Atlantis in bits

iTunes and iPod can remember the playing positions for M4B files, so it’s good for audio books and lectures. You can convert MP4 files to M4B files with software such as MP3 to M4B Converter. But the converter crashed in my computer.

I remember there’s a audioconvertor plug-in in my Total Commander, and guessed probably it could do this job for me. Fortunately, it does!

Select MP3 files, press ALT+F5, choose audioconvertor, tune some settings, and press OK!

Improper closing of outlook makes the data stores (the top folders) in a mess, even with blank names.

I googled a lot, but find nothing to solve this, except creating a new profile. The details of a profile are stored in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Windows Messaging Subsystem\Profiles, but the names of the keys have little meaning to help me catch their usage.

Fortunately, finally I found a freeware which could help to repair the profiles of outlook. If you have the same agony on outlook’s profiles, I believe it can help. The freeware OLfix’s Download and information

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.

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

I have a playlist with probably 10 songs in it. But these songs are in my external USB hard disk, instead of my laptop’s hard disk. I plugged in my USB hard disk, and enjoyed this playlist repeatedly. After a while, the USB hard disk was incautiously plugged out and iTunes skipped each song one by one and got into a deadly infinite loop. At that time, my computer had no response at all, and I turned the power off directly.

Fortunately, I was doing nothing on my laptop at that time, and haven’t lost anything. Anyway, I believe iTunes should consider this exception and avoid this infinite loop. And actually, leveraging some flag variables  could fix this.