I have a real problem with bookmarks. Actually I have a few problems with bookmarks: There are too many, they’re a mess, they don’t make any sense and I can’t search them. Basically they’re a good idea, really badly implemented.

I have a list of bookmarks, I try to keep them organised but there are hundreds every few months I have to go through and throw some away. The clutter in my bookmarks also leads to bad habits. If it’s something I want to read later, I drag a link to my desktop or I put it in a read later folder. These quickly grow out of hand. Then I start getting protective and avoid saving links, dooming myself to searching for them again.

Lately, using Google Reader I’ve come up against another problem - I’m building a whole new set of bookmarks in the form of starred items, except these are completely separate from the rest of my browsing but I keep doing it because it’s easy and I can search them.

When it comes down to it my problem is basically simple, I can’t ever find anything again! It’s even worse if it’s something I’ve found via searches because it might be weeks or months later I try to find the page again and it’s likely that the Google’s index will have changed in that time. So my searching for something I’ve seen gets harder.

Bookmarking the page doesn’t usually make it easier, there is no frame of reference. Unless I’ve set the title to something useful a lot of the time I find it hard to find things again because lot of the time with hundreds to go through, or I’ve cleaned it out and it doesn’t exist anymore anyway.

I’ve tried delicious and other similar tools, and I like them, tagging my links makes them infinitely more searchable. But it doesn’t go quite far enough - it still has a feeling of permanence and exclusivity to it when I tag something and I don’t always want to share everything I tag.

The other problem with social bookmarking and tagging sites is they provide a tag for me, but no context. So days, weeks or months later unless I’ve tagged the site well I may or may not be able to find it. I thought I saw a site that indexed the links from delicious, but I seem to have lost it and can’t find it again(You see what I mean!).

What I really want to see is a site that lets me star or bookmark a page or RSS feed and I want it to index my little corner of the web.

Again, I’m here apologising for letting things slip a little. I’ve been busy and posting has unfortunately suffered for it. I’ve been working hard trying to get things moving for goroam, and it’s been time consuming. I basically spend the last half of last year bogged down with a project and had no time at all to spend on it, so for the last half of this year the focus is really to turn it around, launch a few things and start bringing some revenue in.

Our biggest project at the moment is running an online marketing campaign for Mediqol a medical device consultancy. Our lofty goal is to show up in the first position for the search keywords medical device, short term we’re just interested in optimising the adwords campaigns, and increasing organic traffic for the keywords we know work.

Then there is Citrus - Work is progressing, but we might be looking at an end of the year launch for it. My gut feeling is that we won’t be anything approaching a launch before the end of November.

In the meantime we’re looking into a couple of smaller launches. I have a couple of ideas for tools and products that tie into the Citrus roadmap that we can launch.

I’m going to spend some time this afternoon and weekend writing some posts to get on top of it again.

I wanted to write something else today, but instead I’m recovering my laptop because I decided to “quickly” upgrade from Tiger to Lepoard this morning. Everything looked to be going perfectly and I figured I’d got away without any major problems - that is until I tried to login.

Unfortunately there is an all too common bug with upgrading a system that has a filevault user - in short it doesn’t fucking work! I’m the only user on my laptop and when I tried to log in after the upgrade all I got was an error message:

“Your FileVault-protected home folder did not open and needs to be repaired. Click OK to repair the folder and continue logging in. Click Cancel Login to log in as a different user”

oh fuck.

I’d like this part of the story to be the part where I say, it’s all ok because I had backups, but it’s not. I had my daughter in my arms and was flying one handed, she’d just dozed off for a short nap and I didn’t want to wake her up so I didn’t reach down, unplug the external drive from my desktop machine, I didn’t plug it into my laptop and I didn’t back up my files.

oh fuck.

I clicked OK, waited a few seconds and hoped for the best…

“Logging into the account failed because an error occurred”

oh fuck.

Now it sinks in, what was meant to be a nice little morning project, upgrade my OS has turned into a total nightmare. Here are the steps to sort it out, they worked for me and hopefully will help someone else.

Reset the root password, so you can login

Restart you machine with the install disk in the drive and hold the c key to boot from the disk.

Select your instalation language, accept the agreements and click continue. When it’s loaded choose reset password from the utilities list. Choose your system drive and select System Administrator (root) from the list of users. Set a password and click save.

Login as root

Close all the windows and quit the Mac OS X Installer, when your prompted to select a startup disk choose your hard disk.

Now you login screen should have an option to log in as another user, pick this and use the username root and the password you set above. You should now get a new desktop from here you’ll be able to recover your files.

Get your files

Open finder and browse to the Users folder. Find your user and in there you should find a file called username.sparseimage.

I tried to back the whole file up to my external drive, but couldn’t get it to copy in either Finder or terminal.

So just double click it to mount it as a disk. You’ll be asked to type a password, it’s your user password for the account. Type it and click ok.

