Thursday, August 4, 2005
Pre-breakfast: 2 bananas. Usual breakfast at the cafeteria. Migrated data from the shared OSACA calendar, tweaked shared calendar permissions. Made live some web updates Cindy had approved. Updated the electives schedule for Cindy. Chatted with Cindy about HTML e-mail templates—she likes them a lot. Helped Joel update his and Ena's e-mail address in some listservs for which they are editors. Gave Cindy some tips on using Outlook and Outlook Web Access. Helped Charles understand our Campus Locator System database. Lunch with Joel at Dragonfly (415-661-7755, 420 Judah St at 9th), a new restaurant of contemporary Vietnamese cuisine. Migrated Chris's calendar from Meeting Maker to Outlook. It took about 4 hours, and it's mostly Palm's fault. There's no direct way I know to convert calendar items from Meeting Maker to Outlook, but you can go from Meeting Maker to a Palm Pilot then from the Palm Pilot to Outlook. It took so long because we kept running into problems and the Palm troubleshooting documents didn't anticipate the behavior we had gotten. For example, we could perform a sync, and the log file would reflect that data got transferred, but no data actually got transferred. The solution I figured out myself was: get a computer that had never had Palm Desktop installed on it. Install Palm Desktop using the original CD-ROM that came with the Palm Pilot (in this case, a Palm m515). During installation, choose to install Microsoft Outlook conduits. Download the latest version of Palm Desktop, then install that over the first Palm Desktop. Download and install updated (PocketMirror?) software from Ch????. The Outlook conduits can be installed only from the original CD-ROM and only if when you originally installed Palm Desktop from that CD-ROM you chose to install the Microsoft Outlook conduits. At that time, we were using Eudora instead of Outlook, so the Outlook conduits were never installed. We kept performing steps we thought would sync data to Outlook but the data never came across and the instructions on the Palm website for how to sync data to Outlook never accounted for this possibility, and the error log never accounted for this possibility, so we had no clue how to fix the problem. Palm, in my opinion, made 3 critically poor decisions. The first was to include the Outlook conduits only on the original CD-ROM. The second was to force the user during installation to choose either Palm Desktop or Microsoft Outlook for synching. (A much better design would have been to give the user both options by default and simply use whatever they request to use whenever they request it.) The third was for the log file to presume that data got transferred when it really didn't get transferred. (Or, you could also say the third critical problem was that the log file was a method of troubleshooting to begin with.) I have always had very frustrating experiences synching Palm Pilots to Windows apps, and consequently I will never buy one for myself or recommend them to others. You might say I give two thumbs down to Palm. Tomorrow we attempt to sync data from Outlook to Chris's new Treo. Home. Dinner at home with Patrick: combination pizza with extra red and yellow bell peppers. Unpacked the Mac Mini, then realized that I don't have the right connectors. I still use an old KVM with PS2 mini-din connectors for mouse and keyboard and the Mac Mini only uses USB, so I got a connector cable thing from Cyberguys for about $13 and ordered some CD-R and DVD-R media at the same time. The Mac Mini we bought has a DVD burner, so finally we'll have someplace to put all the Simpsons episodes we want to save besides our Iomega Rev drive tapes. (I never did get a DVD burner for the PC.) Archived documents to PDF.