We use our blogs to share information with our employees, partners, and clients.
The
Byzet Tools Blog is an ever growing collection of tools that
we use and recommend for software development.
Really Free Feeds is a list of RSS and other data feeds that are
free for commercial use.
Here are some recent postings from our blogs.
is "the GNU project's complete and free implementation of the OpenPGP standard". It's a command-line program that'll let you encrypt and decrypt data.
GnuPGWrapper at CodeProject is a .NET class created by Emmanuel Kartmann that wraps GnuPG, making it easy to use within your code.
One bug I noticed: if you set the HomeDirectory, it tries to pass a --homedir parameter to GnuPG and it fails. I think --homedir may no longer be a supported option.
Another issue: if you don't set the HomeDirectory, the wrapper won't find the GPG executable. So I just went in to GnuPGWrapper.cs at line 431 and just set gpgExecutable to "gpg.exe". As long as gpg.exe is in your path, it'll work fine.
Comment designsFrom Byzet Tools Blog, Sunday, April 20, 2008, 10:11 PM eastern timeThis is a nice collection of designs for blog comments. These design ideas can be applied to other things as well, such as how we include the most recent two discussion posts for each stock research article published at
GeoInvesting.
Read and create RSS/Atom feeds with .NET 3.5From Byzet Tools Blog, Sunday, April 20, 2008, 9:39 PM eastern timeThe new System.ServiceModel.Syndication namespace in .NET 3.5 includes a number of classes to help you read and generate RSS and Atom feeds.
Click here for a quick introduction from DotNetBips...
Microsoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power ToolsFrom Byzet Tools Blog, Monday, March 10, 2008, 1:34 AM eastern timeMicrosoft Visual Studio Team System 2008 Database Edition Power Tools is a set of enhancements and tools that complement and improve the user experience of VSTS Database Edition 2008.
Copy to the user's clipboard from Firefox and IEFrom Byzet Tools Blog, Friday, March 07, 2008, 2:46 AM eastern timeWebChicanery has
a great Flash file & some JavaScript code that will let you copy text into the user's clipboard. This gets around the fact that Firefox has no built-in capabilities to access the clipboard, and even bypasses IE's security warnings when a page tries to access the clipboard.
Lancaster PA Incident Status FeedsFrom Really Free Feeds, Saturday, October 06, 2007, 3:41 AM eastern timeLancaster County in Pennsylvania has live incident status feeds that let you track fire, EMS, and traffic incidents in real-time.
http://www.lcwc.co.lancaster.pa.us/lcwc/cwp/view.asp?a=782&Q=538338
Voxant NewsroomFrom Really Free Feeds, Saturday, October 06, 2007, 3:35 AM eastern timeThe Voxant Newsroom may be a bit out of place in this list, at least right now. But it deserves some mention. It lets you embed news videos on to your site and actually pays you when people view them.
Right now you pick a video or a topic to embed, but you don't have a whole lot of control after that. Rumour is that they plan to add more features soon that may give you more automated control of the content. Keep and eye on them.
http://www.thenewsroom.com/
Real-time Traffic Information and Alerts for EnglandFrom Really Free Feeds, Monday, September 10, 2007, 12:56 AM eastern timeThe
UK Highway Agency has real-time traffic condition feeds that cover all of the Highway Agency's roads England. You can look at conditions across all of England, in specific areas, or specific highways.
http://www.highways.gov.uk/traffic/11278.aspxAlso of interest is this traffic alert feed from
London Transport that covers all of London.
http://trafficalerts.tfl.gov.uk/rss/trafficalertsall.rssIf only we could freely get this kind of data here in the states...
Newsfeed MakerFrom Really Free Feeds, Monday, September 10, 2007, 12:46 AM eastern timeNewsfeed Maker lets you build RSS feeds (as well as JavaScript and IFRAME inserts) that return the news you want. You can select specific categories or enter specific keywords to filter what you get. And it is totally free for commercial use.
Some of the results are just the headlines, but many include a snipped of the article. If you provided a search term, the snippets usually include a piece of the article with your search term.
The news sources are the typical sources you'll find at at most likes Google News or Yahoo News - New York Times, LA Times, etc. There also appears to be lots of new sources from their parent company.
http://www.newsfeedmaker.com/
US and World PopulationFrom Really Free Feeds, Monday, September 10, 2007, 12:32 AM eastern timeThe
US Census Bureau publishes real-time estimates of the the US and world population in RSS. I'm sure someone can find a use for this.
http://www.census.gov/main/www/rss/popclocks.xml