Finder will start to mount the disk then stop with the following message:

You’ve got nothing to lose here, it’s mount it or lose everything so just go ahead and click Open.

So it can’t read it properly, just click ok. You should now have a drive mounted and it has all your files in there. Time to back them all up, except they probably won’t all back up. I tried that and got some permission issues, rather then worry too much about them I ignored them and just made sure I got all my documents, pictures, music, movies and the application settings I wanted, I ignored everything else.

I have a lot of files and this took a very long time, the lesson I’ve learned - back up more often. Ironically that’s part of the reason I wanted to upgrade, so timemachine would do this for me… but I digress.

Recover

At this point you have a choice. You can create a new users, move files into it and move on with your upgraded system. Since I was tempted to wipe the system and start again when I considered installing the OS I chose to go that route. I rebooted, used disk utility to clean the drive and started again from fresh.

Either way from you backups and your new user you should be able to either do a recovery and get more or less back to where you wanted to be.

Rant

Filevault is promoted as a great security feature of the OS. I like it, I deal with the fact that my machine is somewhat slower for using it, but I feel the benefits if for any reason my laptop is lost or stolen far outweigh the inconviniences.

I haven’t really had any problems with my mac before now and I don’t see any reason that my system should be anything but standard. Since I’m not the only one that has been experiencing these issues, one can only assume it’s fairly widespread.

If only I’d know, I could have saved myself hours by simply turning file vault off. I mean I took the trouble to reboot once and clean up my home directory so the OS could fully recover it’s space.

To anyone reading this contemplating an upgrade, TURN FILEVAULT OFF FIRST!

The good news

The only good to come from the whole experience is that I ended up with the clean install I kinda wanted anyway. Though not really through choice.

Also next time I’ll be running a simple google search for “snow lepoard upgrade problems” first and hopefully timemachine means I’ll have consistent backups, before I start.

I’ve been busy and haven’t had a chance to get things posted like I wanted to. Work and personal commitments have a habit of getting in the way of otherwise good intentions. I’ll do my best to get a few posts out this week and I’ll see if I can’t get caught back up and maybe get a few posts written and scheduled.

It’s been an eventful couple of weeks on a number of fronts - I wouldn’t go so far as to say exciting because that would imply all good stuff. Some of it was good, some was bad - other parts just interesting.

Hopefully we’ll be able to push out some good news on the goroam front in the next few weeks. Despite what our detractors may say or think we are working hard on getting things done - but stuff takes time. Especially when other commitments get in the way.

In the meantime, where were we?

You may notice that this site has yet another new design today. I’ve left blogger and gone back to wordpress and hosted the blog. I like Blogger and I really like the idea of hosted applications but it just wasn’t giving me the control I wanted and I was finding it time consuming to get things the way I wanted. 

It’s not you, it’s me.

Hosted applications are great and Blogger has got to be one of the best free ones out there. I really do like it, but we wanted to make all our goroam pages consistent, so we bought the great thesis theme from diythemes. We bought a developer licence so we could use it on all our sites and would be free to modify it. 

I wanted something with a little more space for this blog, I liked running things down the side but it was getting too long and I had no space for anything else. For goroam and citrus I wanted to get something that would combine both the info at the top and blogs towards the bottom. Again in the next week or two we’l hopefully get there with this new theme.

is this the last change?

Honestly, no. I’ll probably change a whole load of things over the coming weeks to try and differentiate the sites. Mostly I think I just like to change things.

Welcome to my new blog. I’ve tried a couple in the past and haven’t managed to find my voice and get them going, but I’m going to try again. I’ll basically be talking about bootstrapping our company, coding and other things I thing are interesting or relevant but I can’t promise any of it will be well written, or interesting to you, though I’ll try. You can help by letting me know what you think is good or more importantly what you think is bad in the comments.

The design is close to what I imagined, but I’m no designer. I can beat things into a rough shape approximation what I think would look good, but I can never get the smooth finish I’d like. As with the writing I’ll work to improve this as I go.

the conversation

This is a conversation, the comments are as important as the posts and it’s a fine line to tread. I’m not setting out to moderate the conversation in any great way; I don’t have the time or inclination. I’ll largely leave it alone and respect constructive criticism and comment. I won’t respect attacks personal or otherwise though and will delete any and all comments which set out to disrupt the conversation

I’m a sell out

There are no ads on here at the moment, but one day when there are pageviews I’ll probably put them on here. I reserve the right to sell out at any time - so it’s probably best if you just consider me a sell out from day one. You can quote me:

Andrew McCall is a sell out, he uses his blog for personal financial gain and to shamelessly plug businesses, products and other things which will either directly profit him or people he knows.

So there you have it, my latest effort is launched - please stick around, hopefully enjoy and hit the comments to let me know how I can make it better.