note to self : don’t interrupt FileVault

Posted by Dick on December 17, 2007

I enabled FileVault on my MBP and cancelled the conversion when I saw how long it was going to take. When I tried to re-enable it again today, I got an error saying 

could not create filevault disk image

Google wasn’t very helpful, so I’m noting down the fix here, which is: 

sudo rm -r /Users/Shared/username.sparsebundle

 Turns out FileVault doesn’t use encrypted .dmgs(because they’re fixed size) but instead has a directory called username.sparsebundle (.sparseimage, pre-Leopard) that does the same job.This is initially created as /Users/shared/username.sparsebundle ,populated and only moved into place once the old home directory is deleted.

if you are reading this, typo is dead.

Posted by Dick on December 11, 2007

I’m happy. It feels a lot lot faster, both rendering and in the admin screens.

Quick summary :

  • articles and comments  came over ok (articles via the RSS importer, comments by hand)
  •  the theme existed for both typo and wordpress
  • google analytics needed pasting into your <head>
  • have told wordpress to use the same permalink format as typo did
  • set up some 301s for the old typo RSS and atom feeds

Let me know if anything seems wrong. I’ve been tailing access logs and amazingly I do have some readers (!), so don’t be shy.

 Things I know are broken but probably won’t fix:

  • old Typo URLs for per-article RSS ( I couldn’t see why anyone would want that)
  • tags (the RSS importer set them up as categories instead, which I’m fine with)

I’m not delighted about having to run on MySQL (I‘ll be mysqldumping twice a day),but the schema is much saner than typos had become by 4.x. I’ve already fixed up somethings on the mysql command line faster than I could have found them in the web frontend.

ok kids, get in the car

Posted by Dick on December 06, 2007

I’ve now officially taken all the shit I’m going to from Typo.

  • a seemingly dead codebase
  • rubbish antispam
  • takes an age to post comments
  • takes even longer to delete spam comments (see above points)
  • have a cronjob to restart it 4 times a day

(The last point seems to be standard practice for plenty of commercial software I’ve babysat over the years, but I’m not having it here).
To be fair, a lot of the issues are down to running this on a $12/month hosting account – I’ve had to turn off a lot of features to save memory.

I’m in the middle of migrating from Textdrive → Joyent anyway and I refuse to replicate this shambles on the new box.

The plan is to switch over to Wordpress (yes, it’s PHP, but I don’t intend to hack the code at all).

I’m going to pull all the articles over by abusing the RSS feed, so anyone on a reader might see a few (hundred) duplicate posts in the next day or two. Will do my best to preserve permalinks and comments, although tags might go south for a bit.