Seems some Microsoft software (probably Bing bar) version is changing Internet Explorer title bar to write “optimized for Bing and MSN”. To remove this: Use Start/Run or Start/Find and type there regedit then press ENTER to launch the Registry Editor. At the tree on the left navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Main ...

I had recently enabled FTP access to the ClipFlair Gallery to easy its maintenance during development and after the Windows Server 2008 R2 platform update last night (together with release for Internet Explorer 10), the FTP login stopped working. To fix it, from a command prompt with administrator rights (Start/Find, type Command and right ...

based on the other samples posted at StackOverflow on how to format XML created by DataContractSerializer, that use XmlWriter, here’s a version (from ClipFlair source code) that works with streams (and Ionic.Zip library in specific). It also shows how the code is when you don’t apply formatting (using conditional compilation).  ...

I was just adding a storable (persistent) Volume property to the MediaPlayerView class used at ClipFlair’s MediaPlayerWindow (connected to the underlying SMF player’s VolumeLevel property), when I realized that after reloading saved state, the SMF player’s Volume control would show a different value than the value set to it (which I could confirm ...

Recently, to save myself sometime after having renamed some interfaces/classes in the ClipFlair project sourcecode, I right-clicked one of the class diagrams (.cd files) in it at Visual Studio’s “Solution Navigator” (this is an enhanced Solution Explorer addon) and using “Open With…” I opened up the diagrams with the XML editor to do a rename-all ...

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog. Here’s an excerpt: 4,329 films were submitted to the 2012 Cannes Film Festival. This blog had 48,000 views in 2012. If each view were a film, this blog would power 11 Film Festivals Click here to see the complete report. Tagged: 2012, [...]

I just got an (overpriced) Philips PTA01 USB adapter the other day to make my Philips Smart TV also work wirelessly (apart from via Ethernet cable) and it came with the Philips MediaConnect software on a CD, or at least I thought so till I placed the CD in my computer. I then found out [...]

At ClipFlair’s Image component I use the following XAML to make it show an image from a URL that its ViewModel holds at a property named “Source”, of type Uri (URI = Uniform or Universal Resource Identifier in W3C parlance, something like a superset of the old classic URLs). <Image Name="imgContent"        ...

I’ve been puzzled for some days now with the IIS Transform Manager installation we have at ClipFlair for automating the conversion of media files (for example using Microsoft Expression Encoder) into IIS Smooth Streams. The watch folder I’ve set up for this task was ignoring some of the media files I was dropping in for no [...]

Copying from Microsoft Web Deploy readme: If you encounter any problems during installation, you can run appropriate command listed below for your version of Windows to create a log file that will contain information about the installation process: msiexec /L install.log /I <path_to_msi> You can analyze this log file after a failed ...

While stepping through “ShowDialog()” method of OpenFileDialog with Visual Studio 2010 debugger, at the Silverlight code pictured below (for loading a ClipFlair window’s stored options), I got a “Dialogs must be user-initiated” exception. Same behaviour will be shown with SaveFileDialog too, every time you try to step through the “ShowDialog()” ...

For ClipFlair, I’m looking into implementing advanced search using Silverlight PivotViewer   A really nice example of PivotViewer search is at: http://www.appletoncompassion.org/VirtualExhibitViewer This may take long time to load, since its loading 10000 children art DeepZoom image tiles You can use the mousewheel to zoom in there or the ...

Project Linker is a Visual Studio Extension that “helps to automatically create and maintain links from a source project to a target project to share code that is common to Silverlight and WPF”. In ClipFlair, where I have shared code between a Silverlight and a WPF project (I guess same would be for XNA projects [...]

When using MVVM design style for a Silverlight or WPF control, it is common to use the control’s DataContext to keep the associated ViewModel instance, so that in the XAML file for the control one can use simple binding statements from the UI to the view model (and back if TwoWay binding mode is specified) [...]

Qualys BrowserCheck will perform a security analysis of your browser and its plugins to identify any security issues. You can install it at https://browsercheck.qualys.com/   Another useful quick online tool (needs no installation) for checking that you do have the latest in web browser technology is Browse Happy, at ...

An annoying feature of Skype of recent Skype versions is that by default it shows an icon on the Windows taskbar apart from the one at the taskbar tray while you’re signed in. This also means it shows in the ALT+TAB key sequence when switching between open windows, which you might not always want to [...]

If you want to use the latest DotNetZip library (version 1.9.1.8) with Silverlight, you should get a patched version from http://dotnetzip.codeplex.com/workitem/14049, instead of the official download for Silverlight. It seems the Silverlight build in 1.9.1.8 official download doesn’t work correctly, since it tries to get IBM437 Encoding (as ...

At ClipFlair’s Playground Silverlight app I’m using DotNetZip library (Ionic.Zip namespace) for writing saved component state to a .ZIP file. In fact the Activity container there can create one .ZIP for each state that contains one .ZIP per-component it hosts (it can even host multiple instances of its own Activity componnt type to have nested ...

Was just debugging an issue with loading of saved state at ClipFlair’s Text component, when I realized that Silverlight’s (and WPF’s) RichTextBox control doesn’t accept an empty string at its Xaml proprerty to clear its contents as one would expect. Instead clearing the contents of the RichTextBox requires a call to Blocks.Clear(). In ClipFlair’s ...

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 [...]

Opensource movies made with Blender (http://www.blender.org) http://orange.blender.org/download http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/download/ http://www.sintel.org/download http://mango.blender.org/download/ At the download page for some of them you can also find subtitle files. Also at list of featured Blender movies ...

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 [...]

TeamViewer is a very handy remote control / remote support and screen sharing application with a free version for personal use only. I’ve been using it for some time now since friends and family tend to contact me for support issues and I’m very pleased with its simple installation and use (a user can even [...]

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 ...

To upgrade a phpBB forum, one usually downloads an automatic upgrade package to the latest version, selecting on the website which version they currently have. The current version number at a phpBB installation is shown at the Admin Control Panel (there’s a link to it at the bottom of the main page of a phpBB [...]