Channel 9 - Discussions by Rossj

Tech Off - "Searching 'Samson'......did you mean 'Sampson'?"

Rossj — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 14:23:22 GMT

Googling for Double metaphone will probably find you a better soundex - find the matching codes (primary and secondary for double metaphone, primary for metaphone), weight them according to popularity (if you have the info) and then order according to edit distance.

Don't forget to stem the words (look for an alternative to the porter stemmer if you have time), and try and add more weight to proper nouns and nouns, a bit of weight to verbs and a negative discriminating weight to determiners.

Then add a neural net so that you can track the best matches (based on which links the user clicked) and feedback to improve accuracy in future searches.

Tech Off - "Searching 'Samson'......did you mean 'Sampson'?"

Rossj — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 21:01:47 GMT

levenshtein is not only useful on words, and there are improved soundex ideas about. You will have a lot less sounds codes than words I'd write more but on phone at the minute.

Tech Off - Gilad on cutting out static

Rossj — Mon, 18 Feb 2008 20:59:12 GMT

Only a couple of thoughts (it has been a long day).

Whilst it is true that the use of statics is both imperative (as in the style of) and involves taking a lot more care of how it is used, there are benefits which are not necessarily outweighed by the disadvantages.

Implement a local cache without statics, now do it without passing references back up the call stack from the owner of the non-static cache all the way to the place where it is actually needed.

I can see Gilad's point about distributed systems, and the difficulty in maintaining the 'one true static' but that isn't such an issue if you aren't building a distributed system.

His points about re-entrancy, whilst true, depend totally on your usage. Personally a lot of my use of statics tend to be read-only after an initial locked update, so I'm not so worried after any threading issues.

Yeah, he has lots of great points, but how would I build my Factories and Caches and Blackboards without statics?

I think we'd all agree that he could write the same document about pointers and that'd be true as well, but I don't think pointers being evil (or not) warrants eliminating them from C (or C++) or is likely to ever be considered. Same goes for statics, and as with pointers, use it carefully and it won't bite you.

Tech Off - Override XMLHTTPRequest charset

Rossj — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 18:02:31 GMT

Sven Groot wrote:

I'm requesting some text file using IE7's XMLHTTPRequest. XMLHTTPRequest is interpreting the file as utf-8, but it's not in fact that, and it breaks because of that. The server doesn't return a charset directive, and I have no control at all over the server.

How can I make XMLHTTPRequest interpret the response with a different encoding? Or failing that, how can I manually decode the responseBody byte array into a string? Using nothing but javascript.

An alternative method to download the file would also work. The script has local machine privileges so it can do more than a regular browser script.

The default charset for XHR is UTF-8 with BOM being used to differentiate other encodings when the server returns no charset, so you might try using setRequestHeader() on the XHR to see if sending Accept-Charset might change the server's mind.

Failing that, maybe this might help

Tech Off - Patching VS's XHTML XSDs

Rossj — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 19:33:29 GMT

JChung2006 wrote:

Both XHTML 1.0 Transitional and XHTML 1.1 XSD's reference the same "buttonContentElements" group, but neither has it defined. Your version of the XHTML 1.1 XSD is also missing the "buttonContentElements" group definition.

Is it in one of the includes?

Coffeehouse - VS2008 Launch UK : registration open

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 21:29:23 GMT

andy_hanger18 wrote:
What sort of things happen?

1. Sign in. 2. Go to pub 3. Come back for the prizes 4. Profit!

Coffeehouse - VS2008 Launch UK : registration open

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:47:44 GMT

blowdart wrote:
Oh and, errr, yea.

Does this mean I have to go to the launch event in my power-ranger costume?

Coffeehouse - It' Time to To clarify the situation Windows 7

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 20:06:46 GMT

Minh wrote:
PaoloM wrote:

All of them have been sold, are in use and Microsoft collected the money.

Tell me again how that difference matters in the slightest?
Now, I'm asking this because I'm curious, but I think this scenario is true:

* Company X has 23,000 employees
* Company X buys a Windows site license from MS, for price Y
* Price Y happens to be for companies w/ 25,000 - 50,000 seats
* MS gets to book $Y
* MS gets to claimed 50,000 copies of Vista has been sold
* ???

That sounds like a falsehood to me. Nobody would get away with that.

Coffeehouse - RSS Feed is broken.

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:52:12 GMT

Musta been fixed, was broken for me before - empty document.

Coffeehouse - Anybody running Vista on Leopard Macbook Pro?

