Bruno Silva

Safe mail

To avoid spam a technique which consists on displaying e-mails as images instead of plain text is increasing each day. Plain text can more easily discovered by spammers. Because today I wanted to add an e-mail to this website I search for a website where I could generate an e-mail image.

I’ve found this nice one http://safemail.justlikeed.net. You can choose font and color. You can easily do this in paint for example. But this service stores your e-mail image, so you can use it in blogs or forums just by referring it.

Virtual Earth - 3 in 1

In the last few days I’ve been working with theVirtual Earth API in my spare time. I made a demo application of Virtual Earth. In this demo I used a Windows Forms application to wrap a Virtual Earth (VE) map (which is loaded in a HTML page into a WebBrowser control).

In that HTML page I added some Javascript functions that wrap the VE API in some functions which I call via the WebBrowser control. This way I can manipulate the map in Windows Forms. I’ve added support to my XBox 360 GamePad Component. You can use your game pad to pan and zoom in/out in the 2D map. You can also switch between map styles (road,aerial, hybrid, bird’s eye). This is still a developer’s toy, since you need XNA Game Studio 2.0 installed to be able to run this application. Oh, and you also need .NET Framework 3.0.

I was surprised when I found out that the beta 3D view in VE natively supports the XBox 360 controller.

The least but the last feature I added was support for Microsoft Speech. I added a welcome message, and if you say the name of a country (in English) the map moves into that country (or to be more specific, to the country name that the application understood…). I’ve achieved this by loading a XML file, which I found over the web, that contains the name of many countries (not sure if contains them all). After loading this file the code is pretty similar to my previous post about Microsoft Speech.

That’s all! I’ll be pleased to answer some doubts and hear suggestions about this demo.

Eu no Live Search e no Google

Andei a pesquisar pelo meu nome no Live Search e no Google para ver se este novo domínio já aparecia num ranking decente.

Realmente já aparece na 1ª página do Google e do Live. No entanto queria chamar à atenção para outro “pormenor” com o qual me deparei. O meu blog do Blogger (AKA do Google) nem sequer aparece até á página 10 de resultados do Live Search. Artigos do meu blog que no google aparecem facilmente nos resultados de uma pesquisa mais genérica, no Live Search nem sequer aparecem.

Das duas uma, ou o google benificia imenso os conteúdos “da casa” ou o Live Search irradica os resultados referentes ao Blogger…

Splashup - Online Photo Editing

Have you ever heard aboutsplashup? Maybe Fauxto (which was a previous name)?

I haven’t heard about them until I found Splashup on the web.

This is a tool that allows you to edit your images using a Adobe Flash based interface. You can edit files from your hard disk or access your Flickr, Picasa or Facebook images and photographs. It is great when you are in a public computer without any good software to edit some photographs you want to put in your blog. Upload your image, resize, crop, apply some effects and publish into you Flickr account or download it into the computer.

You can edit several images at the same time, and even work with layers! I was really amazed while I tried it out. It is in Beta stage. But this stuff has a lot of potential. You can even work in full screen mode! One functionality that I didn’t go quite well was importing an imagine from my webcam. It didn’t work

Here’s a screenshot.

My new cybernetic home

Welcome to my new blog!

Update your references, because here is where everything will be happening

I hope you enjoy the design. It was based on Tredndy 1.0.

TinyURL.com - shorten that long URL into a Tiny URL

Do you want to share an really big URL in a presentation to an audience or in a printed document?
Maybe it isn’t such a good idea. It’s a boring task to copy it and in a presentation you don’t want to show a slide for 5 minutes to let everyone copy it.

Well, you can use TinyURL.com. Type any long URL you want and it will create a new one like http://tinyurl.com/37xaar. It can be useful.
I found out about it in TechEd, when a speaker left some references in the end of the presentation.