tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-70518912012-01-25T23:36:28.824-05:00software development, .Net, speech recognition, and stuffIanRaenoreply@blogger.comBlogger431100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-29961150147293165582008-06-12T13:38:00.003-04:002008-06-12T13:49:47.556-04:00

Here's a VisualStudio 2008 tip. Have you ever created a C# project of type "Class Library", and then later you want to change it to a Test Project? Here's how:1. Edit the .csproj file in Notepad and insert the following line:{3AC096D0-A1C2-E12C-1390-A8335801FDAB};{FAE04EC0-301F-11D3-BF4B-00C04F79EFBC}Just before the first tag in the file2. Right-click the solution in Solution Explorer and Add

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-11305008619229063922007-12-03T17:39:00.000-05:002007-12-03T17:40:37.846-05:00

Most developers live in one camp or the other. Few people who work inside the Microsoft ecosystem (Win32, .Net, ASP.Net) spend much time in Java, and vice versa. That's what makes religious wars about languages IDEs so lame; most programmers have never seriously worked with both.That's why it's refreshing to see Erik Sink trying out Java. I spent last winter going from C# to Eclipse and can echo

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-42106366424157046182007-08-09T20:50:00.000-04:002007-08-09T21:04:48.152-04:00

I found an ancient programming book: Top-Down Structured Programming Techniques by Clement L. McGowan and John R. Kelly (1975). It describe Harlan Mill's project at IBM where he pioneered CPT. Guess what. It worked. These reasons for success are easier to see from an agile perspective. Early 70s software development was primitive. The existing paradigm structured programming seemed

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-13463869459640029122007-06-18T08:37:00.000-04:002007-06-18T08:47:48.809-04:00

The 90th Percentile had an article bashing code generation as a programming technique. He is suspicous that visual programming is no better (and in many ways worse) than textual programming. The generated code is often unreadable, and in the case of proprietary tools, you'll be forever dependent on the tool vendor for bug fixes and updates.The IVR industry is especially wed to visual tools,

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-20813330074267622962007-06-12T12:20:00.000-04:002007-06-12T12:31:23.653-04:00

Python's inventor Guido van Rossum is at Google. His first project was a tool for code reviews called Mondrian. Described here and in a video.This is a revealing glimpse of a 21st-century software development organization.Heavy use of tools to automate the organization's own development process.Social not silos. Developers can view other developer's Mondrian dashboard. The tool is an enabler,

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-52479505914245579112007-06-06T07:48:00.000-04:002007-06-06T08:15:37.307-04:00

Marc Andreesen once said that "the combination of Java and a Netscape browser would relegate the operating system to its original role as an unimportant collection of slightly buggy device drivers." Pretty funny, considering Microsoft has fifty billion in cash and Java is nowhere to be seen on the desktop.Yet the idea remains tantalizing. Change the phrase to "JavaScript and a web browser" and

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-7528378236190433822007-06-05T11:27:00.000-04:002007-06-05T11:41:24.852-04:00

This video introduces Morpheus's upcoming speech to text technology. The reason this is important is audio bandwidth. The phone network is based on 64 kbps audio of 4 KHz bandwidth, which is fine for humans to understand but is missing a lot of the higher frequencies that speech recognition engines need to improve their accuracy. That's why phone-based speech rec uses discrete grammars, which

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-2020868823808926942007-05-22T11:02:00.000-04:002007-12-05T19:14:24.339-05:00

Pat Helland, the guy who really understands the concept of time in computing, is back. I saw him talk at a Microsoft event in Ottawa. Distributed transactions are bad. He believes that a reserve & cancel approach to business transactions was preferable.He's also the guy who calls XML the "cardboard" of computing, as in you wrap up something in cardboard, stick a label on it, and send it

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-75788241423883708242007-05-10T13:44:00.000-04:002007-05-10T13:45:10.898-04:00

Here.

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-46344497222398423812007-04-20T17:33:00.000-04:002007-04-20T17:49:48.753-04:00

I was in Southern Ontario last week, and saw some amazing wind energy windmills near Lake Erie near Long Point. These things are massive and dominate the skyline in a war-of-the-worlds sort of way. Thanks to Ian Bigham for the tour -- I took a short movie:videoPS. Farmers are limited to one windmill per 50 acres so although $5000 per year is nice, it's hard to host lots of windmills.

