Background:
One of the goals I set to myself lately is to improve my physical fitness by improve my ability to run long distance in good pace. As a gadgets lover, first thing was to buy the right equipment – Nike + iPod. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not have an iPod until lately so it was a good opportunity to close the gap. The chip in the shoe and the iPod are cool accessories to track running distance and pace (relatively accurately). Nike has (of course) a web-site that allows syncing runs, define goals, track records… (check my runs)
Why am I telling all of that?
A few weeks ago I ran a nice 8K run (in record time) to find out that during my sync the run data got lost somewhere in the cyberspace… The amount of sweat I put into this run did not allow me to let it go so quickly. Looking in several forums I found that it’s a known bug that happens rarely and that there is no official way to re-sync the lost run. Note that whenever there is no ‘official’ solution there must be an ‘unofficial’ one. And indeed there is a ‘simple’ solution:
1. Connect the iPod the PC as a disk drive
2. Find the ‘synced’ folder
3. Copy the relevant run (in an XML format) to the ‘unsynced ‘folder
4. Sync again and magically the lost run appears
This is only one example of a software bug that appears in ‘normal' device. It happens with our phones, DVD players, PlayStation/Xbox and other devices.
Conclusion:
· Software is never perfect and has bugs
One of the goals I set to myself lately is to improve my physical fitness by improve my ability to run long distance in good pace. As a gadgets lover, first thing was to buy the right equipment – Nike + iPod. I’m embarrassed to admit that I did not have an iPod until lately so it was a good opportunity to close the gap. The chip in the shoe and the iPod are cool accessories to track running distance and pace (relatively accurately). Nike has (of course) a web-site that allows syncing runs, define goals, track records… (check my runs)
Why am I telling all of that?
A few weeks ago I ran a nice 8K run (in record time) to find out that during my sync the run data got lost somewhere in the cyberspace… The amount of sweat I put into this run did not allow me to let it go so quickly. Looking in several forums I found that it’s a known bug that happens rarely and that there is no official way to re-sync the lost run. Note that whenever there is no ‘official’ solution there must be an ‘unofficial’ one. And indeed there is a ‘simple’ solution:
1. Connect the iPod the PC as a disk drive
2. Find the ‘synced’ folder
3. Copy the relevant run (in an XML format) to the ‘unsynced ‘folder
4. Sync again and magically the lost run appears
This is only one example of a software bug that appears in ‘normal' device. It happens with our phones, DVD players, PlayStation/Xbox and other devices.
Conclusion:
· Software is never perfect and has bugs
· Software is an integral part of our life
=> we would suffer from annoying bugs in many activities we take
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment