Text-to-speech on Windows Phone

Got Mango installed on my Windows Phone and am loving it.  By far, my favorite feature is the speech-to-text and text-to-speech for instant messages.  The other night, taking my dog out for a walk with my phone in a jacket pocket.  RunKeeper was following our progress and using GPS to make a map of the track that we took, and I had a bunch of Zune pass downloaded music playing into my bluetooth headset.  When a new instant message came in, the music paused, the phone read me the message, I said “reply” and spoke my response, and then said “send” and off it went – then the music started playing again.  No need to touch my phone.

 

One quirk that I wanted to share though.  When I get a phone, the first thing I do is put the ringer on vibrate and turn off all the sounds.  Turns out that you MUST have the ringer on, for text-to-speech to read your IM’s.  My solution?  I downloaded a 2 second mp3 of silence to my music library, tagged the file in the Zune software as Ringtone, sync’d it to my phone, and then set it as the default ringer.  Ahhh…peace and quiet again.

Index of “How-to” for Windows Azure

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg432998.aspx

How to use ADFS for OWA access

Ken posted a great article about how to configure OWA for ADFS authentication:  http://www.theidentityguy.com/articles/2010/10/15/access-owa-with-adfs.html

Overheard in a meeting (paraphrased)…

…the problem is, that instead of trying to make what we have work.  Every software architect believes that that their <widget> will be the solution that everyone adopts…

 

Typing this, reminded me of something else that I heard recently, which was along those same lines…

Of course my idea on the whiteboard is better than all the code that you’ve written!

Getting your Bitlocker keys out of AD

I often talk about my perspective that AD is a great publishing engine, but that it should not be authoritative for anything.  Any mission critical data should be mastered outside of AD, and then sync’d into the directory to be published/consumed.

The problem with this, is when you have services which source their information in AD directly, but that data is still mission critical.  One example of this, would be BitLocker Drive Encryption recovery keys.  The BDE service on clients will write it’s recovery keys directly into AD.

Before MSIT broadly deployed Bitlocker, we worked with an internal team to build a solution for finding new BDE recovery keys, and copying them out of AD into an external store.  We even went a step further, and put some self-service recovery options in front of that store.

I’m happy to see that MSIT was able to publish this solution out to Codeplex, so we can share it with everyone.

If you’ve got Bitlocker deployed in your environment, but are ONLY storing the recovery keys in AD – you may want to take a look.

http://keyrecoverytool.codeplex.com/

ADFS 2.0 is in the house!

Released To Web:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=118c3588-9070-426a-b655-6cec0a92c10b&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20MicrosoftDownloadCenter%20(Microsoft%20Download%20Center)#tm

AD Design Metrics

From http://www.shariqsheikh.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/05/wtfm1.jpg

Location, Location, Location…

Overheard in the cafeteria, during a discussion about a big project…

It’s like eating a big box of fiber, and chasing it with a pot of coffee.  Something big is gonna happen, good or bad all depends on where you’re at when it does.

The True Gentleman

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others rather than his own; and who appears well in any company; a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.

– John Walter Wayland

Got free time?…

This should take care of any spare time you might have had….  http://www.physicsgames.net

 

you’re welcome 🙂