Bullet plugin
Recently I have been working on improving the performance in one of my clients Rails applications, trying to get page load times down. Looking at the query log it was obvious that there was way too much activity going on for what was being rendered on the page–there were N+1 queries all over the place. This was nothing a few joins (or eager loads as the rails folks like to say)...
Read MoreLAMP Development for Windows
I have been doing development in PHP for a long time and have yet to find a really satisfactory solution on Windows. When I recently flattened my home PC and had to restart I thought I would try a new setup and here is what I’m using. Its pretty good to me so far, and I think I’m going to run with it for the time being: IDE For an IDE I am using EasyEclipse for LAMP...
Read MoreBuilding Grammars in .NET
As I’ve shown before (here, here, and here), the Microsoft .NET Speech API allows you to quickly and easily build applications that take advantage of the good folks at Microsoft Research‘s work on speech recognition. The general process is that you can construct a grammar that the engine will recognize for you, and then event handlers for those recognized events will be triggered. ...
Read MoreGetting your C# app to run in the System Tray
While making some additions to the Speech Framework, I needed to figure out how to get my WPF application to run in the system tray. For the speech framework, the sys-tray is a natural place for the application to run, as we ideally don’t want to see any UI and the application should be always on. I opted out of a service, because I did want the rich UI of an application and for it to...
Read MoreJavascript, Flash and cross-browser clipboard fun
Recently I have been wrestling with writing some code that will manipulate text on a user’s clipboard in a web browser. I thought I would share my findings here for others who might be interested in the same topic. First lets start by looking at the Windows Clipboard in general. The clipboard, as we all know, stores blobs that the user has copied or cut from windows applications for...
Read MoreSpeech Plugins: Weather
In this entry we’ll look at building a basic plugin for a speech engine (Microsoft Speech III), that will respond to simple queries about the weather. For this tutorial we will be using the Yahoo Weather API. Note that if you are just interested in how to use their API, it should be easy enough to extract what you’re interested without doing the previous tutorials. We begin by...
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