Updated: 26/08/2004; 19:49:36

 13 August 2004

Study tips

I came across this site in the OneNote forum,  it has some nice concise tips for studying and note taking

http://www.westshore.edu/webs/ltc/study_skills_resources.htm

of particular note is the Cornell Note Taking Method, which although not fancy does provide some insight into the fact that learning does not stop when you finish taking notes!

- Posted by Steve Richards - 4:56:03 PM - comment []

Outlook - Domino Connecter

I was seduced, (for the third time), into installing the Microsoft Outlook Domino Connecter for the following reasons:

 

  1. I wanted a single place to manage my RSS feeds, personal email, tasks, calendar and work email
  2. My trial of mNotes completes in a few days and I needed to decide whether to buy it, or whether I could use Active Sync alone, (as my Local Notes replica would now also be in Outlook)
  3. I would get a unified search environment, (because X1 would search my Notes data, which would now be in Outlook)
  4. Graham said it works fine for him

 

I have tried it twice before, and had to give up both times, despite considerable effort.  I kept telling myself the problems were to do with the sequence I did things, by interactions with mNotes, X1 etc, because I did not leave it alone – i.e. I tried to use it!  Having tried again a few times these are some of the problems I have had:

 

  1. Synchronisation is painfully slow
  2. It does not synchronise according to a regular schedule, it just does it in the background, but not as frequently as I would like
  3. It affects the stability of Outlook quite badly, Outlook has hung on me at least 3 times today
  4. It created duplicate email and calendar entries, (never did figure out why, but assumed it was some sort of cascade effect caused by replica’s and mNotes).
  5. I ended up with a corrupt document in my Local Replica, I am currently creating a brand new local replica to see if I can fix it
  6. It does not handle standard s/mime signed documents, (gives a security subsystem error)
  7. Formatting of some message is a bit strange
  8. X1 tries to index entries as soon as the headers arrive, then triggers a pull of the body causing a dialog to keep opening up, very annoying
  9. if you do a full synchronisation, you can not use Outlook until its complete, (either that or Outlook was hanging).

 

It’s the stability problem that was the killer for me.  I could have carried on trying to work through the other issues.  I also got worrying that there were some version issues, Windows 2003 Server, Outlook 2003, Notes 6.51 is hardly a combination that has been well tested!

 

So I have just trashed it yet again and gone back to good old Notes!  Which is surprisingly refreshing because it does work reliably.  I also like the fact that it’s nice and colourful, especially when you use custom colours for emails from certain people, and colour different calendar entry types!  I just hope this new replica works ok!

- Posted by Steve Richards - 12:42:53 AM - comment []