Google+: Circles are for both access control and subscription lists

The Google Reader UI lets me manage people who post once a year and newspapers that post 100 articles a day.

For example, the NYT Science feed is in both my Science folder and my NYT folder. The Science folder I read closely. The NYT folder I scan, and I "mark all as read" after picking a few interesting headlines.

So Google Reader can handle all kinds of traffic volumes, but G+ used to overwhelm me. A few high volume posters were clogging my read. Then I finally realized I'd misunderstood Circles.

Circles, I thought, were about access control. I thought Circles defined collections of people (once we called these mailing lists) who were able to read what I posted to them (notify and access).

I was partly right. Circles are access control. Circles, however, also define subscriptions or streams. They are, in this sense, analogous to the folders in Google Reader, where each person is a 'blog'.

It's not hard really. Circles are just collections of people. Those collections of people can be used for both access control (who you post to) and who you read (stream) [1]. So a person may be part of a Circle I post to, but I may rarely read their high volume posts (Guy cough Kawasaki cough).

Most of my posts are to "Your Circles" or "Extended Circles". That's a big set. On the other hand, my primary "stream" is a set of people who post a few times a day and have something interesting to say. I call that circle "Conversational".  "High Volume" is made up of the yackers with thousands of followers.

With the G+ web interface Streams are on the left side, but only the first ten or show Circles created display there. "Conversations" wasn't showing until Google+ added Circle ordering. Now "Conversations" is first on the list.

On my iPhone's Google+.app it's not obvious how I csan follow my "Conversations" stream. It's buried away in the app's oddball UI. Here's a rough guide:

1. Tap Circles
2. In Circles screen there are two tabs at the top: People and Circles (yeah, that's weird). Tap the Circles tab.
3. Tap a Circle ("Conversational" in my case)
4. In "Conversational" there is a list of people, and at the bottom of the screen there are 3 buttons/tabs to press. Press Posts. There they are.

Did I mention that the Google+.app UI is as incoherent as post-Jobs OS X (ex: Lion)?

I think Google could have done a better job of explaining this. Looking at their iPhone app I suspect they didn't fully understand Circles themselves.

[1] Fellow Geezers, think radio station.

PS. I still want iTunes style "Smart Circles".

Apple's $1000 docking station

Anyone can sell a laptop docking station for $1000.

Only Apple can make something that seems almost worth it ...

Apple Thunderbolt Display (27-inch) - Apple Store (U.S.)

With just one cable, connect any Thunderbolt-enabled Mac and get 27 inches of high-resolution screen space, high-quality audio, a FaceTime HD camera, FireWire 800 and Gigabit Ethernet ports — and a Thunderbolt port you can use to daisy-chain additional high-performance peripherals such as hard drives and video capture devices...

... The Thunderbolt Display includes a MagSafe connector that powers and charges your MacBook Pro or MacBook Air. The connector sits on your desk, ready and waiting. No need to unwind the cord to the power adapter that came with your notebook. Leave it exactly where it is, in your bag.

Yes, it's insane.

And yet ...

If I wanted the best of all worlds, and I was single, the combination of an 11" MacBook Air and the Thunderbolt display would almost make sense. Hang storage and peripherals off the display, plug in power and Thunderbolt cable, and the MacBook Air becomes a serious iMac contender. Disconnect and travel with an ultraportable.

A 27" iMac is $1,700. An 11" MacBook Air is $1,200. Together they come to almost $2,900. The MacBook Air and the Thunderbolt Display together are "only" $2,000. Really, cheap by comparison.

Heavens, but Apple is Satanic.

PS. Anyone remember the Powerbook Duo? Aka MacBook Air 1.0, but with 3 much cheaper docking station options.

Restoring an XP backup (.bkf) file in Windows 7

Based on a long history of problems with copying GBs of data over the LAN, I decided to move my data from a corporate XP box to a Win 7 box using XP Backup. That old utility is stone simple, but for me it's been fast and reliable.

I mounted a share on the W7 machine then ran backup to put every bit of my old machine into a .bkf file on the new machine. From there I'd unpack at leisure. In a month or so, once I'm satisfied I've not lost key data in a crevice of XP, I planned to delete the .bkf file.

Naturally, I did a small test first.

Obviously, or I wouldn't be writing this, the test failed. Windows-7 no longer supports restores from XP backup files.

I was open mouthed. This is the sort of middle-finger gesture I'm used to getting from Apple. Whatever their many, many faults, Microsoft has always been kinder to data. The formats are usually proprietary, but at least they're supported.

I couldn't believe it, so I looked further.

Happily, my faith was justified. You can now download a Microsoft Win 7 utility that will restore from a .bkf file. Description of the Windows NT Backup Restore Utility for Windows 7 and for Windows Server 2008 R2. It worked for me.

