ClipFlair’s project description website is based on WordPress (a quite extensible blogging platform based on PHP). The other day we had an issue with the AddThis Plugin for WordPress, which was adding tracking suffices (in the form #.UAxxxxx) to the end of our URLs on the browser address bar. Moreover this wasn’t occuring in Internet [...]

One of the main goals of the ClipFlair project is to explore the use of Video Captioning (together with Revoicing) for Foreign Language Learning (FLL). There both are important enhancements compared to the simpler two-line subtitling that was put in use in its ancestor project LeViS. Captioning means that multi-row text is needed while text [...]

Supposing you have an MSDN Subscription, you could download say SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition (x86 and x64) – DVD (English) from the following URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/downloads/hh442898.aspx#FileId=48810 Suppose you do so and you keep that .ISO file (a CD/DVD image that you can burn to a disk using Windows 7 or ...

Since our onoing project ClipFlair is a follow-up of the succesful project LeViS, during its development I’m also looking at covering possible use-cases I infer from feedback entries at LvS application issue tracker on Codeplex (note that ClipFlair is also opensourced on Codeplex at http://ClipFlair.codeplex.com). One such issue ...

Trying to make CaptionsGridWindow of ClipFlair serve captions editing on-the-fly to SMF (Silverlight Media Framework [now called MMPPF]) player component, I had a real hard time, plagued by a bug at TimedTextElementStyle. It seems to be setting default FontSize for captions using a “Cell” unit instead of using a “Pixel” unit. Currently SMF only ...

In the context of ClipFlair development, I was recently adding independent scaling (zooming) functionality to its ZUI container’s floating windows (apart from the container zooming functionality) and came across some strange behavior, where the windows seemed to also move apart from getting scaled. After banging my head a bit I decided to take a ...

While refactoring ClipFlair code to use MVVM (Model-View-ViewModel) pattern, I came across the XAML error “Object reference not set to an instance of an object.”, shown in Visual Studio when trying to bind to my ViewModel (accessed implicitly, being set as the DataContext of the XAML control) for a property named Source. I have settled [...]

Following up on my post on how to fix CSpeex (http://cspeex.codeplex.com) to compile at Silverlight 5 (see http://zoomicon.wordpress.com/2012/06/09/fix-compile-cspeex-audio-codec-at-silverlight-4-rc-and-silverlight-5/).  Initially I thought it was not working correctly, but then I noticed I was running it on Terminal Server and didn’t have an ...

According to http://www.w3.org/Style/Examples/007/center.en.html#vertical CSS level 2 doesn’t have a property for centering things vertically. There will probably be one in CSS level 3. But even in CSS2 you can center blocks vertically, by combining a few properties. The trick is to specify that the outer block is to be formatted as a table ...

While adding some properties to the back panels of ClipFlair windows, I came upon the issue of how to space items in a StackPanel. A Padding property is missing from multiple item containers (only single content controls have such), but a nice solution is described at: ...

At LvS (the opensource application of LeViS), I’ve been using this (VB.net) code to set the UI language (for example to Greek): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentUICulture = CultureInfo.GetCultureInfo("el") Others seem to have been using (C# – that’s why there is a trailing semicolon): Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = ...