Author: tonyandrewmeyer

dev, education, dad

Sharing OS X Address Books between users

Until today, I hadn’t bothered entering any contacts into my Address Book in OS X.  I did have lots of contacts – but they were all entered in my wife’s account, since she uses it more, and it was convenient to have everything in the one place.

Today, however, I started using Delicious Library (more about that later, but in short: get it), and it integrates with the Address Book for maintaining borrower lists.  So I really needed the entries in my Address Book, too.

Thanks to the great Hawk Wings plug-in and add-in list, I found address-o-sync, a donation-ware utility that lets you sync Address Books across machines via Bonjour.  It’s not entirely clear from the developer’s website, but this does include sync’ing between two users (if they are both logged in at the same time).

As an aside: they have the most bizarre license I have seen – they require members of U.S. President Bush’s Administration to pay many times more than anyone else, as a political statement.  Their software, their rules, I guess, but it seems weird to me (an oft-times software developer) to mix politics into a software license.

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Google Calendar

A post on TUAW pointed me towards Google Calendar – it's just fantastic.

Now, I really only have experience with Outlook's Calendar functionality, which I used pretty heavily in 2002, 2003, and 2004 (and some of 2005) when I was sitting in the office at Massey all day.  Since I switched to working at home I've intended to start using iCal, but just haven't got around to it, and since these days I do most of my work on a Windows laptop, that isn't an ideal situation anyway.

I'm also using gmail more and more [does anyone still need invites these days?  I have heaps] for mail that I do want to interupt me, and leaving the browse-at-leisure mail to be processed with Mail (which does get a copy of all the gmail mail, as a backup).  So gmail is open in Flock most of the time.

So I can see myself using Google Calendar (gCalendar, TUAW calls it) quite a lot, especially if a little calendar turns up in gmail next to the (unused by me, at this point)
chat box.

The interface is great – my connection is only 64Kbs at the moment, and it's still pretty smooth.  All the niceties that you expect from a Google product are there.  Try it out yourself!

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MySky is falling

As half a million or so New Zealanders know, Sky's Digital service died a bit before 6pm yesterday until reviving about 8am this morning (in the middle of my recording the final Gilmore Girls episode, argh).

I understand that (rarely) satellites fail, and that errors like this are a huge problem, but will sometimes happen, and that Sky was probably mostly at the mercy of Optus (who own the satellite) here. The response time wasn't great, but it wasn't as bad as it could be.

My issue is that during the outage, all my MySky box would do is show the "atmospheric conditions" error dialog. I have 60-odd hours of recorded material, which don't need a live signal to display (or shouldn't), and couldn't watch any of it. This should have been the time that MySky shone, because I should have had many hours of material to watch while I couldn't watch/record live TV. Instead, I was stuck with free-to-air TV like everyone else.

Poor design. A "mature" product would not have this flaw.

(I think, although I'm not 100%, that my MySky box was accessing the guide – i.e. pulling data from the satellite feed – when things died. Maybe this problem didn't happen for everyone. I would certainly be interested to know if that was the case).

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The Listener’s Take on MySky

My parents have subscribed to The Listener for as long as I remember. When I left home, I subscribed too, and continued for nine years, until Pamela Stirling took over as editor and turned the magazine into a trashy, pale, copy of what it once was. I do occasionally glance over their website, however, and noticed Russell Brown’s MySky review.

Either they give the reviewers the only working copies, or Brown didn’t use it long enough for it to break, like it has for everyone else I’ve heard of that has it.

Laughably, Brown says:

My Sky, benefiting from the experience of Sky’s siblings in Britain and Australia, is a mature product.

A mature product, in my opinion, is one that works. Not one that fails daily.

He does continue to say:

What that means is that it’s an absolute doddle to use.

So I suppose he has a different definition to “mature product” than most people. MySky is simple to use. However, I really do feel that to be “mature”, a product has to be well tested, which should mean few bugs. MySky is nowhere near that category.

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MySky Live Pause/Rewind Failure

A new (just what I need!) MySky problem appeared yesterday: live pause & rewind no longer worked: they displayed a “this program cannot be recorded” error message, even when nothing else was recording (and on any channel).

I managed to fix this with a reboot (hold down ‘go back’ and ‘select’ on the front panel), but it’s yet another reason to avoid MySky for now.

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Quoting and flormat=flowed

A few days back, Hawk Wings had an interesting post about Why Mail.app quotes the way it does.  The post linked to the "format=flowed FAQ", which is a great piece that explains how format=flowed quoting works, and why it is a good idea.  I’ll update my page about good quoting practice (and the corresponding post) to include some of the material from there, and a reference to it.

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