Roomba isn't saving us time

I hate to say it, but the Roomba isn't saving us time. I love the Roomba and Scooba, but the promise of time savings just isn't there. How can that be you ask? It is quite simple; my wife and I hate vacuuming and the cleaning crew we had wasn't doing a good job, so the house wasn't getting vacuumed regularly. While our house is usually "in order", we had dog hair all over the place and the carpets didn't get vacuumed as often as they should.

So now that the Roomba is handling the floors, our carpets look better, there is less dog hair on the tile and our house looks better, but it still isn't saving us time!

Lovely Core Data Issue; is it a bug or a feature?

I've had a few users report that they lost all their data when upgrading to the latest ReceiptWallet or DocumentWallet. This really concerns me as I don't like data loss (who does?). The latest version of both programs switched to using an SQLite database when users were running under Leopard as it is much faster. At the same time, I changed my object model as I was including lots of models that I didn't use (damn Apple sample code included all models in all frameworks). So the changes weren't minor, bug I did my testing and things were working fine. It was in beta for awhile and I had no reports of issues.

Today I decided to revisit the issue and try to solve the problem once and for all. In order to determine when object model I'm using, I add a model version to the metadata which gets written out to the database. I had code like this when I was setting up the data, at the end of the conversion.

[self generateMetadata]

New rate structure

I've been thinking about a new rate structure for clients. It would go something like this:

Is push email really useful?

The holy grail of email seems to be push email where you instantly get your new email as it arrives. For years which my NotifyMail program, I basically had this as well on my desktop, but not on mobile devices. With IMAP idle, NotifyMail is obsolete for the desktop, but push email still seems the rage on handheld devices as everyone wants to be like RIM with the BlackBerry. I didn't think much of this until last week when I saw someone say that the iPhone can't be an enterprise device because it doesn't have push email and you can only have it check email automatically every 15 minutes. To that, I respond, so what? Is email all that important that I have to get messages instantly? Of course not, if something is all that important, people can get me with SMS, IM, or can you believe it, the phone. Why does everyone think that push email (and for that matter constant connectivity) is the only way to work? I think that this causes too much stress and is not needed.

I'm sure people will argue with me that they must be in touch all the time and have to get email anywhere and everywhere, but I'd prefer not to have my life run by a little box.