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 19:23:06 GMT

PaoloM wrote:
taking a look at Mac software

Aaahhh "Research".

j/k.

Coffeehouse - RSS Feed is broken.

Rossj — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 18:52:15 GMT

Coffeehouse - VS2008 Launch UK : registration open

Rossj — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 21:39:53 GMT

Registered. Not sure why, but maybe server 2008 will shock me into being interested again.

Coffeehouse - Can you do this in WPF?

Rossj — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:57:20 GMT

stevo_ wrote:
Well I'm not expecting a miracle of it pushing performance out of a voodoo 3 3000..

What about some of the recent intel onboard graphics cards for example? could I do most 2D animations in that?

Yes more than likely, you'll just need to keep an eye on the handle count if it is a long-running application. On one onboard intel (945?) we were losing dozens of handles a second when doing opacity, another box with the same hardware only lost one or two a second - and they were both identical new builds.

I'd try and get a Tier 2 card though if you want to be entirely safe

Coffeehouse - Can you do this in WPF?

Rossj — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:32:54 GMT

PaoloM wrote:
stevo_ wrote:
Is WPF slow and bloated?

No.

.. given the right video hardware. My ex-companies app was WPF and had horrendous issues except for a small set of video cards.

Coffeehouse - Anybody have "Switcher" Moments?

Rossj — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 21:30:17 GMT

jsampsonPC wrote:

...to not spend ridiculous amounts of money for shiny toys $1,700 for the Air - you gotsa be kiddin' meh

The other small notebooks of a similar size are a similar price, so why not? Even with the optical drive it is cheaper than some.

Tech Off - Zune 30 Audio Trouble

Rossj — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 20:16:47 GMT

I think Minh had this problem, try putting his name in the subject see if he solved it?

Tech Off - How not to do Silverlight

Rossj — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 21:17:36 GMT

evildictaitor wrote:

Edit: It seems to work better in IE7 (but is still jumpy and ugly) - it's truly appalling in Firefox.

More worrying, why is it any different in FF than in IE? I thought Silverlight was supposed to be a plugin. If Silverlight can't deliver the same behaviour in two different browsers we're doomed to live in HTML 3 hell for eternity.

Coffeehouse - What would you like to do in Microsoft?

Rossj — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 19:00:40 GMT

ManipUni wrote:

A degree in CS is a useless waste of time in terms of what you learn.

I disagree. I don't value degrees for the name of the degree, but because I have proof of their ability to learn and to teach themselves.

Coffeehouse - What would you like to do in Microsoft?

Rossj — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 10:49:05 GMT

I could wander around with the tea trolley?

Tech Off - msn live scraper

Rossj — Mon, 24 Dec 2007 10:17:15 GMT

Dr Herbie wrote:

Wow, Beer28 has started spamming us.

New low.

Herbie

Worse than that, he's spamming to try and get people to write code for his 'Google-Killer'.

Tech Off - YouTube.NET???

Rossj — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:09:13 GMT

Minh wrote:

Apparently not, 'cuz Silverlight runs on Safari.

Using the word 'runs' is overly generous, maybe stumbles along with frequent falls is more realistic?

Tech Off - Getting GPS co-ordinates in C# on a Windows Mobile 6.0 device

Rossj — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 08:19:11 GMT

OpenNetCF has a GPS lib, it might be a good starting point but the NMEA stuff isn't too hard to parse if you're feeling frisky (aka overzealous).

Coffeehouse - Come Work on Our Team

Rossj — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 07:31:28 GMT

JChung2006 wrote:

Anyways, it's all good as I have joined Microsoft in a different but quite similar capacity.

Hey congrats - whatcha working on?

Coffeehouse - Source control?

Rossj — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 12:37:58 GMT

Erisan wrote:

Rossj wrote:

Bah, all the cool kids use VisualSVN integrated with VS.Net.

Sorry but cool kids doesn't use SVN at all ...

I'm sure everyone has seen this already but it's pretty interesting and worth to watch:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8

GIT. Next time I need distributed development I'll take a look, but for the common case SVN is more than adequate.

Don't mistake how Linus works with the rest of the world. He is a law until himself

Coffeehouse - Source control?

Rossj — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 08:46:36 GMT

Ion Todirel wrote:

Tortoise SVN forever!

Bah, all the cool kids use VisualSVN integrated with VS.Net. Yes it is based on Tortoise .. but I bought a copy a while ago and it hasn't let me down yet.