An Exciting Time for Democracy

The proposition 8 trial will be posted to YouTube! What a wonderful way to show some transparency!

Why Basecamp is Evil

It's the old wound: they hold your data hostage. Over at basecamp there is an export option, but it doesn't include uploaded files. Which I presume means that links to files will break. I guess the good news is that data hostage taking isn't just for Big Heartless Corp anymore.

In all fairness, I don't think 37signals intended to be evil. It just sort of turned out that way: their tools and data are so tightly coupled that it would be very difficult to extract one from the other. (And one could argue that the tools & data are themselves tightly coupled to the runtime: Ruby on Rails hosted on Amazon EC2.).

I think the idea is that you want to make tools to help your users organize their information, but that doesn't require the tool to make further use of the organization that they have worked so hard to create.

Of course, if I was really smart I'd write a little program that pulled apart the finite state machine that is basecamp - normal recursive wget will not work because of the ajax.

How to solve "cannot connect" problem with VMWare Fusion after Migration Assistant

'The problem:

I recently used the Migration Assistant to move my applications and data over to
the a new machine from my old MacBook.

Everything works fine, except for VMWare Fusion. When I attempt to start either
my Windows XP or Ubuntu images, VMWare complains, "vmware fusion cannot
connect to the virtual machine. Make sure you have access rights..." and
so on.

I did a search through your knowledge base for both the error message
and "migration assistant". No luck. I did a Google search too, and there
are many people with this same problem. The resolution that apparently
works is to reinstall VMWare. But I figure I'd check with you first.

Here's the answer from tech support (which was rather prompt!):

You may need to reinstall Fusion but hopefully not just yet.
Try these steps first to repair the permissions of the virtual machine filles:

1. Log in as a user with administrative rights.
2. Navigate to Documents->Virtual Machines (or wherever you saved your VM files)
3. Right-click the .vmwarevm file that corresponds to the name of the virtual machine you want to work with and choose "Get Info".
4. Unlock the padlock at the bottom of the window using your administrator password.
5. From "File & Extension" remove the .vmwarevm extension.
6. Close the "Get Info" window. This file now displays as a folder.
7. Right-click the folder and choose "Get Info"
8. Under "Sharing & Permissions" beside your user name and "Everyone" ensure the Privilege is set to "Read & Write".
9. Click the gear next to + - at the bottom of the window and choose "Apply to enclosed items".
10. From "File & Extension" re-add the .vmwarevm extension to the end of the file name.
11. Close the "Get Info" dialog.
12. Restart your Mac.
13. Launch VMware Fusion and run the virtual machine.

If your issue has been resolved by this email please let me know.

If you have any questions please feel free to contact me by responding to this email.

Regards,

Kellan Adamson
Desktop Technical Support Specialist
Global Support Services
VMware Inc.

Here's my answer, based on the above:

1. Start Terminal
2. cd Doc[tab]/Virt[tab] (should yield something like cd Documents/Virtual\ Machines.localized/)
3. chmod -R o+rw *.vmwarevm

It works!