Support didn't treat me like an idiot

I noticed that my internet connection was slow, so I rebooted my cable modem and the modem didn't come back online, so I called Time Warner Cable Business Class (I have a business account). The guy I spoke with didn't have me do all the stupid stuff like reboot my computer, turn around 3 times, blame the computer, etc. He tested the cable modem and found (after it came back online) that there was high packet loss ( > 60%). While the problem hasn't been resolved, I'm confident that it will be soon. Time Warner has always been pretty responsive, especially on a business account; one time they wanted to come out a few hours after I called to replace the cable modem (I was actually out of town), but then called me back a few times to give me status and the problem ended up being something they could solve on the headend.

UPDATE: I got a call back and the earliest appointment they had was tomorrow morning, but they are putting in an emergency work order for this afternoon which means someone will be here between about 12 pm and sometime this evening. Uggh. Hard to work without the internet. What did we do before the internet?

The joys of syncing

For over 4 years now, I've actively been doing development in the sync arena trying to get devices to talk together (I actually did some synchronization stuff in college so my history with sync goes back a bit). This is an area that is under appreciated and people seem to only say things when it doesn't work. Syncing is hard; there are no right ways to sync, just wrong ways. No 2 devices or machines match up there data exactly, so choices have to be made to get things to sync. We do our best, but don't always succeed. My recent experience with syncing has nothing to do with the software I write as I don't use it; I don't use it because I don't like it, I don't use it because I don't use the devices we sync. 2 weeks ago, I bought a Motorola RAZR to replace my Samsung A900 with the idea that I could sync it, or at least sync the contacts. Without much difficulty, I was able to sync the contacts. The calendar was another story, it seemed to die depending on what I was syncing; I suspect it had to do with detached events or some kind of repeating events. So I gave up on the calendars, but was still pleased with the contacts. That was until last week when I started noticing that I was missing email addresses for people. It appears that one of my syncs eat secondary email addresses for people. I think I've rebuilt most of my contacts and it doesn't appear to be happening more. While I was a little annoyed at the iSync team/Sync Services team initially, having worked on sync, I know how hard it is to prevent problems. Probably some minor bug that caused the first sync to nuke the entries. Oh well, at least it wasn't the stuff I wrote that ate my data.

Charging a Motorola RAZR over USB

The Motorola RAZR has a mini USB plug on it for charging and hooking to a computer which is great as I have lots of those cables lying around. Unfortunately it won't charge over USB from a Mac out of the box. Luckily, I know some tricks and someone told me the magic to get it to charge. I whipped up a little program that tells the RAZR (or any other Motorola cell phone) to charge over USB. My app is free to download. If you like it, please take a look at my ReceiptWallet program and consider purchasing it. The app is pretty simple; place it in your applications folder, launch it and set it as a login item. Whenever you plug in your phone, it should start charging. If your machine goes to sleep, it will stop charging. (For those curious, all the program does is open and close the USB interface on the phone.)

If you can't get the program to work, unfortunately there is nothing I can do about it other that to suggest to Motorola to fix their phone so that it charges automatically when plugged in via USB.

Update, there are "sync only" USB cables that allow you to charge Motorola phones without MotoCharger; I have one and it works quite well. I've also decided to post the source code. You can grab it here. There are no restrictions on the source, just please don't claim it for your own. If you like it or use it, please use my Amazon link to buy something.

Overlooking the obvious

In my latest program, ReceiptWallet, you can create and delete receipts. While I was developing it, I always hit the Delete key to remove receipts as I'm pretty keyboard centric and don't like using the mouse if I can help it. The Delete menu item is always dimmed and I have received a number of messages asking how to delete receipts. I can't believe I forgot to hook up the menu item for Delete. Stupid me. So in the next version, I hooked up the menu item and added a big Delete icon on the toolbar.