This afternoon I deactivated1 my Delicious account. I feel the need to extract myself from websites that no longer serve a purpose to me. What Delicious once gave me I now use a combination of Xmarks and Instapaper for.
For some time I have been mulling over a reduction in my web footprint. Forget privacy concerns—this is about maintaining dozens of accounts across as many living, evolving web services. I worry about the security implications of so many different logins and passwords, almost as much as the security implications of unifying them all into one account.
There are a lot of reasons to leave a service, however. Eventually the pressure to turn an advertising profit will ruin Twitter. I have even contemplated extracting myself from the Google search-social-advertising-a-verse. This will likely happen when they finally force the new Gmail interface—which is garbage—on me.
1: “To deactivate your account, head to your Settings and click the “deactivate account” link in the “TOOLS” list on the right side of the page.” - Delicious Help
Finally.
This is well timed, as I have lost the ability to share Google Reader articles.
The setup process was not the most straight-forward, but the instructions are clear and offer very helpful links throughout. The only obstacle I encountered was the need to enable Google Talk/Chat.
I have been using one flavor or another of PHPMyAdmin for almost the duration of the project. The app has become ubiquitous; every web host that I have used in the past seven years has had it as part of their control panel. I have installed it myself maybe a dozen times.
Late last year I moved everything from LunarPages to FatCow; I did not feel like paying for two years of hosting and FatCow was a little cheaper. For whatever reason, FatCow’s PHPMyAdmin would not import a 500kb SQL file. I hated the idea of installing my own version of PHPMyAdmin because
- you either need to keep up with security updates or remove the installation and
- it was already installed by my host!
So I looked at two alternatives. The first was SQL Buddy and I ran into similar issues uploading the file. I was starting to wonder if there was something wrong with the FatCow MySQL server, or maybe Comcast.
I finally settled on Adminer. Worked fine.
I have resurrected the blog portion of hraefn.net and converted to TextPattern. I like it so far; some teething pains tonight as I migrated from my local machine.
A few things are not working correctly, but it was important for me to get the site up and mostly functioning. I think a broken public website can be a powerful motivational tool…
I decided this week to once again install Windows XP onto my MacBook, and set it up with the couple applications I needed for work. Hauling a laptop to the office is not onerous, but the MacBook is a hell of a lot lighter than the clunker Dell. Nevermind that I need Windows to run Ventrillo during guild runs.
Having used Boot Camp before, I felt pretty comfortable with repartitioning my drive and fiddling with the Apple drivers. I spent an afternoon clearing some space; I removed ripped DVDs, a seldom-used backup installation of WoW, some software that came with the MacBook and a lot of downloads and log files. I grabbed the latest Boot Camp and ran the installer. One gratuitous legal agreement later, and I am attempting to set up a 20gb FAT partition.
Your disk cannot be partitioned because some files cannot be moved
Back up the disk and use Disk Utility to format the disk as a single Mac OS Extended (Journaled) volume. Restore your information to the disk and try using Boot Camp Assistant again.
Damn.
I was pretty sure from the start the issue was fragmentation. The intarweb was not much help, but I was able to find a very nice defrag utility for the Mac, called iDefrag. Running a trial version of their software showed me exactly what I expected… the MacBook had no contiguous space large enough to partition.
So I bit. The software was easy to buy and I soon had a licensed copy. I rebooted the MacBook into Target Disk Mode and plugged it into the G5. An overnight Optimize cleaned up the drive nicely, but I was not done yet; I still had to run Apple’s disk utility to fix a small error that iDefrag had created. Not a big deal.
Now if only Windows XP did not make me feel so… exposed.