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-6187112074687278902007-04-13T15:30:00.000-04:002007-04-23T16:52:49.652-04:00

Paul Graham's article is intriguing. Of course Microsoft isn't dead; as Joel Spolsky likes to remind us, they have enough money (40 billion or so) in the bank to continue for years, decades even. They can buy any talent or startup they want. They can throw a hundred programmers at a problem faster than you can say absorb-and-extend. But are they dead as a threat? He makes a good

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-85809810325141577522007-04-12T15:08:00.000-04:002007-04-12T15:17:15.554-04:00

Scott Rosenberg blogged on the Viacom - Google lawsuit. He pulls apart some fallacies in a NYT article, and calls Viacom's suit more of the same strategy -- sue the customer.A commenter made the standard comment that people don't mind paying for legal stuff if it's convenient. >Cheap is always good, but most people actually prefer legal and reasonable over illegal and free.I just had to reply (

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-53470683947458855962007-04-11T12:22:00.000-04:002007-04-11T12:24:46.169-04:00

Artima referred (via Martin Fowler) to Dan Pritchett's excellent blog Adding Simplicity. Dan is an eBay architect and covers the scalability and reliability issues of distributed web-based systems. The title of the blog comes from the notion that a great design is "not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". Adding simplicity is counter-intuitive; the

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-79269399231797067512007-04-10T17:22:00.000-04:002007-04-10T17:34:16.907-04:00

Scott Rosenberg's new book Dreaming In Code is a great read for anyone involved in software design over the last decade or two. I'm only on Chapter 4, but it's shaping up well. The book is about a failed project, Chandler, to build a "cross-platform, open-source, PIM in the spirit of Lotus Agenda". The words "in the spirit of" are the big red flag, because it revealed a massive hole in the

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-21516581966074595702007-03-06T11:20:00.000-05:002007-03-06T11:59:01.362-05:00

Logging is one of the most important infrastructure activates that a piece of software does. Good logging saves hours of support and troubleshooting time. For instance, every error that is log should indicate a single place in the source code where the error occured. You can do this with unique error code numbers. I often just vary the error text slightly, so errorFileNotFound says "can't

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-67774001420220285182007-03-06T11:16:00.000-05:002007-03-06T11:17:29.417-05:00

Here It's definitely starting to take shape. Simple directed dialog apps can now be done.Next up: mixed initiative and more SROs.

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-68711980056375078002007-02-26T17:37:00.000-05:002007-02-27T00:21:23.401-05:00

There's been a big change in direction for me in the last month. I'm going open-source. Spent the last month learning Java and Eclipse...and creating an open-source VoiceXML framework called the SpeakRight Framework. It's a code-based approach to writing speech recognition apps that, I believe, results in much higher code re-use and therefore faster development time. Also, modern Java IDEs are

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-6663501592613765372007-02-13T15:02:00.000-05:002007-02-14T08:07:14.041-05:00

The StringTemplate template engine is a powerful tool for generating markup text or code. It does, though, take a little getting used to. The templates may like a type of programming language, but there are some key differences. And since it's not compiled, bad syntax may just fail silently. Luckily it's quick to try things.Update: I have corrected errors in the original post. Namely $if(

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-23071603998447280012007-02-09T23:20:00.000-05:002007-02-09T23:15:41.715-05:00

After years in the Microsoft I am finally learning Java and Eclipse. For anyone familiar with C#, Java is extremely close but feels its age. No properties, delegates, or events? I can live without them. Eclipse however is another story. What AN AMAZING PIECE OF SOFTWARE! Miles ahead of Visual Studio in many areas. Mainly it just works; which is a huge kudo to any piece of complicated

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-11381030629358999272007-02-03T11:05:00.000-05:002007-02-03T11:15:49.274-05:00

Thanks to Gerald Gibson Jr.'s great article I now have a free way to do daily backups of my laptop. Windows natively supports the zip format (as "compressed folders"). The article is a C# program that generates ZIP files using the Shell API.(Be sure to get the latest version from Gerald's web site)My app zips several important directories into zip files in c:\zip. Then, using a free account at

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-59829588157249036102007-01-18T09:55:00.000-05:002007-01-18T10:48:51.550-05:00

Great article by David F. Carr on the behind the scenes mayhem at MySpace, whose exponential growth from a few hundred thousand users to 30 million users overloaded the system. "MySpace started small, with two Web servers talking to a single database server. Originally, they were 2-processor Dell servers loaded with 4 gigabytes of memory" Again and again MySpace was re-written to add: replicated

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-27172885975841738112007-01-12T14:56:00.000-05:002007-01-12T15:14:55.935-05:00