Lion: the curious case of the stingy desktop pictures

My copy of Snow Leopard has seven folders of desktop pictures, about 35-40 images.

OS X Lion comes with 14 images total. Stingy and weird.

It's not the only odd thing about Lion. OS X 10.7 feels like post-Jobs Apple; a compromise mashup between OS prosumer and OS lite. More on that in a future post.

Viewing Mac OS X Parental Control files

One of the many signs that OS X parental controls are half-baked is that Snow Leopard's default log tool doesn't actually .. you know ... display the site history. It's not just Snowie, this is old incompetence.

I'd wondered if there was any way to actually view the sites visited; perhaps a way to load the records in another tool. My Google searches found nothing, but a question on the most illustrious superuser.com site brought a comprehensive answer.

The answer was excellent even though I started out with a misleading question ...

OS X stores Parental Control logs in /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/Users/[username]/year/month with the extension .data.

For example, 15-usage.data contains usage data for the 15 day of a month.

The log files are system read/write only. To access them one must change permissions or use terminal.

I would like to be able browse these files. In an Apple discussion I found a reference to using a "SQL" add on for Firefox to browse them. I guessed this meant SQLite Manager for Firefox, but I the SQLite browsers I've tried can't open the file.

The file is binary, but in a text editor it shows typical Apple .plist header.

I suspect a form of SQLite, or Core Data (which I think can use SQLite).

Does anyone have information on how to browse these files?

My question was misleading because the date-specific .data files are a red herring. The real data is in /events.data ....

osx - How can I view Mac OS X Parental Control files with format .data? - Super User (answer from Daniel Beck)

These date-specific files are regular binary plist files created from a Core Data object graph. Open with Xcode 4 or Property List Editor (comes with Xcode 3), or any text editor after you convert it to XML using plutil -convert xml1 filename.data -o filename-xml.plist in Terminal. The content is pretty much useless though, unless you know how to load it again.

Much more interesting is /Library/Application Support/Apple/ParentalControls/Users/username/events.data. This contains the user-specific applications, web sites and chat protocols in a SQLite container format. Open e.g. using Base, other tools here and here. The date columns are seconds since a date and time in early 2000.

For me, comparison of the GUI value and experimentation showed the 0 value to be Jan 2, 2000, at 2:00:00 AM. Dates shown are May 18 according to the UI. I suggest you focus on this file only; I believe the others are simply helper files for internal data structures.

Incidentally, Daniel Beck lives in Germany has 770 answers on superuser.

Google Voice and merging app and non-app Google accounts with the same user names

This is painful. I hope you don't have to understand it. It may help you to know that you will probably lose data if you merge accounts. In some cases you will be better off to avoid account merging.

If you're reading this, however, you probably do need to know how it goes. Before you begin, consider reading a post from November 2011 2010 - Why you may want to wait on the new Google Apps services - identity collisions.

Here's the problem, which Google calls conflicting accounts.

Consider the Google Apps domain "skynet.com" and a user "hal@skynet.com". Hal uses google mail at skynet.com, but he doesn't actually have a Google Account. He's merely a Google Apps person.

A year ago Hal wanted to sign up for Google Voice. To do that he needed a Google Account. So he signed up for one using his email address hal@skynet.com for his username. Note he won't get email this way, but he can get everything else Google provides.

Meanwhile, Google wants to unify their infrastructure and unite their Google Apps accounts with their Google Accounts. Every Google Apps user will now get a Google Account and most Google services (I don't think G+ is available for Google Apps users however).

Eventually Google moves Skynet.com to the new infrastructure. Now we have a problem. The username hal@skynet.com now has two potential Google Accounts. The old one with Google Voice and the one Google just created.

This has to be resolved. Hal can either change the username for his older Google Account, or he can discard his old account and merge a very few services into his new Google Apps Google Account.

Phew. Reread until your head hurts.

Anyway, I'm now doing this for Emily and my son Tim, both of who have to resolve this conflict now that Google has forcibly upgraded our family domain to their full service range. (Which is mostly good, except for this merger business).

It turns out this works pretty well for Google Voice -- except you lose any old GV contacts.

You begin the process by logging into your Google Voice account with your preexisting Google Account credentials. Then you're told you can either rename or merge. If you merge you can still access your old data (for a while) under a new username of the form: name%old_domain.com@gtempaccount.com.

You're walked through a series of screenshots as below:

Note that 8 months after Google started down this road they still can't migrate most products:

Here's how it looked after its done.

Tim really only used Google Voice, so his migration is pretty simple. Emily used a few services, I'll have to do manual data migration for these. Losing the Google Reader records are particularly painful. In particular "...  this process will only move your feeds, and will not move your trends, followers, people you are following, folders, shared links, or other information associated with your Google Reader."

