We’ve been slowly removing American cloud services from Foliovision, as the extent of American duplicity about privacy and industrial espionage becomes apparent. One of the services with which it was relatively difficult to part was Dropbox.
Regardless, with international state terrorist and Bush security czarina Condoleeza Rice on the Board of Directors, Dropbox had to go. To the Dropbox founders credit, the requirement to openly appoint Condoleeze Rice on the Board of Directors suggests someone felt that founders Drew Houston and Arash Ferdowsi needed very close supervision. I would love to have been inside those meetings, before and after. “Remain professional everyone. We all have a job to do.”
What was great about Dropbox is how it integrates tightly with applications like 1password and Typinator which need daily trimming. I’ve moved back to moving around with a thumbdrive. It is more of a nuisance as one must quit all applications to be able to pull the drive.
On the other hand, Dropbox over the last two years has become very CPU greedy, often spending hours using a whole processor or two on indexing. By removing Dropbox my computers have all become much more powerful. You feel the difference more on a Macbook 11″ or an old 17″ Core2Duo than a quad processor Mac but on those dual processor Macs it’s the difference between sluggish and spritely.
When you rip Dropbox out, one must be careful to undo the special setups you might have put in along the way. For the last two months I’ve had regular BBEdit crashes, with all recent versions.
- 8.7.2 launches and runs for about ten or twenty minutes before crashing.
- 9.6.3 crashes on launch.
- 10.5.13 crashes on launch
Strangely TextWrangler ran just fine so I used it as a crutch in the meantime. Still I wanted my BBEdit back for the nice HTML tools, HTMLpreview and occasional grep searches on folders.
Removing BBEdit preferences didn’t help. Removing BBEdit licensing didn’t help. Non-stop crashes on launch. Checking out BBEdit’s list of conflicting software didn’t help (it turns out I’ve dumped all my Contextual Menu extensions already). I’m not the only one to be made nervous by Default Folder. Until version 4.4.4 Default Folder could force crash BBEdit. But it wasn’t a software conflict. It was much simpler.
It turns out I’d put a alias from the ~/Application Support/BBEdit to my Dropbox. What was great about this is that I’d see all my recent files when reopening BBEdit on one of my four or five work computers (yes, I really do wander from working on one computer to another, I’m thinking of cutting back both computers and hours on the computer).
very necessary BBEdit Application Support folder
With the broken alias in place, BBEdit was unable to replace those Application Support files and crashing (harder in more recent versions). Once I removed the alias, everything went back to normal.
Moral of the story: the less you customize and hotrod your computer and OS, the less trouble you will have with said computer.
AK00AK
Alec Kinnear
Alec has been helping businesses succeed online since 2000. Alec is an SEM expert with a background in advertising, as a former Head of Television for Grey Moscow and Senior Television Producer for Bates, Saatchi and Saatchi Russia.
Do you think the presence of Rice on the board means the back door is wide open? Is Rice on a lot of other boards? Not sure what I think about this.
It may be that we should examine ALL tech board of directors and shun those with national security representatives.
I think Ms. Rice is there to make sure that the boys really cooperate. I can’t imagine why two cloud service founders would want someone like that on their board: it just sends the wrong message.
Anywhere you see Eric Schmidt would also be a bad sign. When people complained about privacy issues Schmidt told us we shouldn’t do anything of which we’d be ashamed. Ironically, Mr. Schmidt has even more to hide than most of us.