From Delicious to Diigo

Like everyone who does a lot of web search, I like to bookmark web links for future reference. For years, I've trusted Delicious's friendly social bookmarking service until the most recent change of ownership messed it up almost completely. Unfortunately, I maintained the Delicious account using an email address that I do not check very often, so when AVOS sent a notification email about the deadline to transfer existing bookmarks to another service, I was oblivious! But who would have ever thought a service as useful and as popular as Delicious would one day be discontinued like that.

In case anyone also faces the harsh reality of having missed AVOS's deadline, I will share my exodus journey from Delicious to Diigo, another bookmarking site.

1. Access the old Delicious servers to retrieve your bookmarks, as described at:
http://gabrielleabelle.livejournal.com/337468.html

To know how to edit host files on Mac OS X, refer to:
http://www.switchingtomac.com/tutorials/how-to-edit-the-hosts-file-in-os-x

As of Oct 30th 2011, it's still possible to access these servers. You will be prompted to log in with your Yahoo username and password. After this, you will arrive at a plain looking page.

2. Export bookmarks in .htm format by going to Settings. Under Bookmarks, select Export/Backup Bookmarks.

3. Import the htm list to Diigo. In Diigo, go to Tools (top right corner menu). Under Web Services, select Import bookmarks and browse to the .htm list.

Et voila, you have rescued all your Delicious bookmarks, together with tags, to Diigo!

What an unnecessary hassle and waste of time you might say. But hey, I am actually relishing the fact that with Diigo toolbar Add-on for Firefox, any bookmark I save from now on can be set as "private by default". Delicious never made this feature available to its users, despite numerous appeals.

P.S: Prior to attempting the above method, I followed another advice at http://leo.gaggl.com/2011/10/export-delicious-bookmarks-in-xml. It gave me a .xml list of exported bookmarks which Diigo had troubles importing. Specifically it says "Oops. Something wrong. Please check the file size and format. Don't hesitate to contact us (with your diigo user name) if you still experience problems."

Hải Vân Pass

Hải Vân (literally translated from Vietnamese: Ocean Cloud) Pass marks the border between Đà Nẵng City and Thừa Thiên-Huế Province, Vietnam. Prior to 2005, this pass, especially dangerous during rainy days or otherwise foggy weather at dusk, used to be the only way to traverse between the North and South of Vietnam. Since then however, Hai Van Tunnel, built between 1998 and 2005, has taken over the role of the pass as the primary transportation linkage. Banned from tunnel access, motorbikes, gas tankers and carriers of live animals, as well as some tourist coaches are among the few vehicles frequenting the pass nowadays.

What it means for tourists is that there is very little traffic on the pass, which would make for a lovely motorbike sightseeing trip at your own pace. Although I am overseas most of the time, I do ride on motorbike whenever I am back to Vietnam. Most recently, during Tết (Vietnamese New Year holiday), Nicolas and I decided to travel to Hue for a few days, and we wanted to do that via Hai Van Pass, on a motorbike, motivated by praising words of gorgeous sights from travellers who have taken this route.

View of the Hai Van Pass in the direction towards Hue, taken at the top of the Pass. The highest point is said to be 496m from sea level.

Too bad when I mentioned this, my parents objected right away, unconvinced of my ability to handle the pass's twisting bends, especially with a heavier person behind. There are also rumours about the risks of falling victims to road crimes due to lack of road patrols and traffic in general. ... We ended up arranging for a car with a driver that would take us all the way to Hue's city centre, not skipping the Pass of course. This set us back by US$ 55.

It was a beautifully clear and sunny day in February when we departed. Seeing that road visibility was excellent, and that there was a reasonable number of motorbikes braving the road, I actually regretted not doing it myself!

Traffic on Hai Van Pass (Photo credit: Nicolas Boichat)

I think many of those people must be going from Da Nang to Hue and vice versa to visit their relatives, as part of our Tet customs. Completing the pass on a day like this takes as fast as 30 minutes to as long as a little over an hour, depending on how long you stop for photo-taking.

I will definitely keep this road trip in mind for next time, if the weather is favourable and the timing is neither too early nor late (just a safety precaution).

Shop houses at the top of the pass. There is a post office too but I don't know whether the service there is reliable.

Recover Picasa albums from backup files

I've been using Picasa for more than 2 years now. It's a pretty neat tool (especially considering that it's free!) to sort photos and quickly upload to Facebook. Recently though, the hard drive of my Macbook failed and I had to re-install the OS which led me to figure out how to recall files that have been backed up by various applications, including Picasa.

1. To recover a lost album, first locate its most recent backup file (with a .pal extension) or that of any other date you prefer. On my Mac, it's in User/Library/Application Support/Google/Picasa3/Picasa3Albums/backup.

In the same directory, there should be another folder with a funny name (like ce5639026adb24fbfbfb4dded3c37e4f). This is the current database; it contains information about all the albums (or none) that should appear in Picasa if you are to start the application immediately. This is saved from your last Picasa session. In case no such folder exists, just open and close Picasa to generate one.

2. In the backup folder, there are many sub-folders each named after a certain date where some activities take place in Picasa. Each folder has some .pal files with very cryptic names such as 95a8b8e741e769511d518d04410be0c1.

To know which .pal file refers to the album you're looking for, open them one by one with a text edit application. You will see that listed are the paths that lead to all pictures in that album. For example, $Pictures/Planets/Jupiter.JPG/.

Also take note of the database ID (abbr: DBID) provided at the second line from the top of the document, e.g: 2e2bcb8311ab2ed72895a05958ac435f.

3. Make sure Picasa is not already on. Copy the appropriate .pal file(s) into the current database folder mentioned previously.

4. Launch Picasa and you should see your lost album re-appear!

What happened is that when Picasa is launched, it will look into the current database folder to find which .pal files have a different DBID from the current database, and update those into the new session. When the session is terminated, the foreign DBID is then converted to that of the current ID.

If your album is lost because you have moved the pictures that belong to it, you will need to edit the paths contained in the associated .pal file. For more details, refer here