Really, it's a pain. I expected Google would manage this better, but it is what it is.

Update: I ran into several small and medium bugs during the process. The worst bug is that Google continues to route logins to the conversion screens even after conversion has been completed.

In the end the primary data losses were with Google Reader and iGoogle (bookmark list). I think some of the bugs may be related to other changes Google is making to switch to G+

Contact Sync and Database.sqlite3 corruption bring Mail.app and my fast iMac to its knees

Sometime over the past two weeks my relatively new iMac seemed to lose steam. It was slow to respond, lots of beachballs. Felt like it was occupied, but Activity Monitor didn't show anything obvious.

I think OS X was caught in a sync loop involving Spanning Sync, OS X iSync and MobileMe sync all synchronizing between OS X Address Book, my iPhone, MobileMe Address Book, and a subsection of Google Contacts. That setup has worked well for about a year, but it's fallen apart now.

Looking at the Spanning Sync logs a few contacts were being updated constantly. Nothing special about them I can see.

I'm afraid my Contacts Unification program has died. With MobileMe on the way out, and with Google frantically tweaking Contacts for their social/G+ initiatives, and Apple doing its own Lion and iCloud contact management I don't think this is going to come back. I'll need another approach.

For the moment I've set MobileMe sync to manual and disabled Spanning Sync. I may do a manual sync every few days. My iMac is working again.

Synchronization is Hell.

Update 7/22/11: This morning I received a warning from Carbon Copy Cloner about a physical read error with Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3. Interesting ...

07/22 08:25:58 rsync: read errors mapping "/Users/jfaughnan 1/Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3": Input/output error (5)

07/22 08:26:22 ERROR: Users/jfaughnan 1/Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3 failed verification -- update discarded. (51)

Disk Utility didn't find any physical errors, so I assume Database.sqlite3 has been corrupted.

I put Database.sqlite3 in the trash, logged out and back in, then deleted it. Mail.app recreated it, went from 7MB to 2MB. Safari and Mail.app both felt much faster. I then downloaded the most recent version of Onyx, restarted as Admin, then ran all the cleanup and automation scripts. At the moment the machine feels about 10 times faster.

Even though sqlite3 is a core part of OS X Data Management, but it's hard to find much about how it's actually used in most apps. I found one page that listed apps that use SQLite databases, but those apps are listed as storing data in different locations. I found a couple of references [1] that suggest this is where Mail.app and Safari store their RSS feeds.

One article mentioned using this command to fix this sqlite database:

/usr/bin/sqlite3 ~/Library/PubSub/Database/Database.sqlite3 vacuum

Using that search string brought up more interesting articles:

• 10.5: Set per-feed update/expire intervals in Safari RSS - Mac OS X Hints
• One possible fix for Safari freezes and slowdowns - Mac OS X Hints

The second link is from 2009, and it sounds very much like what has been happening to me in OS X 10.6 ...

I am syncing, on several Macs and several user accounts, information such as Calender, Mail Rules, Bookmarks, etc. After recently updating to Safari 4.01 and OS X 10.5.7, all of a sudden I had all very bad Safari performance -- including constant freeze situations. After being ready to delete the impacted user, I realized that there were some issues with the database.sqlite3 file in the Library » PubSub » Database folder. The PubSub folder is used for tracking RSS feeds, and it seems my problem resided there.

After deleting the database.sqlite file, and resetting the Mobile Me information, the freezes and crashes stopped...

Deleting this file did not actually remove the feeds from Mail.app and Safari.

Looking at my feeds I see I've been tracking my Google Reader shared item feed. That is an enormous feed; I think I've been pushing the limits of what Mail.app RSS subscription can handle. I deleted all of my Feed subscriptions from Safari and Mail.app, then I delted all the data in ~/Library/PubSub/Feeds and I deleted Database.sqlite3 (again). On logout/login it was recreated with a size of 74kb (empty). Mail.app is now blindingly fast and my system is healthy again.

I won't be using Mail.app's feed reader features any more. They don't scale. I use Google Reader, but to archive some of my feeds I'm going to buy a dedicated standalone feed reader.

Update 7/24/11: I created an archive of my Address Book, cleared the iSync database then restarted MobileMe. It told me it was going to add 843 records. Coincidentally, that's how many I have. I went ahead anyway, since it's surprisingly easy to save and restore Address Book archives (I have about fifty versions saved). In fact I ended up with 843 that look correct on spot check. Curiously, both MobileMe and my laptop say I have 842 contacts. So there's something broken somewhere in iSync. It's easy to see why Apple dropped iSync (so far) from Lion. Synchronization is, honestly, and truly, Hell. This has underappreciated implications for health care interoperability incidentally.