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November 28, 2006

Why does synchronization have to suck? (, )

by fluffy at 7:40 AM
Whose bright idea was it to synchronize address books and calendars based on matching textual content rather than based on GUIDs? Was it Palm?

The fact that every single device on the planet seems to do that seems to follow from that bad decision, and the fact that every device uses a different set of matching and "cleanup" rules is only too obvious.

Of course this means switching to a GUID scheme is now impossible, because in order to do that you'd need some way of mapping GUIDless entries to GUIDed entries (since most things don't use GUIDs), and you have the same many-to-many relationship all over again.

I thought this shit was supposed to make my life easier, instead of making me spend at least half an hour every day cleaning up sync conflicts in the deluded hope that things will eventually "settle into place," and each time my metadata becomes more and more useless (home and work addresses and phone numbers get swapped around or duplicated, IM usernames get lost, cards marked "company" get marked as a person, my own personal card "fluffy" keeps turning into strange variations of "Fluffy -" or "- Fluffy," as do the cards for people who I only know by first name, and so on.)

Comments

#7961 12/01/2006 06:21 pm
My current setup, which seems to work well enough:

Work: Sync to Palm

Home: Sync to Palm and phone. Set Palm to receive Home and Work calendars and insert new items into Work. Set Phone to receive all calendars except Work and Birthdays and insert new items into Unfiled.

Palm's sync between OSX and Windows (via Chapura) works a lot better than my phone's and doesn't seem to cause any weird data corruption or relabeling. So now I only get one reminder for work stuff (via Palm), two reminders for home stuff (via Palm and phone) which is a bit annoying but I have far more work items than home items, home items show up on my calendar at work so people can schedule accordingly, and I always have my full phonebook available everywhere, and always have mobile notifications for work items which were scheduled same-day (assuming I remember to sync on acceptance).

Gosh, this is all so overcomplicated.

Also what this tells me is that if my phone ran PalmOS I wouldn't have any problems with sync, and I could put everything everywhere. If only there were an affordable, durable, Treo with Bluetooth! Maybe now that the 680 is out the 650's price will have dropped. Glargh.
#7964 12/02/2006 10:22 pm
What is GUID?
#7965 12/03/2006 12:46 am
Globally Unique Identifier. A randomly-assigned number which is always associated with an item which ensures (to a very good degree of probability, anyway) that ONLY that item has that ID, and moreover that every instance of that item has the same ID. So you can always tell if two things started out as the same thing or not, because the GUID never changes (even if, say, phone number, or last name, or whatever does).

Sometimes also called UUID (Universally Unique ID).
#7984 12/05/2006 11:38 pm
Ah, yeah, there's a tag for that in a podcast... I should have recognized it.
#7986 12/05/2006 11:50 pm
RSS's <guid> tag isn't quite the same thing, but it's the same concept. The guid in RSS is usually just derived from the item's permalink, though some weblogging platforms use the md5sum of the entry, or add such to the entry's URL, so that whenever the entry changes it gets treated as a brand-new entry.

I hate weblogs that do that.