CARD: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Posted October 6th, 2003 by ambar
I was running along nicely with purging after 30 days. Then I decided to experiment with tossing some of that older data, so I did a purge of everything older than 7 days. Since then, the pie on my Mac desktop (where I did that experimenting) is radically off (one category, which has no repeating tasks and very few checked off, reports at 33% and growing, whereas my largest category, which contains almost all of my daily repeats, is at 21%). The Palm that I sync with has a much more normal looking pie, as does the Windows desktop I sync with occasionally. I'm back to purging at 30 days.
What's the best way to recover from this?
(LB 3.2.1 on all platforms, Mac is running OS X 10.2.8)
Thanks,
Ambar
Comments
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Hi Ambar,
This is distressing as I've seen a few other cases where it looked like delete/purge wasn't rolling up credit correctly. I've added a card to look into the problem.
In the meantime, assuming you haven't made any other changes to the desktop, what you can do is a "handheld overwrites desktop" sync. This should update the accumulated credit on the desktop to to match your Palm.
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any further questions.
Scott
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
I've had the same problem a few times with Windows Desktop. I resolved it by using "desktop overwrites handhand", but on reading the above, I'm wondering whether I should have done "handheld overwrites desktop" instead. I guess I'll never know.
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Either way the final result will be consistent charts on both platforms. For now, the best bet is to overwrite with whichever platform seems correct. In Ambar's case, it was pretty clear that the Macintosh was off while the Palm was "correct" so that a "handheld overwrites desktop" made the most sense.
Scott
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Well, I'd synced the two many times since the purge that I believe started the problem, and I was puzzled that the two charts were so divergent. But, in any case, I did one more ordinary sync, and then the handheld overwrite to desktop, and that seems to have cured the symptom, if not the problem. :-)
Thanks,
Ambar
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Hi Ambar,
The fundamental problem is that the accumulated credit is effectively a derived property of the tasks. We know how to correctly sync the data that the user directly changes, but things like the accumulated credit is trickier. We know we have a problem where the Palm and the desktop can drift over time, but this can usually be eliminated by syncing frequently and confining changes between syncs to one platform or the other. Unfortunately, it looks like there is another problem with deleting/purging which makes the whole situation worse.
However, we have made sure that doing an overwrite sync will make both platforms have the same accumulated credit as a workaround until we can resolve these problems.
Scott
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Scott
Overwriting during hotsync makes the pies the same, but of course the fact that they differ always makes us wonder which one is right...I'm glad you have a card raised for this issue.
RE: pie radically off on Mac desktop
Another thing to check, which can really mess up the pie charts, is the date and time for each platform that Life Balance is running on.
I recently had the batteries on a Palm go dead enough to send me back to factory settings. I restored the data from backups. However, I forgot that kind of reset will also send me "back in time" to January 2000. To make matters more confusing, I also recently travelled and the powerbook was still on Phoenix time for a while. When I fixed the date and time everywhere, I got the results I was expecting.
Not that this is necessarily happening for you. Just thought it was worth mentioning since checking first for the simple stuff can be helpful. :)
Best wishes,
--Catherine--*
Catherine E. White
President
www.llamagraphics.com