The Falcon's Nest

If you are in the habit of trying out every new Opera release -- be it a final, a technology preview, a beta or a weekly build; and if all you do is upgrade (i.e. install over the previous Opera installation) instead of doing a clean install; chances are by now your profile\opera6.ini file (under Help > About Opera, see Preferences under the Paths section for its location on your machine) is a veritable mess.

Due to the ever-evolving nature of Opera, many settings in the profile\opera6.ini file change not only in their values but their syntax and semantics as well. Failure to use a well-formed preferences file can cause all sorts of problems; starting with weird page loading, bad CPU and memory usage and so on.

If you think doing a clean install and migrating all your settings and mail over is a big task you are not feeling up to, the simple procedure below may give you enough of what you need. As always, remember to make a full back-up of your Opera profile and mail folders before doing this.

• As described above, note the location of your profile\opera6.ini file.
• (Optional) Run Tools > Delete private data to clear your cache and cookies.
• Close Opera completely.
• Delete the profile\opera6.ini file.
• Start Opera again.

This will re-create the profile\\opera6.ini file from the operadef6.ini file in your Opera installation folder, and will contain data as if you had done a clean Opera installation. It should not affect your customizations (toolbar or menu setups, bookmarks, notes, passwords etc) or your mail / feeds.

You will lose the customizations you had made by directly editing the profile\opera6.ini file, of course -- and this is mostly a good thing (they are what probably landed you in this mess to start with). In Opera 9, you should be using opera:config instead of editing this file by hand, anyway. You will also lose the personal information you had entered in Tools > Preferences > Wand > Personal information, but it is easy enough to enter again.

I usually don't blog about non-Opera topics, but I felt compelled to write about this...

While we enjoy the end of the year and the various festivities that accompany it, it is perhaps also the time to take a few moments and think back. The past year has brought many wonderful things (free Opera -- who would've thought of it? ), but it has also wrought havoc in several places across the world.

Mother Nature claimed the year to reassert her dominance over the world, and shatter the illusion us humans had of controlling it. The Boxing Day tsunami almost exactly a year ago that literally rocked the world, the hurricanes in the Carribbean and southern USA, the floods in Mumbai and south India and the earthquake in north-east Pakistan and north-west India were all stark reminders of how helpless we are when the earth unleashes some of its fury at the way we have been treating it for the past several generations. It is time to remember the lives lost, the damage incurred.

It is also time to thank those who came forward in the time of need to help their fellow humanity. Charitable organizations as well as philanthropic individuals across the world gave generously of their money and even personal, physical effort; and we should be grateful to all of them.

And while it may be beyond our means to donate money or physically travel to the disaster zone to help, we can still do something in our own way. For the web-savvy amongst us, there is The World-Wide Help Group -- a voluntary newsgroup and rallying point for power bloggers, wiki experts, database adepts, etc, for calls to action and volunteers to provide information post-disasters. It is a commendable effort to harness the goodwill, the togetherness, the willingness to help expressed by blog writers and readers over the last year, and we should do our best to make it a success.