Getting in Sync

I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of information in a lot of places – personal email, personal computer, work email, work computer, iPhone, etc. Today I decided to spend some time figuring out how to connect them all together to keep my information in sync and accurate. Mostly anyway.

While the primary goal was to get all of my data in sync, the secondary goal was to protect my data from loss or exposure.

Here’s what I’ve done:

• Work PC (Outlook) syncs email & work calendar with Work Server (Exchange 2007)
• Work PC (Outlook) syncs work calendar with Google Acct using Google Calendar Sync
• Google Acct syncs all calendars (work, home, holidays) with iPhone using Google Sync for Mobile, (which, stupidly, only does calendars and contacts)
  
• iPhone pulls work email via IMAP and sends work email via work SMTP
• iPhone pulls Gmail via IMAP and sends personal email via Google SMTP
• iPhone syncs with Address Book via iTunes (the only cabled connection)
• Address Book updates iCal’s “Birthdays” calendar
• iCal syncs work, home, and holdiay calendars with Google via CalDAV

The final result is this:

• My personal and work data are visible from home or work and on my iPhone.
• My personal data are on my personal equipment and not my work equipment.
• I can lose my phone without losing any data.
• I can lose my job without losing (or exposing) any personal data or having my data wiped by my employer.
• I can lose my personal computer without losing any data (Time Machine, FTW).
• I can lose my work computer without losing any data (Iron Mountain).

What is lacking

• iPhone does not have my birthdays calendar (so no reminders, sorry everyone).
• Outlook on my work computer has to be running in order for Google to get my work calendar.
• Google contacts does not match Address Book or iPhone.
• I still have to use a cable to sync my iPhone with my Mac when my phone and my computer both have Bluetooth. WTF, Apple!? Fix that.

Google’s contact management still needs some work. I tried sync’ing that at one point and it screwed everything up -  lots of duplicated contacts: Google had their email, iPhone had their phone number, so now I had two contacts. Google has finally given us the ability to merge contacts (and it works well), so I’m going to work on getting that cleaned up. What really needs to happen is that Google updates my contacts automatically when they update their own contact info – like Exchange.

If anyone wants more details about how I accomplished any part of this, post and I’ll fill in the details.

Crowdsourcing vs. Open Source

So, last night, I got bit on the foot by a mosquito, which itches like crazy, and was keeping me up.

I got started thinking about Wikipedia, like one does in the wee hours of the night, and I came to this conclusion (my thesis): Wikipedia suffers from credibility problems because contributors have vested interest and no vetting.

In distributing a pile of work among a great number of voluntary participants, there are basically two schools – crowdsourcing and open sourcing.

Crowdsourcing, abbreviated, is breaking a big task among a fluid group of anonymous, voluntary participants. One excellent example of crowdsourcing is reCAPTCHA, which utilizes humans’ ability to read distorted text to do character recognition on scanned text that computers have a hard time discerning.

Open Source, abbreviated, is providing information or skills you’ve learned to the collective body. It’s rarely anonymous. Linux, an operating system written collectively by thousands of people over the years, and provided for free to everyone else, is the most common example. Google “linux” and be amazed.

Wikipedia lies somewhere between the two. Wikipedia’s content comes from people who contribute what they’ve learned (or what they believe), with the idea that enough people validating (or correcting) eachothers’ statements will end up with something resembling the truth.

Here’s where the difficulty lies. With crowdsourcing, to use reCAPTCHA as the example, no one cares enough about whether the single word is read incorrectly to try to sabotage the system. There is no bias and nothing to be gained by coercing a group of people into convincing the system that a single word is wrong. With open source, the person doing the work has put in the time to learn the language, the time to learn the distro, and the time to learn whatever piece they’re working on. Essentially, the participants are self-filtering. It would take more than the casual user to become an active participant in the development cycle, write code, and get that code into the final build to cause any kind of harm.

Wikipedia, however, until recently, could be edited by anyone with little to no expectation that their statements would be traced back to them. This led to, obviously, all kinds of abuse, with people who have conflicts of interest making edits to suit their beliefs, employers, etc. The casual user, or a conspiracy of several users, can making their version of the truth the most popular belief.

I don’t know what the solution to this is, but I think that edit moderation would take us a long way towards it.

Whatever happens, I think that documenting the collective intelligence is a phenomenal idea that needs to be pursued vigorously. As long as we’re documenting the collective intelligence, and not the collective ignorance and mis-information.

That’s what Faux News is for.

I am not a Software Developer

…but I respect them.

In college I studied Mathematics and Computer Science. When I was a kid, for some reason, I thought the life of a coder would be what I wanted – long restless nights of coding in the dark, followed by days sleeping on the couch at the office, bloodshot eyes, big headphones thumping techno and blocking out distractions so you can focus on the code. I may have watched too many movies like “Hackers”.

In one of my junior year’s programming classes (3D Animation, I think), I discovered that it’s not actually fun. It’s boring. And tedious. Programming is 10% writing something new and 90% finding the bugs in what you wrote. At least, it is when you’re just starting out.

So, I started doing other things – graphic design, troubleshooting, networking, etc. Basically putting to use what developers had created. Let them worry about compiling errors, product cycles, iterative loops, customer specs, and so on. I’ll use it when it’s ready for use.

But having some programming and business behind me helps me understand what it is to develop software.

Without going off on several tangents in the same post, the point of this is to bring some attention to this great series of articles about one developer switching from Windows to Mac (Win32 to Coca). And, in particular, his description of A developer taxonomy.

I won’t contend that this is not boring for 99% of the world – probably more. However, when you’re shopping for software, implementing new software, or running through a demo, having an understanding of the type of people who wrote the software you’re looking at makes it much easier to see the madness in the method calls.