I submitted some abstracts for Code Camp III. All of the Code Camp submissions are being displayed here on Thom Robbin’s site. You can submit abstracts up until the end of January and then Thom, myself, Chris Pels and a few others will start building a schedule. Since Rod Paddock is beginning his little North American User Group Tour at Vermont.NET on the Monday following Code Camp (March 14th), he has also put some sessions in for Code Camp. So now his tour will be extended even more. We should start tracking his tour on MapPoint – Waltham MA, Burlington VT, Montreal QC and then Toronto ON are on the list so far!!

I was happy to see a submission by my pal Dave Burke!! He has been doing some amazing things with customing .Text for his own blog site, so his session is to share some of the things he has learned about custominzing .Text.

http://www.AcehAid.org

I’m watching Josh Ledgard giving a tour of all the cute guys (and girls, too, yippee!!)  on the VS Core Team 😉

I just wanted to lay this quote down that came out of a conversation on debugging:

“there’s no correlation between the size of the error and the effect it has on the product”

Having been a programmer for over 20 years I can only say “amen” to that comment.

As always, this inside look is really interesting and enlightening.

Okay, back to watching some more!

The FBI is scrapping may scrap a $170million dollar investment in a failed custom software application. One hundred and seventy million dollars to write a computer program? And it’s SO bad that they are trashing it? Aaaaaaaaiiiiiiiiiiiiiiieeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee! How do companies (the company that has $170M in their pocket) get away with this sh*t? I heard the story on NPR but it’s not online yet so here’s a CNN link.

From that CNN article: Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, called the program “a train wreck in slow motion.”

http://www.AcehAid.org

Richard Sprague wonders why Text To Speech does not get more attention. I thought I would share a valuable use of this technology.

I had to implement a TTS solution years ago in a VB6 app and it solved a huge problem for my client. I used Chant’s fantastic SpeechKit package to accomplish this.

The problem was that we create a daily schedule for technicians out in the field. At that time we were not yet publishing the schedule to the web (of course, we are now). So, in order for techs not to have to come into the office just to get their info, each one of them had a special extension on the phone system. At the end of the day, the scheduler would have to dial each person’s extension and leave them a voice mail detailing everythign they would need to know about the next days’ work. In the summertime, there are about 70 field technicians. This solution was great for the techs but not so for the person who had that horrible chore.

I figured out how to take the data that was getting pushed onto the big schedule report and use Ms. Microsoft Mary (this was before the huge revision of the MS Speech tools) to “read” the information into individual WAV files. The tricky part was finding a DOS utility to convert the wave files into the format used by their voice mail system. Because of the many hurdles I was told by many, including the company that owned the voice mail system, that this project couldn’t be done. But my client had faith in my pit bull like qualities when I am told “can’t be done”, and I persevered. Although still Mary has to “read” the info in real time, we run multiple instances of my app and she can do the whole process in about 20 – 30 minutes while the scheduler is able to do other tasks.

This has saved my client about 2 hours a day, 5 days a week for the past 4 years or more years. It was well worth the effort.