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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.

First some comparisons:

Original Mini, first generation model from January 2005:

• 512MB RAM PC-2700 DDR SDRAM
• 40GB disk
• 1.25 GHz PowerPC G4
• ATI Radeon 9200 GPU with 32MB VRAM
• Two USB ports
• Firewire 400 port
• 10/100 Mbit ethernet
• 1 modem (remember those?) port
• Hard disk and CD/DVD drive both (P)ATA

Then in comes the new version, released three days ago (March 3, 2009):

• 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• 320GB disk
• 2GHz Core 2 Duo
• NVIDIA GeForce 9400 with 256MB VRAM
• Five USB ports
• Firewire 800 port
• 1 Gbit ethernet
• Hard disk and CD/DVD drive both SATA

Hello mister Moore, nice to meet you again!

The migration was very smooth. We swapped keyboard/mouse/monitor a few times while we had both Minis running for this, which was almost the trickiest part. Unfortunately I didn’t have the right kind of firewire cable to connect the old and new machine or I would’ve used that, but fortunately OS X supports migrating machine via ethernet and wifi as well now, which only required installing a bit of software on the old one and setting up wifi on the new one (because of encryption) and then sit back and wait while a few GB of data is transferred between the two.

As far as I can tell almost all settings are included in this migration process, except for a few things (and if I notice more I’ll update this entry):

1. The parental controls preference pane would cause system preferences to crash. I blame this on going from PPC to Intel. Nuking the contents of /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/ and then restarting the machine appears to have taken care of that.
2. The Sharing – Remote Login setting wasn’t included, so I had to re-enable it.
3. I had to reenter the wifi password.

Now I wait for the kids to get home and actually put it to work with general browsing, flash games, photo booth experiments, etc. Any bets on how many days/weeks until they complain it’s too slow?

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!

A few articles that confirm that this is not limited to the local school district:

• Schools debate: Is cursive writing worth teaching? (USA Today)
• Handwriting skills in danger from the texting generation (WalesOnline)

Having brought this up with the teachers once or twice, the general feeling is that yes, we’d like it to be better as well but there simply isn’t enough time in a day.

Aside from braving the glares and asking our boys to rewrite parts of their finished homework or things that were written in their planners, what can you do? I really don’t want to bring school-like activities into their spare time but I do wonder how this is going to affect them with their school and careers in the long run.

Suggestions?

Now, with them being from the USA, California to be precise, there were two things that never made sense to me:

1. The reference to Liverpool.
2. The reference to UB40.

The former I could somewhat accept given the tendency in the USA to name places after ones elsewhere, like Amsterdam, Athens, Rome, etc, so surely there are places called Liverpool out there, right? The latter is very much a UK reference though. Just like the group called UB40 it refers to the Unemployment Benefit form 40. What the hell were these girls from California doing singing about that?!

However I just ignored that until finally, after all these years, I decide to do some (minor, in retrospect) digging and find out today that the answer is very simple: The song is a cover of one originally written by the (UK) Katrina and the Waves!

It’s all so clear to me now.