Screen Casting Fun

Have played with a free screencasting software the other night - very easy to use and might be a good feature to add to sites - e.g. how to use CMS etc etc. or even front end stuff

The software I've used is http://www.camstudio.org/ more info here: http://www.screencast.be/

It does audio too (not tested) and can export to Flash or avi.

There is an example here (use Internet Explorer I think there is a trivial bug in the auto generated embed script for Firefox)

The example is clearly a bit long and the file size is too big but serves as an illustration.

Anyone played with any other screen casting software?

Visual Studio Woes (pt 1)

Had a bit of a nightmate this morning trying to open a web project I haven't accessed for a while. The error VS was giving was a "The http redirect request failed.". Yes.. Very useful VS!!

After doing a little googling, the only advice that was give was to clear out the contents of the bin directory of the project you are trying to open.

Did that, and it worked .. so passing this on to everyone in case you also have a similar experience in the future!

Handy list of countries in CSV format

Great for when you need that dropdown list of countries on your website or registration form. Also has lots of other potentially useful columns like currency, capital and TLD's.

Download from here

Multiple versions of IE

In our quest to ensure consistency and compatibility in different versions of IE, most of us havae gone to the lengths to install Microsoft Virtual Machine with the sole intention of running IE6. There is a standalone version of IE6 that has been knocking around, however it doesn't have cookie support - so that cripples its usage.

I've found this little package:

http://tredosoft.com/files/multi-ie/multiple-ie-setup.exe

This contains multiple versions of IE. The version of IE6 that is contained within the installer will support cookies, so no longer any need to run Virtual Machine and cripple the performance of your system!

Enjoy!

Educating your stakeholders

Another good article from A List Apart:

http://alistapart.com/articles/educatingstakeholders

Who decides what's best for a website? Highly skilled professionals who work with the site's users and serve as their advocates? Or schmucks with money? Most often, it's the latter. That's why a web designer's first job is to educate the people who hold the purse strings.

Automated lip reading technology

Ok, it's not Web, but it's still very clever:

http://blog.outer-court.com/archive/2007-05-25.html#n90

a computer program analyzes a person’s lip movement in a silent movie (here: Hitler filmed by Eva Braun), matches the frames to a large library of pronounced words to find out what was being said, and then plays back the sound via a computer generated voice. This way, fully automated, a silent film turns into a film with speech, and historical archives reveal new information.

How to stop your RSS feed barf chunks

When generating an RSS feed .Net appeared to be attempting to be chunking its transfer encoding - or at least that's what the header info was reporting. Consequently some RSS parsers were having problems with this ("Unable to read data from the transport connection"). Whether .net was actually chunking or not is however debatable (by default it should not be). Work around appears to be to simply amend the header to stop reporting chunking! i.e. response.AddHeader("Transfer-Encoding", ""); See this in action in output.repeater.cs.

.Net 2.0 has a nice "response.SendChunked = false;" but not .Net 1. but worth noting if chunking really is occurring. (more info on chunking )

Great tips and tools on how to make your website mobile friendly

Covers topic like getting the (x)html ready and testing in various browsers and emulators.
From Vitamin

Hello World!

void main()
{printf("Hello World\n"); main();}

Welcome to Sequence Labs


10 print "Hello Sequence"
20 goto 10


Hello all - as discussed at the meeting yesterday, here's a place for us devs to put the cool/useful/topical stuff that we're working on / just come across. Instead of emailing list-devs, basically.

Although the target audience is ourselves, and hence content can be dense, technical, etc., please try to
1) Keep it on topic - not too much unrelated humor(sic)
2) Keep it professional - I'd like to open this up (read only) to selected clients eventually