Emad Alashi’s Blog

Lately OData (Open Data protocol) is gaining a great momentum, everybody is talking about, and in fact it deserves all this fuss. OData is a protocol through which you can share data provided as ATOM or JSON formats by exposing URI’s to be invoked via HTTP, check the FAQ for fast information.

One of the interesting things is that the protocol provides various options through the URI to query all sort data; conditions, ordering, filtering, smart selection, …etc, in addition to very smart linking between exposed entities.

So hereby I provide the data of DotNetArabi through OData on the link http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc for the sake of fun and for anyone who might find it useful. I used the Entity Framework for this purpose since it was the easiest, you can find a very helpful information here.

To start playing around check:

http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc/Guests
http://odata.dotnetarabi.com/odata.svc/Episodes?$filter=AudioFileLength gt 40

I hope you find it interesting.

After publishing 8 episodes of DotNetArabi, I think it would be nice to share on this blog how it goes and what equipment needed in the process. But before we begin, dear reader, note that I am not an expert, I am still in the beginning of the way, though it’s going good so far.

  My working machine is HP dv 6700 laptop, my first trials with recording was with simple microphone like the ones you use for chats; recording in winter made things smooth, but when summer came a long the heating problem became obvious in the low quality of the audio recorded, in addition to the higher target I needed anyway, so a different measure had to take place.

I looked for an audio device that would clear the recording of any noise that is caused by the internal electrical and the fan. I had different options then, but the most interesting one was the MobilePre USB audio interface which I finally got. It takes analog inputs (2 of which are XLR) and transforms to digital signal view USB.

Of course it appeared that it is over bloated than what I really needed, but I liked it anyway and produced the quality I looked for, though if you are going to record voice only, I believe there are other devices with lower cost.

To complete the set I got myself two XLR Microphones, not fancy ones, 15 JD’s each (about 22 US $) and that was it.

Now on the software side I use Audacity, I find it the best free audio software.

After all that, you’d find it surprising that you still need to use the Noise Removal feature in Audacity. And by that you can have your own podcast