These folks were mentioned in a New York Times article today on outbound vote solicitation. The article states that up to two million calls were made to households in Maryland using software that uses voice recognition to ask leading questions that promote a republican candidate for governer. I wonder if they're using Microsoft Speech Server?

On another topic, I found a workaround for a problem with the dotnet measurestring function that has been a persistant thorn. This function is intended to return the dimensions of a given string with a specified font as a SizeF object. The width value of the result is often much larger than the string when displayed on screen, however there is a workaround that provides for much more accurate results: Set the TextRenderingHint property of the Graphics object is set to TextRenderingHintAntiAlias. A knowledgebase article that explains why this works is available here on the Microsoft web site.