February 2005 Entries
Well I wanted to help my son with his spelling list at school each work so I developed a spelling quiz program for him. It uses the built-in Windows Speech feature and requires the .NET Framework to run.
When you launch it, you can either go to the word list or generate a quiz. Words can be entered with a phrase to make it easier to tell what word it is. This is pretty standard in oral tests, but pretty important with synthesized speech since it isn't really clear enough to understand a word in isolation.
After entering the...
I got bored with the included skins and decided to see what else was out there. It turns out that there's a great collection of skins here. If you are ready to make your blog more interesting, it's worth checking out! I haven't applied any yet but I think I will soon.
UPDATE: I have switched to the LuxInteriorLight skin from Jaxon Rice. It's a great looking skin that just dropped in place pretty nicely. The link to get it is actually on the bottom of each page, but here's an inline link to save some...
As mentioned in the previous post, I created a simplified XML template for Picasa web export. This makes a smaller XML file (about half) and removes the undefined and unncessary tags. I liked it personally, and anyone else is welcome to it! It's not required for the bulk image uploader.
Click here to get more details and to download it.
I fixed the issue that affects blogs without an image gallery already setup. It was a dumb mistake as the uploader doesn't care if galleries exist or not anyway. I still need to include the source for anyone that cares, but I haven't gone through it clean it up. I'm not trying to make it perfect (don't get your expectations up!), just trying to make sure that it's clear.
Tomorrow I'm planning on posting a new XML export template for Picasa that strips out unnecessary tags. The bundled template has more than most people would need. ...
I discovered a cool feature on A9.com the other day. For those people that haven't seen A9 yet, it's Amazon's search engine. Many of the results come from Google, but it has a decent interface and ties results together nicely. You can have image and web search results (and other types) visible at the same time and show/hide them easily. Recently they entered the Yellow Pages arena (business phone listings for those outside of the USA). They added two interesting twists though. You can actually view pictures of listings in several major cities, and...
It looks like neat things are on the horizon for Skype! I've been an (informal) evangelist of them for awhile now and recently got a USB box to connect a regular cordless phone into my PC (thanks, Patrick!). Calls to real phones are 2-3c/minute, and to other computers running Skype are free. The quality is just amazing and NAT/firewall traversal is unreal. Phones like this being able to work between networks will be incredible. I'm not sure if agreements like this are the best in general though. Why not cell/VoIP phones, rather than cell/Skype?...
I've been playing with Visual Studio 2005 (formerly Whidbey) in their Beta 1, and Nov and Dec CTP builds and I must say they are impressing me more and more. I've been a pretty hard-core Java developer for a number of years and I've always loved the framework, but as I look at Java 1.5 and the .NET Framework 2.0 I see a pretty close convergence in many ways. Web development is the best it's ever been with ASP.NET and Struts/JavaServer Faces. Generics, iterators, and attributes make for very expressive code, which I consider a critical feature...
Well it looks like Google has done it again. Their new Maps feature (still in beta) is a formidable opponent to the other online map offerings. I'm primarily familiar with MSN Maps and Mapquest so I can't comment on all of them, but Google is the best I've seen so far. It has such an uncluttered interface. No ads to be seen at this point. Of course, still being beta might just mean that the ads aren't ready yet, but for now it sure is nice!
I always like how MSN Maps did an instant zoom...
Doing some research today regarding Visual Studio I came across an incredible looking collection of controls (and free to boot!). They are simply called XP Common Controls (XPCC), written by Michael Dobler and distributed on his website. This may be old news to Windows Forms developers, but as a relative newcomer I hadn't heard of them before. They do a wonderful job of recreating the look of Windows XP as seen in the task views of Windows Explorer and Movie Maker, as well as much of the pizazz of MS Office. For all of this to...
I've been a user of Google's Gmail email service (http://gmail.google.com) for eight or nine months now and I've really been enjoying it. They still have a ways to go as far as I'm concerned compared to "complete portfolio" services through companies like Yahoo. I like Yahoo's briefcase and photo features, along with scheduling and notepad. Google has their excellent Picasa product but no online counterpart. They need some way of at least organizing pictures that arrive as attachments even if they don't turn it into a full-fledged gallery product. I tried to search messages the...