dabgotra.com

Thanks to the following links, I was able to get my new Nokia 6300 to successfully sync with my Mac’s Address Book via iSync:

• http://klauskjeldsen.dk/2007/06/08/free-nokia-6300-isync-plugin/
• http://nokia6300.net/8/new-version-of-the-nokia-6300-isync-plugin
• http://brent.kearneys.ca/technology/2007/how-to-sync-a-nokia-6300-on-osx/
• http://kaspers.freeflux.net/blog/archive/2007/04/13/how-to-isync-a-nokia-6300.html

Unfortunately, two things didn’t sync up: Birthdays and Contact Photos. After politely asking people if there was any way to get these to work (especially photos, as it’s nice to see someone’s picture pop up on the phone for faster recognition before you unceremoniously reject them) I tried to tackle this one on my own. I was able to dig around in the plist files of the Nokia N93 and glean the few lines that make both of these details available to the Nokia 6300 plugin.

Before we begin however, I’ve noticed some problems that can occur with Photo syncing. PLEASE READ THIS THOROUGHLY before continuing: it’ll save some head-banging and frustration later.

Failing to follow the following guidelines will result in a completely failed sync. Should this happen, I simply deleted all of my contacts on the phone (phone memory, not SIM card), tried to determine the problem, and tried again.

Also, note that if you do end up deleting all of the contacts on your phone, you’ll also lose your 1-touch dialing and the entries in your caller groups (but not the groups themselves).

Here we go:

1. Do not use .GIF files — JPG only! (I didn’t test PNG)
2. You cannot drag-and-drop from a web-page directly onto a contact. Although this works for Address Book in that you’ll see the ‘image edit’ window pop-open, and you can save your contact, when it comes to iSync your entire sync will fail. If you want to use someone’s image (from Facebook, for example) simply drag the photo you want from the web-page onto your desktop, and then drag the photo from your desktop onto the Address Book entry’s ‘contact photo’ area. You’re then free to delete the image from your desktop.
3. You cannot sync with a ’smart group’ that you created within Address Book. This has more to do with iSync than the new plugin, but it’s a pain nonetheless. Physical groups only!
4. When a sync fails, you are not told what failed, or why it failed. iSync detailed logs are useless too, stating only:

   5:28:24 PM Error [Nokia 6300] An unexpected error occured.
5:28:24 PM Error Device "Nokia 6300" synchronization failed

   Fun! What I did was create a ‘temp’ group, set iSync to sync with that folder only for contacts, and then slowly add contacts into that temp group until a failure occurred so that I knew what the offending entry was.

The plugin that I’ve created is essentially just the one from the site listed above, but with some additional properties put into the PhoneContuit.plist and SyncEngine.plist files.

As with everyone else, I take no responsibility if this completely fcks up your phone or Address Book, but please do backup both your Address Book (File -> Back Up Address Book…) and your phone’s contacts (I typically just copy everything to SIM). I can say that this has worked fine for me for a day now, with a fair bit of testing. After I cleaned up my offending image-entries, it’s been great.

To install: Quit iSync, download the following zip file, and drag-and-drop the plugin into your system using the shortcut, and sync away.

Nokia 6300 iSync Plugin With Photos

Good luck, let me know how it goes in the comments!

Rummy.

No sound, but imagine if you will: ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’.

In this past month:

1. MacBook hard drive failed
2. VOIP line at home has been a complete POS, but I think that’s due more to Shaw and their “Quality of Service” BS than anything (they throttle VOIP traffic to push people to their own Shaw Digital Phone offering. Sounds great! And it’s only 4 times the price? Sign me up!
3. 2 weeks ago, we were woken up in the middle of the night by some incessant beeping coming from the office. I wandered over, and it turned out that the humble server running this website had issues. The CPU fan had stopped working, and the hardware monitor was (thankfully) alerting of the failure. Any more than a few minutes without a CPU fan and the processor goes up in smoke. A quick fan swap the next day and all was fine.
4. My MacBook is showing some of that discolouration issue that has plagued may other MacBook users. Something about the type of plastic they use is more porous and susceptible to yellowing over a few weeks, but it’s a known problem by Apple. Long story short, I’ll have to send it in AGAIN soon to get the palm-rest area of the laptop replaced
5. Speaking of Apple issues, the 3-year-old worthless-sitting-in-a-drawer battery on Trophy Wife’s iBook was part of the Apple Battery Recall program, so that was sent back and in return a brand new $160 battery was given by Apple. Woo hoo! Thank you Sony for your exploding batteries!
6. Today, I’m sitting in the office about to do some work and notice a strange smell. Burnt something-or-another. I don’t have the best sense of smell (which is quite ironic for those that know me) so I call the smell-master-3000 over to check it out. Yep, something’s on fire in the office.
   
   
   We immediately unplug everything — lamps, power adapters, computers, everything. After much sniffing around, we narrowed the smell down to one of the Linux boxes (specifically, the Ubuntu network-backup box that everything gets RSYNC’d to nightly)
   
   After unscrewing the panel, a few chips fall out of the case, having melted right off of the motherboard. A couple more looked ready to go had we not shut the machine down. Not only did the plastic of the chips melt (causing the burning smell), but they got hot enough to de-solder themselves off the board.
   
   
   I don’t think it would’ve started a fire, but luckily we were home and able to react quickly.

