Sync Services can make a mess and here's a way to clean it (maybe)

I think that Apple's Sync Services is an excellent technology and has a lot of potential. It is not quite mature, but I have high hopes for it in the future. One of the problems that has been brought up on the Sync Services developer mailing list is that there is no good way for an end user to remove data from Sync Services and unregister it if they remove a program. All developers are in the same boat and Bare Bones, developers of the popular Yojimbo that I've blogged about have written a FAQ about it for their product. Unfortunately this really isn't a solution, especially for people that want to keep clean systems.

This morning, I decided to attempt to write up a solution to this issue. While my attempt doesn't solve everything (it only unregisters items from Sync Services and doesn't actually remove the data from Sync Services or .Mac), I've decided to put it out there and include the source code. The app has been lightly tested and may cause issues on your system, so only use it if you know what you're doing. By downloading this, you take full responsibility for using it and if it nukes your data, I'm sorry, but there is nothing I can do. Having said that, make sure you have a backup first and good luck. This app uses undocumented Apple calls and is likely to break sometime in the future.

You can download my creation here. It's quite small, so don't be surprised if it downloads almost instantly.

The application and source code are free to use and modify. While I'd appreciate some feedback on if it helps, there is no requirement to do so.

Am I too thick headed to see something funny?

Recently I've heard a bit about the movie Napolean Dynamite and I'm not sure what the attraction to the movie is. I saw the movie in December and did not funny it at all funny; in fact, I thought it was quite stupid. Others seem to think it is one of the funniest movies ever. What am I missing?

Telemarketers be gone!

A few years ago, when I became self employed, I was looking to simplify some things about my business and decided to get rid of our second and third phone lines (one was a fax line). I had to find a way to handle the occasional inbound fax and messages for work. All my outgoing calls were made on our home phone as we have unlimited long distance and don't get that many calls on it. I decided to get a number from JConnect as it handled both voicemail and faxes. It worked out well and I soon realized that I should just give out that number as our home number so that we could cut down on the telemarketers. That started working OK, but its important didn't solidify until we moved and we chose not to forward our old number and couldn't keep it. Now we use this number exclusively for all, but family, friends, and a few others. It has been a huge help in eliminating unwanted phone calls. The $165 per year is a small price to pay for this little bit of peace and quiet.

Is my job easy?

I sure hope my job isn't easy, because if it was, I'm definitely doing something wrong because it isn't easy for me. Over the years, I've heard people say that other jobs are easy or are hard without ever experiencing them. Take teaching, for example, outsiders think that teachers get it easy with summers off and leave school around 2:30 pm or so. What they don't see is teachers getting up at 6:15 am, staying at school until 4 pm and then coming home and doing lesson planning for awhile (at least the dedicated ones). Do I know what it is like to be a teacher? Not really, I've given a few lectures for my local CERT, taught CPR and First Aid in college, but I really don't know what it is like to be a teacher day in and day out. However, my experiences have shown me that it is damn hard to prepare for a simple lecture and can't imagine what it is like to prepare for 5 classes a day.

What about my job? Well, as I say, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. There are some "easy" parts of my job, but they don't last long because easy usually means done quickly so they're over and done with in the blink of an eye. Some people think that a feature or a design is easy just because some other application may have implemented it. Do I have any idea how long someone else spent implementing something? A feature may look simple on the surface, but the time and effort implementing a feature could be huge.

If I ever say that someone else's job is easy (and I haven't done that job myself), I need to remind myself that I need to be slapped.