Last week, like many people, I upgraded my MacBook Pro from OS X 10.5 (Leopard) to 10.5.1. Upon system reboot I was not able to log into my user account because the OS was complaining that FileVault wasn’t working properly.
Panic begins…
I had no backups. In fact the day of the fault I was pondering buying an external disk for the express purpose of Time Vault. Great timing..
I tried all of the things outlined on all the websites but nothing worked. I was on holiday so I didn’t have access to my Leopard or Tiger CDs. In the end I had to resort to DiskWarrior to recover the data.
The process went like this:
- Borrow an external USB disk.
- Backup FileVault sparse image.
- Attach the FileVault sparse image
- dd the filesystem from the sparse image to the spare USB disk
- Boot from the DiskWarrior 4 CD and attempt to repair the USB disk (it failed)
- Attempt to repair the filesystem image on the USB disk (it worked!)
- Reboot to Leopard and mount the fixed filesystem image and copy the contents to my mac
- Realise I made a mistake by copying to my user directory; make a lisa2 account
- Copy the data to lisa2, delete lisa account, recreate lisa account, copy data back
- Log in to lisa account, find all my data and reoice
The moral of the story is: Don’t be the first to upgrade.
It’s coming.
The new REST helpers are most appreciated.
Moving the proprietary adapters to a separate repository without any tests makes it impossible to modify the adapters. That irritates me a lot. How are we supposed to test patches that improve thing?
It seems that a blog post was made by a guy named Jeremy Sivers to pimp his E-comerce site (Sorry, no google juice for you).
In the thinly veiled blog entry-come-advertisement Jeremy uses Rails and Ruby as a punching bag (up against PHP) to drive people to his site. (I nearly said “poorly designed” but my sites aren’t works of art either. Hey man, I’m no artist either!)
The many dozens of pages of comments are filled with many people backing up Rails and PHP while completely missing the point: Jeremy wants to use O’Reilly’s blogs as a means to advertise his poor coding and (his company’s) project management skills as well as to advertise.
His post can be summed up as follows:
Visit my site! Two years ago I decided to try and rewrite my site’s codebase with Rails while not bothering to leverage migrations (or to otherwise change the legacy schema to a rails-friendly schema). I suck at programming and project management and exadurate a lot so after wasting two years of time and money I decided to spend two months to code the site from scratch in PHP!
What I want to know is why didn’t he just use the existing codebase from the start? Was it broken? Was there some other Ruby/Rails standardisation in progress that required the E-commerce side to change then?
In any event: Don’t rewrite anything unless it doesn’t work. Use Rails’s conventions – they’re better than yours. Don’t worry about scaling, yet.
Incidentally my personal site is still backed with PHP because there’s no compelling reason to waste time rewriting it.
