Last whines of the RAZR - it's not easy to clean it out

This past week Facebook was fronting for the Hotel California (You can checkout, but you can never leave...). Years ago I had a similar experience with trying to eliminate a Microsoft Passport account -- later Microsoft cleared that up.

It's no surprise. I've been in the startup gig. "Erase customer data" is the sort of thing that never gets beyond "priority C" -- but funding ends mid-way through the "A list". Facebook is unusually bad, but not qualitatively different.

On the other hand, there's the Motorola RAZR from Hell. There's no easy way to leave that sucker!

I did it anyway.

I'd replaced the Sprint V3M RAZR with a low cost AT&T Nokia (better phone too) enroute to iPhone 2.0. It's about twelve months old and in surprisingly good shape -- so I wanted to get the phone to someone who'd really use it. Any money for me would be nice.

I probably paid $150 to $200 less than a year ago, Second Rotation offered me $50 (shipping included). Motorola phones depreciate fast. The price/hassle ratio was good enough for me, so I accepted the offer. I rounded up all the gear, including tracking down the original 64MB MicroSD card.

Then I had to erase my tracks a bit. I'm not worried about someone plumbing the on-phone memory, I just didn't want my contact list available. Turns out Motorola never bothered to provide a complete phone clean-up utility.

Here's what I had to do:

1. I tried calling with the phone and got a reassuring "not activated" message.
2. From the manual I learned of the Security Menu options to remove contacts and "reset" the phone. I needed to know the security code to do this, but I'd never set one up. Turns out the Sprint guy set one up on purchase. Maybe they told me then what it was, but I don't recall it. Happily they followed the convention described in the manual -- the security code was the last four digits of my phone number. Now I know to set one up early.
3. I formatted the Micro-SD card from my desktop (FAT).
4. I found an option to completely clear my call log.
5. I had do do a few other manual content cleanups.

I'll miss my RAZR. It gave me something I could really rale against.

10.5.2 fixes AppleWorks and more

Although 10.5.2 isn't ready for me, it seems that Leopard really has emerged from beta. A commenter to a GT post of mine tells us that 10.5.2 restores a lot of applications that died under 10.5 (but not, of course, Classic).

Gordon's Tech (comments): Leopard breaks AppleWords, what about Classic

After leopard 10.5.2 and graphics update AppleWorks not only works but works better. As do all the apps I had pulled off as not working under leopard. AOL, which crashed under Leopard now works ...

So 10.5.2 is the real 10.5.0. That means we have two more updates before it's truly solid, and that people who need to get work done might consider 10.5.3.

iPhoto Library Manager merge testing

I did some testing of iPhoto Library Manager's Library merge abilities using two test Libraries. My test Libraries included:

1. video in both
2. edit of a few images (see if import both original and current)
3. comments, keywords (overlapping and distinct), titles
4. event comments
5. album comments
6. album name collision: smart and dumb
7. keywords
8. ratings
9. events

iPhoto was inexplicably crashy, pre-merge -- when I was creating the test Libraries. Otherwise the merge went as expected. All of the above metadata, including both "Current" and "Original" images and video were all imported. As expected the following data was lost:

Smart albums (become dumb albums)
Books
Calendars
Slideshows
Web galleries (these will be turned into photocasts in the merged library)

In terms of metadata preservation this is significantly better than Aperture merger, but I've only tested on small Libraries. I expect to have some real world tests in a week or two.

I am disappointed that Apple's never provide a Library merge tool

iPhoto why so suddenly crash?

Did some recent software update break iPhoto completely? What gives?

I've been doing some testing of iPhoto Library Manager merge functions using two small 20 image test Libraries. These are both new, very generic Libraries. I've crashed iPhoto at least six times doing basic manipulations of these test images. I'm not talking merges, I mean editing album names, adding comments, etc.

Weird.

Update 2/18/08: If this turns out to be a persistent problem on 10.4 but not 10.5, the suspicious among us will start suspiciousing ....

OS X 10.5.2 breaks sync services again: new upgrade rule

One of the benefits of reading the Spanning Sync blog is that it's the "canary in the coal mine". Apple routinely breaks everything, but the company seems to have special hatred for synchronization functions.

