KludgeHack

BarCamp Portugal 2007
17 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Random tidbits | Comments (0)

For the second time, there’s going to be a Barcamp gathering in Coimbra (Portugal).

As a student myself in this beautiful city, and as a person interested in learning/sharing new ideas, I’m going to attend this year edition.

The event will take place on the 1st and 2nd of September. If you have the time and will, here’s your opportunity to spend some good time in good company. More detailed info can be found on the official website.

As my first time attending, I already submitted my presentation theme: “Beating the crap out of the Web 2.0 Experience”. A little exaggerated, but still, not really a lie.

This last weeks I’ve been learning and experiencing the new WPF powers, and I’m simply fascinated with such technology. In my presentation I will try to talk a little about the my experience, and some demonstration on How and Why such technology matter.

I’m looking forward to that moment, facing a room full of attendees with a Web 2.0 mindset, and a Microsoft subject on my hands.

Feed to Podcast - Simple Converter
13 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Programming & Software | Comments (2)

Just finished my simple application, named Feed to Podcast, that using a given RSS Feed address, converts the posts to Podcast audio files compatible with the most popular devices iPod, Zune, etc.

The application was built just for fun, leveraging the new APIs available in the .NET 3 (WPF and Speech).

The applications is mainly for Windows Vista users. Although it works on Windows XP, the voice available for default (Microsoft Sam) is really annoying on big texts. Microsoft Anna (Windows Vista default voice) is a step forward to voice improvement. It’s not natural human voice, but there have been improvements.

You can download the binaries here, but you will need the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.0 Redistributable Package (not necessary for Windows Vista) and Windows Media Encoder 9 Series (to encode the audio files).

More information, including the source code can be found here. There’s also some known issues, and more likely some unknown. Please free to stress test the application.

I’m already beginning another WPF application. This time a more complex…

So, are Database Stored Procedures Good or Bad?
11 July 2007 in Databases & Personal Experience | Comments (4)

I was doing some researching on Stored Procedures performance, and found this article on O’Reilly Databases.

Roland Bouman analyses survey data based on performance, portability and appropriateness of using Stored Procedures.

Its well known that this subject is “tricky”, mainly because his data shows most developers think Stored procedures are faster than client-side code (and SQL statements). Although the article is not focused in any database implementation, it really tries to “solve” some myths around the subject. I also agree with the author, using Stored procedures is good in some cases, and bad in others.

Working with Dev-Cpp on Windows Vista
5 July 2007 in Personal Experience & Random tidbits | Comments (0)

Recently I needed Dev-Cpp (free C++ IDE for Windows and Linux) to compile some old code, unfortunately, current versions (4/5 beta) don’t support Windows Vista.

Doing some online searches I found out at a SourceForge post mentioning a workaround:

• Open the menu “Tools > Compiler Options“, select the “Directories” tab and add “C:\Dev-Cpp\libexec\gcc\mingw32\3.4.2″ to the list.
• On the same window, choose the ”Programs” tab, and add ”C:\Dev-Cpp\bin\” before every executable name. (You can also edit Windows Environment variables, but this is definitely a safer way)

Naturally, put no quotation marks and eventually replace C:\Dev-Cpp\ with your Dev-Cpp installation folder.

After this, everything should work fine.

Encarta answers you…
27 June 2007 in Microsoft & Personal Experience | Comments (0)

There is a really cool new Encarta bot for Windows Live Messenger. Just add encarta@botmetro.net to your Messenger Contacts and you can ask it pretty much everything. It also opens up the Encarta page for you in the chat window, If needed.