Catch-44

Media RSS (MRSS) is an XML format which extends the RSS format. By using this format, a website can be enabled to provide rich media functionality. This can be used for images, audio and video. This entry discusses enabling Media RSS for images. Video is very easy to implement, but will not be discussed here. By using PicLens in Firefox, the result looks like below. It is very fast, full screen, and has nice facilities to scroll around the images, zoom in and out and other such things. Here I will discuss a simple implementation, and you can scroll below to download a small .NET application to automate this process. If you already have a Media RSS viewing application, then check out an example of the output (Note, copyright links were added after the page was generated). [More]

Continuing from a previous post in which I added a Google Map of the visitors to my blog, this post will discuss how to take the same information and present it in a Visifire chart. Visifire is an open source Silverlight charting component which is very easy to use and well documented. [More]

This VSTO project creates a context sensitive dynamic help system inside of Microsoft Word, based on the current cursor location. For example, if the cursor is on an image, then help information would be presented regarding the business rules pertaining to images. I.E. what size can the image be, policies regarding alternative text for web publishing etc. The help information is presented in a custom task pane, and uses HTML. [More]

By combining the Google Maps API with an IP address host service such as HostIP.info, it is possible to present a map showing the current visitors to your blog, and to display them on a map. This implementation shows how to do this for dasBlog. [More]

A C# application to parse apache log files. This could easily be extended to parse other log file formats. [More]

Image gallery is a small application that takes all the images in a directory and creates a lightbox style AJAX image gallery that is web ready. It reads the metadata in the picture to extract the title, description, keywords and rating. Primarily I wrote this to experiment with some C# 3 features, such as LINQ. [More]

Wikipediaise is a Visual Tools for Office addin (VSTO) developed in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 as an addin for Microsoft Word. It is written in C#. It can be used to hyperlink acronyms and jargon to Wikipedia or any other reference source and add entries and add an acronym table to a Word document. [More]