So it's not surprising that 10.5.2 fixes some sync services bugs, only to introduce new bugs:

Spanning Sync Blog: Mac OS X 10.5.2 Fixes Some Bugs, Introduces Others

This week Apple released Mac OS X Update 10.5.2, and while it fixes the notorious Leopard iCal bug present in 10.5 and 10.5.1, it introduces another bug with identical symptoms, plus others:

• Synchronized events are not reflected in iCal
• Endless sync conflicts when syncing with .Mac
• Duplicate calendars

Our Mac software architect Larry Hendricks has posted a comprehensive discussion of the new problems caused by 10.5.2 and their solutions to the Spanning Sync Google Group.

Apple is aware of these issues, which affect not only Spanning Sync but also applications like Plaxo, Entourage, BusySync, and .Mac itself, and is reportedly working on fixes.

Lots of problems.

Synchronization is very hard to do right, and quite easy to screw up. Apple's been doing the latter, so I'm guessing they've got their "A team" working somewhere else.

I've long said I won't go to "Leopard" until 10.5.3, but now I'm adding a new rule: 10.5.3 or later with Spanning Sync blessings.

Aperture 2: consolidating two iPhoto Libraries

I have several iPhoto Libraries. In theory they can be consolidated with iPhoto Library Manager (which I've registered) or one of several potentially risky techniques, but my tests a few years ago did not go well.

Apple's answer to this problem is "buy Aperture". Since I'm testing Aperture 2.0 prior to purchase I tried merging two libraries "by reference":

Macworld | From iPhoto to Aperture

... When importing pictures, Aperture can copy images into its library, thus creating duplicates of each picture, or it can reference, or point to, the existing files in your iPhoto Library folder. Although you’ll save disk space by referencing your iPhoto files, you’ll lose out on a key advantage of using Aperture: its Vault feature won’t back up referenced files (see “Why Move to Aperture?”).

If you’d like to try out Aperture but aren’t ready to import your images into the program, consider using referenced files as a trial run. When you import images from iPhoto, go to the Store Files pop-up menu in Aperture’s Import pane and select In Their Current Location. If you later decide that you want to use Aperture as your main photo-management tool, you can import the original files from iPhoto by selecting File: Consolidate Masters....

I imported two iPhoto Libraries into a single Aperture Library this way. Each became a project.

The first thing I checked was whether the image counts matched up. There were 2071 + 1772 = 3843 images in my two imported Libraries; but this is the count of "current" images. It doesn't count the originals of any edited images.

Aperture imports an original and "current' image as a stack, so each image is counted. I typed opt-; to collapse all stacks and, happily, my image count then matched the iPhoto total.

So that was nice! Those Libraries didn't have Videos however, and we know Aperture can't handle video files. So we'll see how that goes.

The images keep their titles, comments, ratings and keywords. Smart albums (annoyingly) become "dumb" albums. Much worse -- comments on Rolls, Albums (Collections) and Events are completely lost. Aperture can't handle metadata at that level.

Slideshows and photo books, as well as videos, can't make the move either.

That's a lot of lost metadata...

Update 2/17/2008: I added a third iPhoto Library of 8,000 items, again by reference. This killed Aperture. I got an endless SPOD (spinning pizza of death) when I tried to browse the complete image collection. I had to kill Aperture.

Scott Gruby likes BusySync: Google to iCal synchronization

Scott's an independent Mac developer, so I pay attention to his recommendations ...

Scott Gruby’s Blog » Blog Archive » Simple Google to Mac syncing

... I’ve been longing to easily sync my calendar with Google so that my wife and I can keep our calendars in order. I just started using BusySync from BusyMac. Previously I was using another product, but lately it just seemed to take hours to sync and it bogged down my system. I’ve known the BusyMac folks for years and they used to write Palm software. So far, it works extremely well. Make a change on either side and within 5 minutes, the other side gets the update....

This might work for us, but what I really want is a very high quality Outlook to Google solution. When I last looked I couldn't find the quality I needed (it's a very hard problem).