Atlantis in bits

The How-to Geek gave a way to prevent duplicated items in Outlook 2007’s TO-DO bar when using Google IMAP account.

He used the advanced filter to filter all the items outside the inbox directory. But actually all the criteria in the advanced filter dialog are combined with “AND” operator, so other regular outlook tasks will not display as they are in the “Task” directory.

If you’d like to display the flagged items from Google IMAP folder together with regular outlook tasks, I suggest you should use the SQL filter as below:

In the SQL statement, we could use the “OR” operator to connect multiple criteria. Below is the SQL statement I used, and hope it helps you.

(”http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/id/{00062003-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}/810f0040″ IS NULL AND “http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0×10910040″ IS NULL AND (”http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0×0e05001f” LIKE ‘%Task%’ OR “http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0×0e05001f” LIKE ‘%Inbox%’ OR “http://schemas.microsoft.com/mapi/proptag/0×0e05001f” LIKE ‘%SNEPC%’ ))

Sharing in Google Reader is very helpful. It can speed up information transmission among your friends. However, I can do nothing more than press “shift-s” to share an item. I believe It will be better if Google Reader could allow user to give comments on each sharing items.

After I complained bitterly about the lack of the comments or discuss feature, I found in Facebook, if you are using a FriendFeed that subscribes your Google Reader Sharing Items, anyone, include yourself can give a comment on it.

I registered on Facebook several days ago and found it’s very interesting and useful. Actually, my friends invited me to join some SNS web sites not very long after those web sites were launched, but I found they were not very useful. Friends were connected on those SNS, but we were unable really get connected as the activities can’t be revealed from these SNS.

But on Facebook, it’s another thing. With Facebook applications, we could mash up many other web sites together. We could know what you complained on Twitter, what you expressed on Blog and even what music you frequently listened to. And especially the FriendFeed makes me keenly aware of the power of mash-up.

So these days, I am quite enthusiastic for Facebook, I tried to add more friends into it. But I have to confess that Facebook is not very common in China. At present, I only has 17 friends on face, while I have more than 250 contacts on my mobile phone.

Usually, our eclipse based IDE consists of two parts: Eclipse SDK and Plug-ins. Different plug-ins combines together and work as an IDE for different purpose. IDEs for different purposes also share some common plug-ins. If we are using CDT and WTP, we have to include not only the basic Eclipse SDK but also some plug-ins like Subversion Plug-in, EMF-SDO in both these two IDEs. Usually, we maintain several copies of the Eclipse SDK and some common plug-ins for different IDEs. However, if we need to update some parts, we have to update in every Eclipse copies.

We can use another approach to install plug-ins. We put link files which point to the location of plug-ins in the links directory, and when Eclipse starts it will look for those locations and load proper plug-ins. Many developers leverage this method to maintain their Eclipse Environments.

I developed a small utility and hope it will make this approach more easily. At first, you need to download a copy of Eclipse SDK and those plug-ins separately.  Then, make directories like below:

d:\eclipse

       |_____base

                    |______eclipse (Eclipse SDK)

      |______bundles

                    |_______WTP
                    |               |_______eclipse
                    |               |                 |_____features
                    |               |                 |_____plug-ins
                    |               |_______.bundle
                    |_______EMF-SDO
                    |_______m2eclipse
                    …………
                    (Some other plugins)

“Base” is the directory storing basic Eclipse SDK and bundles are for plug-ins. In each plug-in directory, create a plain text file named “.bundle” and write the name of the plug-in into it (Actually, this file is unnecessary, I will improve this later). Finally, put following two files under the top “eclipse” directory.

File1: LunarPhase

File2 LunarPhaseHelper

And then launch the LunarPhaseConfig.exe.

new a profile by specifying plug-ins and workspace.

and then you can click the launch button, or click the shortcut button and then run the corresponding “bat” file to raise your customized Eclipse environment.

Still some bugs, I will fix them and add some useful features (example: downloading from update sites) later.

I adopted the GTD methodology almost one year ago, even before I own a Palm Treo 650. I tried several software to make GTD work more conveniently and effectively. Through some practices, I believe probably I could establish my GTD system “officially”.At first, let’s review the original GTD conceptual diagram from David Allen’s book at first:

From the above diagram, we can conclude four types of utilities which may be necessary if you are applying GTD with a digital device (PDA or PC or UMPC)

1. Inbox
2. ToDo List
3. Calendar
4. Project Planner

And then look at my own system diagram:

The major software I am using to apply GTD are:

• Natara DayNotez: 

I take this as the main inbox. We can type words into it directly, and if your hands are not free for typing, you can just take a photo or record a piece of voice.

DiddleBug, BugMe, Slap are also recommended. No one is the best, just use the one you like.

• Life Balance:

It’s an awesome ToDo List application, but not only a ToDo List. With the context support, we can easily get what we should do at a particular time and spot.

• Iambic Agendus:  Datebook, Contacts
• Natara Project@Hand: A client on Palm for MS Project files.
• Natara Bonsai: A outline utilities, if need to plan a project with few resource and dependency, this is enough.

The detailed process is:

1. When some ideas, tasks and other stuff come out in my brain, I just open DayNotez and type into it or take a voice record. I map DayNotez to “Opt+Hardkey2″, so that it can be accessed quickly. These coarse stuff are put in the “inbox” category. If I am free for a while, I will process those stuff in the “inbox” category. If it is not actionable, change its category to “Reference” or “Maybe”.
2. If it is actionable and can be done in 2 minutes, do it right now and change its category to “Processed”.
3. If it can’t be done in 2 minutes, but also a one step action, I will create a todo entry in Life Balance with a particular context and category.
4. If it can be broken down, use Bonsai or just Life Balance, or MS Project on PCs to break it down, and then create entries in Life Balance.
5. When I am changing my context(spot, time or target contact), I will change the context in Life Balance as well and do the next action according to the order.

The contexts in Life Balance:

I use three flags to make up a context. The first one indicates whether it’s a next action or a “waiting for” action. The second one tells the spot or target contact. And the third one is just a category which is used for import and export. Some example are: !NextAction@Computer$FamilyLife, !NextAction@LvQi$Career.

Dumb Little Man’s 5 Simple Steps to Power Up Your Productivity gave a good approach to help us improve productivity.The essential part of the article is “30 minutes high performance time”. It means you’d better focus on one thing for 30 minutes, and after the 30 minutes, hang about with your notebook, have a rest and try to review all you have done.

The translated version (Chinese) at mifengtd.cn (Chinese) recommend two countdown tools to help us implement this approach. However, I am not so satisfied with those two utilities. I took about 1 hours and made an own application to count down the 30 minutes. Probably, in future, if time permits, I will add some other feature into it, for example the integration with Outlook tasks.

This tiny application is developed with Visual C#, you can just download the application file (LaserConvex.exe) and run it directly, or download the setup file, go through each step and you could run it from your start menu.

Program: LaserConvex.exe
Setup: Setup.rar