Technical and Miscellaneous

Serial Port Access

Guy Friday claims the serial port only when you ask it to dial a phone number. It relinquishes it as soon as the call is placed. Because Guy Friday assumes that other applications may run concurrently and may change modem configuration, it re-initializes your modem before it dials. Thus you may notice a brief time lag before Guy Friday dials. If you find this lag annoying, you should experiment with shortening or abandoning altogether the Modem Init String, which you can set in Telephone Preferences.

Modems

Your modem should be Hayes compatible.

Synchronizing Files

If you want to use Guy Friday on two different computers, for instance on a “home” computer and a “work” computer, or on a desktop and a PowerBook, then you’ll probably want to use this feature.

Synchronizing allows you to bring changes that you’ve made to a Guy Friday Document into your other computer (or vice versa). In other words, if you’ve added a few names and phone numbers to your home computer, and similarly added a few to your PowerBook, you’ll eventually want to synchronize the two Guy Friday files so that they are both up-to-date and include all possible information.

Be aware that synchronization is designed to be used on two files that started out, no matter how long ago, the same. If you attempt to synchronize two completely different files—files that never shared anything in common—you’ll wind up just blindly merging their contents, which is useful, in some cases, but hardly rocket science.

There are two ways to synchronize files. You can do use “Safe Synchronization” or “Dangerous Synchronization.”

Safe Synchronization merges the contents of two files, eliminating duplicate nuggets. If nuggets are not exact duplicates, but are variations of each other, then the merged file will contain both variations.

In contrast, Dangerous Synchronization deletes the older variation. This is quite powerful if used properly. For instance, let’s say your good friend Bob changes his phone number. You learn about this change while you’re on the road for business. So you enter the new phone number in Bob’s nugget on your PowerBook. Later, when you synchronize your PowerBook and your desktop computers, Guy Friday will find two variations of the Bob nugget. If you’re using Dangerous Synchronization, Guy Friday will remove the old nugget containing the old phone number, and will replace it with the new.

What’s the danger in that? Well, Guy Friday determines the “newer” nugget by observing an invisible time-stamp that it adds to each nugget whenever a nugget is modified. But what if the internal clock in the PowerBook is substantially different from the internal clock of the desktop computer? (Perhaps you traveled to a different time zone and set the internal clock to reflect local time). Guy Friday might, if the right combination of circumstances occurs, confuse which nugget is “newer.” You’ll wind up with one Bob nugget, but it will have his old phone number.

Dangerous Synchronization, if it is used at all, should be used each time you’re about to “switch” computers (for instance, each time you travel home at night). To see why, imagine that Bob calls you in the office and gives you his new phone number. That night, you return home and start using Guy Friday on your home machine. You remember that Bob’s wife is named Mary, so you enter that information on his nugget.

The next time you Synchronize your files, Guy Friday will keep the most recently modified nugget (i.e., the one created at home that night) and remove the old one (which contains important information—Bob’s new phone number).

All in all, it’s probably wiser to stick with Safe Synchronization. It should be pointed out, however, that despite its name, Dangerous Synchronization is not so irrevocably dangerous—it does not actually overwrite either of the two source files that you wish to synchronize, but rather makes a third file that contains the synchronization results.