{"id":437,"date":"2005-08-10T09:03:40","date_gmt":"2005-08-10T09:03:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/?p=437"},"modified":"2005-08-16T10:06:37","modified_gmt":"2005-08-16T10:06:37","slug":"bad-software-bad-support","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/archives\/2005\/08\/10\/bad-software-bad-support\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad software, bad support"},"content":{"rendered":"

[updates below]<\/em><\/p>\n

I’ve not written much about techy, computery stuff recently, but this morning I’m angry.<\/p>\n

I’d been looking for a way to keep the numbers on my mobile phone synchronised with my Sony Clie PDA. SonyEricsson’s software would only synchronise with Microsoft Outlook, and I didn’t want to install that huge lump of bad software just to store phone numbers. Instead I found a shareware program called Mobile Master<\/a>. I tried it out and then paid \u00a318 to register it.<\/p>\n

At first it seemed to work fine, synchronising my phone with Palm Desktop and so with my PDA. Then I noticed that it had subtly corrupted my PDA’s address database. All the fields were in the wrong places and people’s surnames had been replaced by some kind of ID code. I reported the problem to Mobile Master’s authors and waited for a reply.<\/p>\n

Update:<\/em> I’ve now received a reply to my problem report and an apology for how long it took. Unfortunately it’s too late as I’ve uninstalled the software and am using Outlook and SonyEricsson’s software.<\/p>\n


\nThe worst part of the problem was that the database corruption was only visible on the PDA, everything looking fine in Palm Desktop. To recover I had to restore an old address database from backups and delete the desktop database before synchronising, usually losing a few changes in the process. It’s possible that this was due to a problem with my setup but there’s no way I can fix that without the help of Mobile Master’s authors.<\/p>\n

After a while without a reply I downloaded the latest version and tried again. It still corrupted the database. I reported the problem again.<\/p>\n

On Monday I bought a new phone, a SonyEricsson K700i, to replace the one that was stolen in Osogbo<\/a>. It came with their synchronisation software, so I gave in and installed Outlook, everything is now synchronising properly.<\/p>\n

I’ve got used to using freeware and free software<\/a>, where support is usually minimal, but I resent getting no support when I’ve paid for software. Even an acknowledgement that they had received my report would have been a start.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[updates below] I’ve not written much about techy, computery stuff recently, but this morning I’m angry. I’d been looking for a way to keep the numbers on my mobile phone synchronised with my Sony Clie PDA. SonyEricsson’s software would only synchronise with Microsoft Outlook, and I didn’t want to install that huge lump of bad […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-437","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tech"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=437"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/437\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=437"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=437"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caboose.org.uk\/b\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=437"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}