Erik Osterman

For many months now, MobileMe has stopped syncing. This is a big problem when you depend on your phone to be in sync with your laptop so that you don’t miss scheduled appointments, or when you do, to have the contact number of the person you need to contact!

I am embarrased to say the number of hours I’ve spent on resolving this issue. I’ve tried every trick in the book to get it working from resetting sync settings, creating a new user account, to reinstalling OSX! I’ve spent 4 hours just on MobileMe support and even gone in meet with a tech at the Genius Bar. It turns out that my problem has alluded just about everyone.

I’m very happy to announce that I have a fix! It turns out that it’s possible for your keychain to get corrupt on MobileMe. When this happens, it will synchronize your corrupt keychain locally, thereby breaking Sync Services.

Possible solutions:

1) One solution is to reset Sync Data on problematic computer, then re-synchronize the keychain on MobileMe with the local computers active Key Chain. This will very likely not work because you cannot even check the box to synchronize data or when you try to register your computer the wheel spins forever. However, if it works for you, then when it prompts to merge choose to use “this computers” data and not the data from MobileMe. The downside is of course that you will lose any passwords stored in your keychain on MobileMe.

2) The most likely fix to your problem will be to reset  your keychain. You will loose all of your stored passwords. (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts1544)

To easily recover from this situation in the future, backup your ~Library/Keychains/*.keychain files. The next time corruption happens (and it will!), just restore your keychain files from a backup so that you won’t lose all of your stored passwords. I am sure with a little bit more investigation, one can delete individual properties of your keychain to determine which key in particular is breaking the sync.

/var/log/system.log:

Recently, I learned how broken the dispute resolution process is with Bank of America. I asked them to send me the receipts for 5 recent charges from the same Mexican Food place across the street from me. I love Mexican food, but there’s no way I could have eaten 5 meals in a row from this place (esp when I wasn’t even working from home that week), so something was awry.

Herein lies the rub. If they send me the receipts (which include signatures), I can no longer dispute the charges because now I’m in possession of the sales receipts. Even if the signatures on the receipts clearly show an invalid signature, I have forgone the ability to issue a charge back. I asked the customer support if they could visually verify that the 5 signatures closely matched all my other signatures, but that was impossible. They didn’t have the ability to view the receipts.

I find this totally absurd. Granted, using a signature as a form authorization is incredibly fallible, the fact that it’s not even relevant when disputing a charge, raises the question why do we even need to sign the receipt at all? The back of my credit card is not signed, so that means that they would have been required to view a valid form of identification, which obviously wasn’t the case and is rarely ever the case. I suppose it’s all a moot point. BofA reversed the charges regardless, which was nice of them. I would have just preferred a more thorough process.

Up until recently, it was not possible to upload large files asynchronously to 2 or more machines simultaneously. This was due to a problem in the ruby ssh implementation. A patch is available which fixes this.

http://rubyforge.org/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=17857&group_id=274&atid=1123

If applying the patch is not an option, you can always change the transfer mode to synchronous.

I thought this was a pretty neat discovery. You can download an XML feed of all blogs which have pinged (xmlrpc) Google in the last 5 minutes. Optionally, you can add a parameter ?last=120, if you wanted just the last 120 seconds. The limit is 300 seconds (or 5 minutes).

http://blogsearch.google.com/changes.xml

Frustrated with the low quality and infrequent updates of current App Review sites for Facebook, we at Launch 10 decided to start our own blog. We review hundreds of apps every month on our own time, so we decided to share our thoughts on the apps we check out. Our blog will generally be updated several times a day, so check back often. As OpenSocial gets adopted by all the the major social networks, we’ll be covering the new apps that get released on there as well.

Recently came across Windows Live Writer. It’s a WYSIWYG editor for creating/editing blog posts. So far, I’m very impressed with it’s ability to seamlessly integrate into many blog platforms including WordPress.

You can even take screen shots and directly insert them inline.

Notice my infinitely strong password? It’s so strong that you can’t even login. The solution to my problem was to make sure I quote my passwords in the database.yml file so that the YAML parser doesn’t interpret them as a number. In this case, I had a password like 123e4567. In otherwords, a VERY big number (123 followed by 4568 zeros)