. I paid for the full version.

When Brent joined forces with NewsGator, not much changed for me, I just continued to use it and enjoy occasional updates. Later on NewsGator decided to give away the clients for free and just charge for premium services, which I couldn’t exactly complain about.

Then the iPhone came along and Brent released a NNW version for it. After some trial and error I found the best way for me to use it was to sync my feed list to the NewsGator servers, let them deal with the feed-checks (except for a few local-only feeds), have some feeds only visible on the desktop version and the rest on the iPhone version, and push entries to the desktop for later reading or sharing with the clippings feature.

Along comes this blog entry: NewsGator Consumer RSS Reader Product Changes & Google Sync

They’re trying to spin this as an improvement, but so far it’s all downgrades as far as I can tell:

• The new beta release of NNW has ads and a premium version will be created but isn’t available yet.
• Users will have to create an account with Google Reader.
• They are discontinuing their own sync service.
• They are discontinuing support for syncing with mobile.me (and if you want to continue to use a version that does support that, you can never upgrade).
• They give a deadline of one month.
• The iPhone version doesn’t seem to be ready yet, let alone approved or available in the iTunes store.
• The clippings feature will be discontinued because Google Reader doesn’t have something that matches it.
• Google Reader apparently doesn’t support authenticated feeds either, which is something else I need.

What were they thinking?!

1. The client versions are unfinished or not even available and you give us a month to switch?
2. Have these people not dealt with software development before? Testing and bug fixing always takes longer than you want/expect.
3. Have these people not worked with the iPhone App store before? Approval times have been unreliable/unpredictable, you can’t set such deadlines unless your app has actually already been approved.
4. Removing one feature before the replacement (such as it is) has even been finished, polished?

Obviously they’ve been receiving a lot of similarly sounding feedback and it seems they’re scrambling to fix a few of these issues but it really feels like this was an incredibly poorly thought out rush job.

Their blog post started out with You spoke and we listened: In response to customer demand … but I certainly don’t recall ever asking for essential features to be ripped out like this. What are they not telling us?

I like NNW, and I like the openness with which Brent has been developing it but it this is really the direction that they’re going, I guess I’ll have to move on to something else.

Where possible I’ll keep the URLs of the blog the same as they are, so that I won’t confuse news-clients and other aggregators elsewhere (like the LJ feed).

The purpose of this exercise, if there is any, is to reassure visitors that I haven’t abandoned this site and as I move from one service to another, I can easily switch the feeds around. Anyone subscribing to the combined feed would never miss a thing but I’m not suggesting that you should!

I’m glad ABC will repeat tonight’s Lost episode, otherwise I would’ve missed that and would have had to resort to bittorrents or something, and that’s just a PITA.

• To change folder, move or copy messages, with folder name auto-completion.
• To change focus to the folder, thread, or message panes.
• To hide/show the folder pane.

And there is more, like user definable rulesets depending on what sub-folder is in focus and what text matches the sender, recipient or subject of the current message(s).

If you used to use pine or mutt then you will probably appreciate these features.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if you could build one in a container smaller than a matchbox, weighing about as much as a wristwatch. The components, including a transmitter, battery and the sensors you’d need would probably cost less than £50,” he says.

That’s progress.

Stellarium:

Stellarium is a free open source planetarium for your computer. It shows a realistic sky in 3D, just like what you see with the naked eye, binoculars or a telescope. It is being used in planetarium projectors. Just set your coordinates and go.

Looks pretty cool!

Comcast traffic blocking: even more apps, groupware clients affected:

So far, Comcast has been extremely tight-lipped about what’s going on here. The only thing Comcast will admit to is using “the latest technologies to manage our network to provide a quality experience for all Comcast subscribers.” From the look of things, that quality experience doesn’t extend to BitTorrent, Gnutella, and Lotus Notes—and we wouldn’t be surprised to see more applications added to that list.

What was that about net neutrality again? Ugh.

The Evolution of Yahoo! 360:

On Yahoo!’s Q3 Earnings call today, it was announced that we intend to transition Yahoo! 360 to a more integrated Yahoo! experience in early 2008. I want to provide additional information on this news and assure you that we will minimize any disruption to you and our valued Yahoo! 360 community. I also want to assure you that you can still use all the features of Yahoo! 360 until this transition takes place in early 2008.

Translation: We’re shutting down Y!360. This was posted there a week ago and only today I hear about it through TechCrunch. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there, did it really happen? Or something like that.

Then in the evening I got an email, out of the blue, from a former colleague (we worked at the same company about 8 years ago), saying he had come across my name in a TUAW article, where Erica mentioned the rumour and thanked me for passing it on.

Oh, and that portal is actually live now, by the way.

The cashier tried to speak to him but got angry when Goodnight didn’t respond, Goodnight told police. The cashier threw Goodnight’s change at him, scattering it on the floor.

As Goodnight picked it up, the cashier hit him in the side of the head with the crowbar, Goodnight said.

The Inflation Calculator may seem useful but mostly to fuel bogus arguments, I think. After all, your $200 CD player from 1990 didn’t cost $313 in 2006, did it?

Duty Cycle Calculator is a slightly different calculator, one that makes it easier to estimate how much it costs you to leave the television on, leave light bulbs on over night.