Carbon Silk

Having attended a talk by Jason Fried from 37signals at south by southwest, i managed to feel completely inspired by what was spoken and how it was spoken.

What i took from the presentation

It all finally hit home, the message that Jason and 37signals were trying to make; keeping things simple. I realise things should be simple anyway, just having it spoken, made a whole lot of sense, and the general idea is to avoid over-complicating tasks. As humans we strive to make our lives more efficient, but in the process we inadvertently make more distractions resulting in a poor productivity.

Getting things done for me is a hard task. My process in doing things usually involves first thinking:

• Is there is a better way of doing something?
• If i do not find some magical batch task solution, i will usually ponder on the best way of tackling the matter, again taking up time that could otherwise be spent doing stuff.

Why is this, man it gets annoying as i like to see results, and fast!

Tapping into my thoughts on task execution efficiency

I set myself some kind of mental note now (not a todo/task as that would be too constrained and definite), to try and hit the task on the head and get it done. This is the only way i managed to get this very blog live, by just doing it, instead of worrying on the design, the mark-up on the front end, the way i will market it etc… Its here and it may or may work but at least it got done.

Moving on from the talk

One of the subjects covered in the talk was to avoid certain things, such as avoiding talking to people, which can be considered a distraction, but instead use email/IM/etc. to leave communication to a passive mode, to allow productivity. This is a hard task and i think if taken to literally, could be bad for picking up inspiration, relevant information, and not forgetting you may be conceived as a recluse!

I will do stuff, i will create those apps that i have been meaning to release, i will blog more, i will get more stuff done at work, or maybe not?

It all begins when i became somewhat frustrated when my Mac Book Pro became increasingly unstable.

If it was not alt-tabbing or trivial operations including opening new applications, everything and anything seemed to lock up my machine, almost as if MS Windows had somehow taken over Unix in an evil way.

I persevered with this poor standard of working/coping for just over 3 days, when the final straw came, i could no longer use my Instant Message client Adium or read my RSS feeds in Vienna. Time for me to go on a hunt to track down the culprit to the nagging issues.

My first thoughts were that something was going amiss with the application preferences; as Vienna no longer knew what feeds i was once subscribed to and it was as if Adium had some form of Amnesia, prompting me to set up an IM connection for the `first time`.

Time to investigate

ls -las ~/Library

This is a problem, but an odd one. I had no results from my previous ls. How could this be? Well i consulted with a fellow system engineer and colleague, Giles Rapkin, whom advised me to do a disk checkup. Great idea, so i went off, firstly restoring permissions (just in case), no joy there, so disk check it was.

The disk check returned no conclusive results. So came the thought, could it be a problem with FileVault?

I logged out of my account, and logged in as root on my machine. I then dragged my FileVault image from /Users/$$USER$$ to Disk Utility and did a disk check. This returned my problem; i had a corrupt FileVault image. This was most likely caused by doing a hard reset whilst my machine was still doing stuff when the image was mounted.

Sorting out the problem

Problem diagnosed, time to move on and deal with the matter of getting my machine up and running in a stable fashion again.

Note, my solution will suspend the use of Filevault, see a guide on Encrypt your homedir on your mac without FileVault by Stuart Colville

Steps taken to fix my broken machine:

1. Ensure you are logged in as root (Enabling and using the “root” user in Mac OS X)
2. Mount the FileVault image from the account directory
3. Copy all the files to a backup location: sudo cp -r /Volumes/$$USER$$ /Users/$$USER_backup$$
4. Check the backup worked: ls -las /Users/$$USER_backup$$
5. Delete the user in question in from the Accounts preference pane
6. Create the same user again, still in the Accounts preference pane
7. Copy all the backup files over to the newly created user: sudo cp -r /Users/$$USER_backup$$ /Users/$$USER$$
8. Change permissions on the moved files: sudo chown -R $$USER$$ /Users/$$USER$$
9. Logout of root and log back in to $$USER$$

Conclusion

This seemed to fix the problem and luckily everything is up and running again, smoothly, and this time without FileVault.