The iPhoto 11 (v9.0) data loss bug: permissions again

The killer data loss bug in iPhoto 11 is ... wait for it ... Permissions related:

iPhoto 11: Avoid possible data loss - Mac OS X Hints

A possible bug in the upgrade process by iLife 11 causes a loss in one's library. Even more, some of the 'successful' upgraders are not even aware that they might too have lost some files!

The root of the problem lies in faulty permissions within the iPhoto Library. The solution is to fix the permissions. Repairing permissions in Disk Utility won't help because that doesn't affect user files, only installed programs with Receipts.

... Install BatChmod and run it...
Drag and Drop your iPhoto Library (usually located in your ~/Pictures folder) into the open BatChmod window. 

Change the Letters R, W and X under the Owner, Group and Everyone to a check mark. 

Also select the check mark for the following boxes: Change ownership and privileges, Clear ACLs, unlock box and Apply to enclosed folders and files.
Click Apply...

Have I mentioned I hate the OS X Permissions based security model? It's a botched implementation, and probably the worst part of using OS X. Adding the 10.6 ACL layer seems to have made a bad scene worse.

This bug is yet another example of why I never rush to install Apple products. Apple is a design company, not a quality company. They do this sort of thing routinely.

It's appalling that the installer doesn't check for permissions issues prior to installation. iPhoto has had lots of permissions related bugs in the past, and I've personally run into about a dozen permission related bugs in other parts of OS X. Apple should have tested for problems.

It's too bad there's no legal resort to pursue for these kinds of egregious quality problems.

See also:

• Is there a club for people who hate OS X permissions?
• Gordon's Tech: Permissions bug in OS X 10.5 - unable to update applications
• Gordon's Tech: Resetting permissions from the OS X 10.5 and 10.6 Installation DVD
• Gordon's Tech: How to fix permissions in an OS X Package and how deal with VMWare Fusion Insufficient Permission problems
• Gordon's Tech: OS X Leopard 10.5: The unknown user and group bugs
• Gordon's Tech: Take Control of Permissions in Snow Leopard
• Gordon's Tech: Permissions bug in OS X 10.5 - unable to update applications
• Gordon's Tech: Why you shouldn't use OS X ACLs

PS. Google's blogger removed the paragraph spacing in more than half of the above articles. I hand edited each one. Blogger is proof that Google is made up of flawed humans.

Update: Apple has released the 9.01 fix.

OS X - the Dropbox, Drop Box and Public inversion mystery solved

Something weird was going on.

My 10.6 account had the old "Public" folder containing the familiar "Drop Box".

It also, however, had a "Drop Box" folder containing a Public folder! The Public folder had a document I'd never seen before ...

You can get a public link for any file in your Dropbox's Public folder.

Simply right click (or control click) on a file, click the Dropbox submenu,

and then click 'Copy public link.'

How strange. I don't remember that feature of OS X.

New feature? Inverted Public to Drop Box relationship? What's going on?

OS X hasn't really changed. There's still a "Public" folder containing a "Drop Box". The "new" folder wasn't actually another "Drop Box" -- I'd misread it. It is a "Dropbox" folder -- all one word. It was created by when I installed a cloud based file service known as Dropbox.

I'd stopped using it, and forgotten the double meaning. The folder was simply leftover. I deleted "Dropbox".

It is rather confusing ...

Why didn't the MacBook Air ship with USB 3?

I'm halfway to buying a MacBook Air, but I'm sticking with Gordon's rules of acquisition. I'm good with #2-#4, but working on really, really wanting it three separate times.

Thanks to the joy of a nearby Apple Store I've touched the 11". I am infected now. I verified that my 51 yo eyes can read the screen -- that was my main concern. I've also confirmed that it's no bigger than an iPad.

My decision would be easier if the Air had shipped with USB 3. That would more than compensate for the lack of Firewire or ethernet ports.

So why doesn't the lovely 11" come with USB 3? Will there be a USB 3 version out this fall?

This Wikipedia article explains ...

... Intel will not support USB 3.0 until 2011 ... These delays may be due to problems in the CMOS manufacturing process ... .... or a tactic by Intel to boost its upcoming Light Peak interface... Current AMD roadmaps indicate that the new southbridges released in the beginning of 2010 will not support USB 3.0...

This looks ominous. I'd be surprised to see USB 3 in an Apple product before mid-2011. I wouldn't be surprised if they took another path entirely.

Bottom line: USB 3 isn't ready now, isn't likely to be ready for a year, and may yet go the way of Bluetooth (basically dead).

PS. Incidentally, I tested in the Apple store. The MacBook's USB port has enough juice to charge an iPad.

Speeding up my sluggish XP Fusion VM

When I gave up my last XP machine, I created a VM from the disk image. It worked, but the performance was poor. My XP VM on an i5 iMac was quite a bit slower than a Windows 2000 VM on my much less powerful MacBook.

It took me a while to speed things up. I removed some custom settings for the Windows swap file and I gave the VM more cores. I upgraded my system memory that helped too; I gave the VM more RAM.

Even so, I could hear much more disk activity than I liked and file saves were often slow. I don't use the VM for much, so I took my time on fixing this.

More recently, I got some help from VMware KB: Troubleshooting Fusion virtual machine performance for disk issues.

I found the VM had inherited 35% fragmentation from the old disk (I'd also made it too large). I used XP's built in defrag to fix that. Then I ran VMWare Fusion's cleanup utility, and I flipped my VM from 2GB files to a single large file.

It's fine now; as fast as I need it to be (not much!).

Tweeting Google Reader Shares and Notes via feedburner

I've been using twitterfeed to tweet my Google Reader Shared Items for about a year (via jgordonshares now).