Sheesh. Like I said — no love from the hardware gods lately.

Here’s a quick recap of my MacBook saga last week for you all to use as an anecdote as to why you should backup your data daily.

Wednesday evening, Sept 06, I’m playing around on the MacBook and it freezes. Completely unresponsive. I think it’d had only crashed like that once before so it was odd, but no big deal so I hold the power button down to shut down. Press power button again and after a few minutes, I get nothing but a folder icon with an question mark. Huh?

Long story short, after a bunch of diagnostics running Drive Utility off of the OSX install disc, I determine the hard drive had crashed. Kaput.

Next morning, I call Apple support, and we run through a bunch of tests (memory, reset the PRAM, etc.) and same conclusion. I’d spent about 45 minutes on the phone with the lady and finally she said that I had to drop it off at a local repair centre to get the drive replaced and here was my case number.

I decide to go to MyMacDealer, a relative newcomer in Edmonton’s Apple market especially compared to WestWorld, but they’re nice and close by — just a 5 minute drive to Whyte.

A 20 minute drive through lunch-time rush hour traffic later, I explain the problem, told them of all the tests I’d run, gave them the case number, and handed the MacBook over. They said that depending on how long it would take to order the drive in from Apple, it would take only a few days. Slight chance for Friday, but likely Monday afternoon my machine would be ready.

As I was out of town for the weekend, Monday would be fine. Monday afternoon I call, to find out the status of the machine, and they hadn’t even tested it yet. “Tested the machine? It’s a bad hard drive!” “Yes, but our techs need to check first.”

Tuesday rolls around, and the Tech finally started to look at it, to run some diagnostics.

Wednesday, the drive was ordered.

Friday, the drive arrived, and Friday afternoon it was installed and the trophy wife picked up the machine for me. I was lucky it wasn’t Monday as they rushed the drive in.

It’s frustrating. If you know it’s going to take a week-and-a-half, don’t bullshit me and tell me it’ll be done in 2 days. After the 3rd phone call I was about *this* close to grabbing the MacBook and going to WestWorld after talking to their techs, but resisted. The people at MyMacDealer were friendly enough, but I don’t appreciate false repair estimates. Whether WestWorld would be any different will remain to be seen in the future.

ANYHOW, I have an Ubuntu server with a 300gb drive in it that acts as my backup server. Before The Big Trip, I was fairly diligent in doing network backups on both laptops via the great SuperDuper! software. Upon return however, I never did said complete system backup due to sheer laziness of clicking a few buttons.

Luckily we had our trip photos on the iBook, and even mailed backup cd’s of our photos home from Prague, but I did manage to lose photos from a friend’s wedding, and some other things. I was able to do a data recovery on some of the camera memory cards using the wonderful EXIF Untrasher, but it doesn’t recover RAW images so some of the original shots are gone for good. There are backups on this site under the photo gallery, but they’re compressed and not of the greatest JPEG quality.

E-mails are all backed up in GMail, so those were fine.

The photos aren’t the problem though. It’s all of the system tweaks, scrips I write, and software I install on an almost daily basis. It was going to be a pain in the ass to get that set up again. Even my Ubuntu Parallels VM had to be recreated from scratch. Fun.

After the crash, I went out and bought a 320 GB external backup drive for a paltry $120. After partitioning the drive, I copied over the 50 GB .sparseimage MacBook backup from June to a new bootable partition. Pop in the OSX CD, go to drive utilities, click on restore, and nothing.

Turns out there’s a bug in the Intel OSX GUI that Apple just won’t fix with the resotre function in Drive Utilities. Bastards. So, I cracked open Terminal, typed the “asr” command and restored via the command line as per some instructions I Googled.

1 hour later, my machine was back up and running perfectly, albeit with software and settings dating back to June 2. However, no need to set up e-mail accounts, reimport old photos, documents, WPA wireless keys, bookmarks, etc., etc.

I now backup both laptops to the external drive every night. Takes 5 minutes. Much less effort than the hours I’m going to have to put in to get the MacBook back to where I want it.

No more excuses. The most frustrating aspect is that being in IT I should have known better, but at least now I’m going to pester everyone I know in to backing up their stuff as well.

For the amount of money I spent on the external drive compared to the time spent on data recovery, it factors down a couple bucks an hour. Your time is worth more than that, right?

After a long delay, posts will start appearing here again. For starters, take a look at how the next version of OS X (called Leopard, due in January) will do windows management.

I’d expect this groundbreaking vision to be ‘discovered’ by Microsoft in Vista 2, about 5 years from now. ;-)

Off to NYC and then the Big Trip. Those of you keeping tabs will get an e-mail from me shortly about where we’ll update our summer gridskipping. Pics will all be posted on this site’s album, but the blog will be elsewhere so that worlds don’t collide.

but I even wore my lucky orange shorts. MY LUCKY ORANGE SHORTS!!!! THAT SHOULD BE A GUARANTEED VICTORY.

Damnit.

Sure is quiet out tonight.

Okay, so I seem to do nothing but quote and rip-off Covered in Oil, but that does not detract from the fact that each and every person reading this post (that pretty much amounts to Allison) MUST GO HERE NOW: Knob Hockey.

Here are two examples of clips from their site:

GO. NOW. Knob Hockey.