Having spent around five months fighting with Orange over a messup their system made on my account, I’m already fed up of call centres. So when my PinSentry security device from Barclays gave up the ghost last night, I was straight on the phone to report it. The PinSentry is a small keypad device with… Continue reading Is Barclays Internet Banking too secure?
Category: devices
Adding SQL Server Management Studio to a development machine
A quick post in case any of you developers out there are having trouble adding the SQL Server Management Studio tool if you have Visual Studio 2005 with an installation of SQL Server Express Edition 2005. The setup.exe will fail when it checks your current install, especially if you’ve been applying Windows Updates which may… Continue reading Adding SQL Server Management Studio to a development machine
NDA vs Blogs and Forums
While trying to learn something new, the Internet proves a valuable resource. A quick Google usually reveals enough blog entries with other people having similar problems that you can find what you’re after. The trouble with the Beta SDK’s for the iPhone at the moment is that while they are in development themselves, all users… Continue reading NDA vs Blogs and Forums
Does iPhone mean business?
I’m in the process of using and understanding the new iPhone SDK from Apple. Consequently, I’m keeping my eyes keenly on new news stories about the iPhone. There are plenty of rumours surrounding the iPhone especially ahead of the World Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in June. The main rumours regard a possible 3G version of… Continue reading Does iPhone mean business?
iMovie 08 and the DVD Image crash
I’ve upgraded finally to iLife 08 and I’m a complete fan. I’ll blog about all the things I love about iLife 08 later but my post today is to help explain one way that iMovie 08 may crash on loading.
Cisco VPN Mac Client
I needed to get VPN access using a Cisco VPN client over the weekend. I didn’t have access to the PC version so I decided to search for a Mac version if there was one. Thankfully MacUpdate came to the rescue and I found a Mac flavour of the Cisco VPN client and I was… Continue reading Cisco VPN Mac Client
SLAP, my service’s up!
As part of the new raft of services in development here at Esendex Towers, Adam‘s been busy with his inventing hat on again. Fresh from the lab is SLAP: Service Location and Announcement Protocol. This post is inspired by just how useful basing your inter-service communications on SLAP can be when it comes to development,… Continue reading SLAP, my service’s up!
Mario, Lego, Plasticine, and Friday afternoon equals…
See what happens when you merge Mario, Lego and Plasticine and stick it all on your monitor. See the photo | read digg story Ian seems to think we’ve not had much to do this Friday afternoon but we were waiting for a build to finish, your honour 🙂
Using SAPI with nAnt
I’ve been successfully using Microsoft’s Speech API (SAPI) in Visual Studio 2005 to create samples to demonstrate how we can harness text-to-speech capabilities. However, to get this to work with nAnt I had to be able to reference the Microsoft Speech COM component in the <references> section in a nAnt build file.
Getting real with speech
As part of the continuous research into new ideas, I’ve been helping out research and evaluate RealSpeak Telecom from Nuance. One thing that’s not instantly clear from the documentation is how to play back the ‘standard.pcm’ file that the standard demonstration application they provide generates. To be fair to them, they do tell you that… Continue reading Getting real with speech