It's mostly worked, albeit with the limitations of Google's oddball Reader shared item feed. Recently, however, I've been concerned about Twitterfeed's understandable need to monetize their service. It's not the monetization I mind, it's that I'm a passenger wherever they go.

So I poked around a bit. I reviewed some services I'd looked at previously, including RSS Graffiti, but they didn't give me the warm fuzzies. Then I learned I could use a services I already know, Google's Feedburner, to tweet a feed ...

• How to Auto Tweet your blog Post using Google Feedburner
• Official announcement

I configured feedburner to turn my Google Reader Generated Page feed ...

http://www.google.com/reader/public/atom/user%2F06457543619879090746%2Fstate%2Fcom.google%2Fbroadcast

into a Feedburner feed:

feed://feeds.feedburner.com/faughnanreadershares

It took several tries to get it to work. I repeatedly got an "internal error" message even when I provided the shared item web address (http://www.google.com/reader/shared/jfaughnan) and let Feedburner discover the feed. Just as I was about to give up, it worked.

The Feedburner version of the Google Shared Items feed has some interesting properties.  For example, my Reader shared item notes now appear as inline text. I can also get odd links to posted notes like this one:

http://www.google.com/reader/item/tag:google.com,2005:reader/item/4ba48c42d43b00ab

From Feedburner it was easy to link the output from this Atom feed to my jordonshares Twitter stream. I'm using the following services there ...

Optimize

- Title/description burner

- BrowserFriendly

Publicize

Socialize - Twitter

I wonder how long this will work, but for now I'm using Feedburner instead of Twitterfeed to post my Google Reader Shared items and notes to Twitter.

See also (lots of experiments!)

• More of me: My Google Reader Shared Item Feed (10/09)
• Loving Google Reader - Shared post feed (9/08)
• Gordon's Tech: Google reader shared items to Facebook (3/09)
• Filtering my Google Reader Share with Yahoo Pipes (9/08)
• Google Reader: Experiments with notes, following and sharing (11/09)
• Social wrestling: Google Reader, Twitterfeed, Blogger and Facebook (4/10)
• FreeMyFeed - Getting Twitter feed to Google Reader (4/09 - a different use of Feedburner)
• Reimagining realtime focalcast communication – Buzz and Twitter 2.0 (3/09)
• How do I share my Google Reader Shared Items Feed and process it via Yahoo Pipes? (9/08)
• Twitter feed for my Google Shared Items (9/10)

Migrating from Blogger to WordPress - a guide

I need to move from Blogger to WordPress (via Dreamhost).

I'm studying how to do this, starting with these guides:

• The New Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress | MamaBlogga (8/09)
• Moving From Blogger To Wordpress – Maintaining Permalinks, Traffic & SEO (1/22/2009)
• Blogger.com (BlogSpot) To Wordpress Migration Professional Service (3/24/10)
• Blogger To Wordpress Migration Service (current)
• Blogger To Wordpress Traffic & Permalinks Redirection Plugin (1/2008)
• How to migrate from blogspot to wordpress with 301 permanent redirection without leaving traffic behind (4/22/2009)

Happily many have gone before me. I'll study these posts and make the move in a few weeks.

It will be a great pleasure not to have to deal with Google's paragraph, rich text editing, anf formatting problems any more.

Blogger's 3 year paragraph debacle - the case of universal line break conversion

(Post title revised to reflect updates.)

I'm increasingly running across old posts that I've not touched where paragraphs have now vanished.

Not content with ruining formatting on newer posts, Google (blogger) is is now blowing up older posts.

I need to find an alternative to Blogger.

Update: I ask at Blogger's help group, but, based on the questions there, I doubt it will get any attention. Here's a sample of the damage. I have hundreds to thousands of old posts like this ...

Update 10/29/10: This has been going on since 2007. Three years of screwing up.

Update 10/29/10b: I've figured out part of this, thanks to a hint in that 2007 article. Blogger has a feature in settings that turns out to have devastating side-efects:

I believe the default setting is "convert line breaks". I changed it to NO to see if non-conversion would help with Google Composer's longstanding paragraph and format mangling. It never occurred to me that I was changing a setting that would be applied to every post in my blog. I reversed this setting on tech.kateva.org and my old posts now have line feeds again.

On notes.kateva.org I'd never changed the setting, so it wasn't disrupted.

Incidentally, I have two new insights on what's wrong with Blogger's various editors. MarsEdit's HTML view illustrated the second bug:

1. Blogger's rich text editor paragraph controls get confused when a paragraph begins with bold text. Frequently, but not always, this triggers an extra line feed.
2. Blogger's editor sometimes inserts <div> tags when it should insert <p> tags. In the rich text editor these create paragraphs, but browser behavior is variable. To quote Jennifer Kyrnin: The <div> tag is not a replacement <p> tag. The <p> tag is for paragraphs, only, while the <div> tag defines more general divisions within a document. Others have been confused about this distinction.

Update 10/29/10c: It appears that the editor is inserting two <br> tags and a <div> tag instead of a <p> tag. Both the current standard editor and the draft editor do this, I think the old editor might have inserted a single BR tag and a DIV tag. This is a terrible practice. See this Stack Overflow discussion and this one.

Update 10/30/10: The MarsEdit forum has a 2008 post on Blogger's flailing about with paragraph breaks, there's a companion thread in the Blogger developer forum. The developer group is only moderately interesting, it's been invaded by desperate end users seeking support. There is a "new developer relations engineer", perhaps because his predecessor was last seen drinking heavily in an Alaskan bar.

I wonder if there's a fundamental flaw in Atom Pub 1.0 that somehow led to Blogger's twisted implementation of the paragraph.