Atlantis in bits

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

After China Telecom acquired the CDMA division of China Unicom, I believed that China Telecom will become a very dangerous rival of China Mobile. China Telecom has the largest fixed network in China taking up most broad-band market. The joining of CDMA will satisfy Telecom’s coverting on the mobile license and provide more choices to Telecom’s customers. Probably, it will stop or slow down the decrease of Telecom’s customers.

However, after I did some operations in Telecom’s counter, I found that Telecome still has a very long way to run, to catch up with the leading CMCC. CDMA from Unicom just provides the infrastructure on which business can be run, but staffs and processes are still obsolete, and will not prevent the decrease of customers.

As China Telecom is the oldest company among these three communication services providers, we should bear the slower change on their management. Although in the begining, CMCC is also come apart from China Telecom, it’s much easier for CMCC, a new organization to establish new mechanism and rules, to adopt new management from the western world. I believe the revolution in China Telecom will last very long time, and thus we have to expect less on Telcom than on CMCC. Anyway, now we have more choices.

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.