Little Logos

This was an interesting contract to build a data collection tool on an older PocketPC. Given that the client was probably going to:

• need further surveys
• use multiple devices 
• have a limited budget

I opted to buy a tool and build the survey using the tool rather than custom write the survey from scratch.

The tool I ended up with was from Pendragon Software and is called Forms.

The tool works on Palm and PocketPc and has adequate layouting and scripting functionality. It is a little slow with calculations but is excellent at managing survey deployment, versioning and managing data collected with different devices. On the pc end it uses a database backend that is starting to show its age.

Overall for the price it was a very good tool for the project and we were able to build and prototype the survey very quickly as a result. Because I didnt have to build any of the backend I was able to spend more time on building the survey logic and training the users and we still stayed on budget.

I had been using CD wallets to store all our CDs and DVDs but while they are good for taking into the car I was finding them a pain to cope with an ever growing amount of disk media.

I wanted something which could:

• cope with taking CDs in and out of storage easily
• be able to easily see what was in the store
• be able to insert CDs anywhere in the store
• store CDs upright not flat to prevent warping
• be simple enough for the kids and adults to live with

I think I now have this sorted. Welcome the Kensington Sleeves and Box system. This is a transparent box which holds aprox 100 CDs in (double-sided) removable sleeves. 2 movable separators are also included.

Now I can take one or more CDs out of the box while keeping them in their sleeves, this way they stay more protected while on the desk. I can also move them to a different box later for archiving. But the best thing is the ability to add new CDs to a collection you can “file” them into the box wherever you want. Letting you easily work with your own categories and systems.

The sleeves have a little slot at the top for a label (packs come with labels). I found that it was easier to use 2 rows of labels folded together to get a little more stiffness - making insertion a little easier.

Also for the music CDs and some of the games I was able to remove the rear insert from the original box cut the spine and use this for a label. Again, cutting this double the width of the spine and folding over makes it easier to insert into the label slot.

For some things like music or (older) games I have been storing one CD per sleeve with the booklet in front and CD in back. For other things like backup archives I sometimes store 2 or 3 CDs per sleeve.

Currently we have 3 boxes but I think I will get another 2 or 3 while they are available.

I can recommend this as a cheap and functional CD storage system (AUD $15 for the box inc 50 sleeves, and $8 for 50 sleeves only).

While removing a replication or save conflict document yesterday (the server mail config document for the mail server), we inadvertently deleted all the mail rule docs that went with it.Now, these are “keep private” documents, so you can’t just copy and paste them from a working NAB (which we quickly backed up off a replica before anything bad happened to it).We found some useful info on notes.net. This post tells how to copy them from one db to another, and this post tells how to set the response docs so they have the correct parent document. So what we did was to first create a private view that just has mail rules documents so we could see what we were working with. We did this in both the mails server db, and the local copy we had. Next, we set all the documents $KeepPrivate to 0 so that they could be copied. Copied the 28 mail rule documents back over to the mail server. Then set the $KeepPrivate back to 1, and set the CfgDocUnid to the correct one. So the mail rules now showed up ok, although we kept getting a strange error - Cannot find external name I_ISSERVERRULES. There is *nothing* on the net about this - on notes.net or google. So we replaced the design of the database, and the errors went away. Not sure if this was to do with the rule documents themselves, or, more likely, the deletion of the replication save conflict document and problems that may have caused.Next we restarted the router to make sure all the rules were in place, then tested in and outbound messaging, and also tested the rules to make sure they were working too.

Thanks to Karen for doing the actual work on this