Mark Baker comments on the problems with (xml) document validation. Any DTD that is too detailed is a time-limited contract. ProductType may be "1", "2", or "3" today. But a year from now types "4" and "5" may be allowed.True, but validating, or what used to be called "laundering your input", still has to be done. Whether it's in the gatekeeper or the business object, the code has to be there

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-21806264478366266732007-01-12T11:58:00.000-05:002007-01-12T12:04:38.891-05:00

Further to my recent post on example-centric programming, Tony responded withI entirely agree with the audience targeting critique you make. I was thinking about the historical roots of programming, the social aspects, and how they must be considered, not just for fuzzy artsy reasons but for because they are part of the sociology of skills and attitudes that mold the field (we are the medium of

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-72078318967785323132007-01-10T14:49:00.000-05:002007-01-10T15:01:34.057-05:00

This Jonathan Edwards guy is brillant. His demo of Subtext is the most creative thing in programming in years. But he's basically trying to replace 50 years of programming culture: programs as text. Doomed to fail, like Charles Simonyi's Intentional programming, but may throw up interesting mashups.End-user progamming is a dubious thing. It comes and goes as the Next Big Thing. The problem is

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-12382987268547120432006-10-31T14:34:00.000-05:002006-10-31T14:48:22.528-05:00

In retooling our QA lab we've dropped the number of machines by half...and become more productive! Our work involves constantly re-installing windows service packes, hardware drivers, and assorted telephony software. Turns out that looking after of lots of machines was wasting time. We didn't used to have an organized way of managing the machines; we didn't know what was already on them,

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-45003827809235256202006-10-30T16:43:00.000-05:002006-10-30T16:55:43.014-05:00

We installed Subversion and Trac here last week to replace Starteam for defect tracking and source control. Firefox and GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail are rampant. Asterisk answers the phone. All these open-source software tools have replaced commercial products. Even here in a traditionally Microsoft shop, OSS is starting to mainstream. And we didn't need to switch to Linux to do it. Yes, the

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-2631287772005587572006-10-17T13:24:00.000-04:002006-10-17T13:27:52.980-04:00

Scott Rosenberg has an interesting article on Ballmer's comments that Vista has come out pretty much as expected. I think there are about 30,000 programmers at the Redmond campus. It boggles the mind how that many coders can get anything done that doesn't duplicate, simulate, or break what others are doing. For many years they coped through specialization. Each programmer got something tiny,

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-8113621120195852962006-10-04T11:54:00.000-04:002006-10-04T12:00:30.091-04:00

Estimating how long it will take to finish a software project is one of the toughest parts of software engineering. Luckily it's easier to get better: start making estimates now and track your accuracy.Two rules of thumb:Make a guess and double it. I find this one surprisingly accurate. Probably because I tend to work on the same sorts of projects; but then don't most programmers!Brook's book

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-43258963271102847512006-08-23T11:20:00.000-04:002006-08-23T12:08:12.025-04:00

Tuning refers to the post-deployment tweaking of grammars in a speech app. Your QA department can test the features, but there's nothing like real callers in all their variations of speaking styles to really probe your app's grammars. If the open-source mantra is "with enough eyeballs all bugs are shallow", then the speech app mantra should be with enough speakers all grammar bugs are

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1155068704179980872006-08-08T16:22:00.000-04:002006-08-08T16:43:53.320-04:00

So, Microsoft Speech Server is being folded into Office Communication Server, and will be known as Speech Platform Services. This was announced at today's SpeechTek conference. Office Communication Server (OCS) is basically Live Communication Server, which does presence and SIP call routing.I have fairly mixed views about this move. First, the negatives. Yet again, Microsoft is making a

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1155065747151507962006-08-08T15:27:00.000-04:002006-08-08T16:28:04.133-04:00

Anyone who does speech recognition demos knows how they can go bad. This one by Microsoft's Rob Chambers (YouTube) is about as bad as it could get. After mis-recognizing the presenter's first utterance, the recognizer got even worse at understanding his correction attempts like "select all and delete".Turns out it was a Longhorn bug with its audio software. Today Rob did the demo again, at

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1150488729567645412006-06-16T15:56:00.000-04:002006-06-20T18:08:46.400-04:00

The sub-title says it all "The extra-ordinary story of the largest covert operation in history". George Crile has written a fascinating account of the CIA's role in the Afghan resistance to the Soviet Invasion of Afghanistan.Charlie Wilson was a Dem senator from Texas. Most of the book deals with his efforts in Washington to get funding and support to his beloved mujahadeen. Washington is

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1150487698176118842006-06-16T15:36:00.000-04:002006-06-20T18:09:37.890-04:00

If you program in C# then buy this book. It's an indispensible reference with 300 code snippets of everything you never have time to look up. Snippets on things like: better ways to use collections, regular expressions, generics, delegates, exceptions, reflection, i/o, XML, and security.MSDN is great if you already know the name of the class or function that you're interested in. But if you don't

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1149701038745810322006-06-07T13:21:00.000-04:002006-06-07T13:23:58.756-04:00

Eating with kids at restaurants can be a challenge, but last weekend in Montreal we hit a new high (or low). The Bar-B-Barn is a classic Quebec chicken & ribs place that takes its tradition seriously. With puritanical zeal, they have kept the same menu and decor: department of highways road-stripe-yellow paint, pine panelling, and ancient posters of hockey players.The kids couldn't believe we

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1148655121611830592006-05-26T10:42:00.000-04:002006-05-26T10:53:53.493-04:00

Ethereal really saved our bacon recently on an MSS + SIP project. Calls from one gateway worked, but another gateway in California wouldn't work. Turned out that the RTP packet length was 20 msec on the "good" gateway, and 10 msec on the "bad" one.Whoever thought up the idea of human-readable message protocols should get a Nobel Prize. Protocols like SIP, HTTP and RSS are so much easier to

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1133977019305631222005-12-07T12:32:00.000-05:002005-12-07T12:36:59.320-05:00

.Net was supposed to make memory leaks a thing of the past. Turns out they can happen in C#, even pure .Net code that has no COM objects or unmanaged codes.The culprit is async sockets.The the buffer we pass to Socket.BeginReceive gets "pinned" in memory, preventing GC memory compaction. Since all new allocation uses the top of the stack, .Net has no choice but to keep allocating more Private

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1089821036783604032004-07-14T11:29:00.000-04:002004-07-14T12:04:06.450-04:00

Spent a week trying out Subversion, as a replacement for Starteam which (in our old version) doesn't support branching. Summary: Subversion works well on Windows. TortoiseSVN is OK but the integration within File Explorer is a bit disconcerting since it lets you check-in to any trunk or branch. I would prefer a 'Set current svn URL' feature. Setting up the subversion server I used svnserve

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1086276375769181662004-06-03T11:11:00.000-04:002004-06-09T09:55:59.840-04:00

Wow. After months of development, VBSalt 1.0 shipped. The blue and silver CDs arrived today from the printers. They look great. It's hard to believe that months of work turns into just a bunch of bits. I saw the movie “Pieces of April” last week. It’s about a woman, April, who is trying to cook Thanksgiving dinner in her little apartment. The stove breaks, and she spends most of the movie

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1086113236793242452004-06-01T14:00:00.000-04:002004-06-01T14:07:16.793-04:00

Now that John Lawrence has moved to a new position, his blog is no longer dealing with Speech Server. We need some other Microsofters who work on speech server or the SASDK to start blogging. For instance, today we were dealing with a false barge-in problem on our MSS-based Auto-Attendant. There are a bunch of TIM and SES settings for controlling the sensitivity of the speech detector.

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1085662020351431132004-05-27T08:17:00.000-04:002004-07-13T17:12:25.026-04:00

moved to http://www.computertelephony.org/blog/index.php?p=25

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1085609495938158202004-05-26T18:00:00.000-04:002004-05-27T08:48:59.956-04:00

From the Fish Don't Notice Water file: A standard feature of movie jail cells seems to be a window with bars and no glass. The hero can chat with friends standing outside or (more commonly) receive escape materials through the window. What gives? This is some sort of cultural QWERTY phenomenum, a cliche so engrained it doesn't get changed. It's been decades since a jail cell had glassless

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1085093724555465992004-05-20T18:39:00.000-04:002004-05-20T18:55:39.426-04:00

The name of this blog refers to a quality of good server software, it sits in the corner and just works. The fact that people forget about it, or at least take it for granted, is an indication of success. But silent software is not about software that is mute; servers should log copiously when asked to, and fail loudly. "Just works" is a perception, not a physical characteristic. Lack of

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7051891.post-1085078049590797262004-05-20T14:31:00.000-04:002004-05-20T18:39:31.300-04:00

Hello, world\n :) I'm new to Blogger and to blogging so we'll take this slow. This will be a blog about two things. First, I have an interest in the process of developing software software, including agile practices, software architectures, and project tracking. Secondly, I'm interested telephony and in particular speech recognition applications. This stems from my current position at

IanRaenoreply@blogger.com2