This video is absolutely hilarious. Admittedly he is trying to do something that the Vista speech recognition wasn't designed for, but it still made me laugh so hard it started to hurt. It looks to me that under the right conditions and with the right training it would work well for writing letters and other documents, but I honestly still can't see speech recognition taking off in a huge way - a perfectly quiet environment is not something you usually find in the average office.
On Friday at our usual work lunch at Nando's we were discussing the difference in taste between Coke, Coke Zero, and Diet Coke, and the perceived taste difference between soft drinks out of a can and out of a bottle. After much discussion it was resolved that some blind testing had to be done to resolve the issue. Five of us did a blind test using four identical glasses of Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero all out of glass bottles, and Coke out of a can. We found that (a) almost all of us had no trouble discerning "real" Coke (with sugar) and the others; (b) Diet Coke and Coke Zero have a very similar taste but that the slightly unpleasant aftertaste that you get with Diet Coke wasn't as noticeable in Coke Zero, so they aren't quite the same; and (c) there was absolutely no difference between the coke out of a can and out of a bottle, so it must be just the drinking experience that influences the taste perception. Case closed :)
The Opie code is "frozen" at the moment in preparation for the Opie 1.2.3 release which should happen very soon. There's been the suggestion of another minor Familiar release including it (among other things) in the near future as well, which I would definitely support (and try to help with). Actually I'm looking forward to when the freeze period ends so that I can have a look at committing a few bits of code I've been sitting on - such as by external keyboard (kbdd) control stuff.
Saturday, February 17, 2007
Tuesday, January 23, 2007
Opie-ate of the masses
Thanks to Lorn Potter I now have Opie CVS write access, so I've committed almost all of my patches. Most notably, after sitting stagnant and buggy for some time, TinyKATE is finally usable - only minor changes were required such as providing access to the already written find/replace functions, and prompting the user to save changes (very important). OpieRecorder is now a lot easier to use as well, and I've fixed a number of minor bugs in various parts of Opie that have annoyed me for a while. There's lots more stuff to be done, I just need to keep finding the time and the motivation.
The OpenSync Opie plugin gained initial support for syncing of notes this week. Since Opie provides a text editor rather than a "memo" application like most other platforms, the plugin just looks for and writes .txt files in the user's home directory on the handheld. It seems to work fairly well in testing for me - try it and let me know how it goes.
In other news, the "new" Battlestar Galactica rocks! I hadn't seen it until last weekend and I was really impressed. All those people who told me it was good previously weren't kidding.
Some random cool stuff I discovered lately:
The OpenSync Opie plugin gained initial support for syncing of notes this week. Since Opie provides a text editor rather than a "memo" application like most other platforms, the plugin just looks for and writes .txt files in the user's home directory on the handheld. It seems to work fairly well in testing for me - try it and let me know how it goes.
In other news, the "new" Battlestar Galactica rocks! I hadn't seen it until last weekend and I was really impressed. All those people who told me it was good previously weren't kidding.
Some random cool stuff I discovered lately:
Monday, January 08, 2007
A PDA in the hand...
It's now the beginning of week 3 of my holidays. So far I've had a fairly quiet break - I've taken the opportunity to do lots of reorganisation at home and do a bit more of my own coding. I've been submitting patches for Opie itself, which I've done before, but this time I'm delving into lots of different applications and areas. Most of the fixes are fairly trivial, but the bug reports they address (some of which were submitted by me, some by others) have been around for several years (!) Hopefully now one of the developers can spare the time to review the patches.
Some people have been suggesting that Opie is dead. While it's true that many of the developers have moved on to other things, and Opie II is now on the horizon, I think Opie still has some life left in it. I imagine it'll be a while before Opie II reaches the level that Opie is at in terms of application availability and features, so there'll still be users around that are interested in using the original Opie for some time to come, and that justifies me spending time working on it. I'm hoping also that the recent development of a viable syncing solution (at least for Linux, anyway) might increase interest levels amongst users.
In related news, I've bought yet another second-hand PDA for Familiar testing and/or actual usage - this time it's an iPAQ h2200 (that's my fourth iPAQ now). It's slightly smaller than my other iPAQs, so it should fit in my pocket. Linux support for this model looks good, though I'm not sure about Opie. At least if I have any problems with the latter I'm a bit more confident I can help debug them now.
Some people have been suggesting that Opie is dead. While it's true that many of the developers have moved on to other things, and Opie II is now on the horizon, I think Opie still has some life left in it. I imagine it'll be a while before Opie II reaches the level that Opie is at in terms of application availability and features, so there'll still be users around that are interested in using the original Opie for some time to come, and that justifies me spending time working on it. I'm hoping also that the recent development of a viable syncing solution (at least for Linux, anyway) might increase interest levels amongst users.
In related news, I've bought yet another second-hand PDA for Familiar testing and/or actual usage - this time it's an iPAQ h2200 (that's my fourth iPAQ now). It's slightly smaller than my other iPAQs, so it should fit in my pocket. Linux support for this model looks good, though I'm not sure about Opie. At least if I have any problems with the latter I'm a bit more confident I can help debug them now.
Thursday, December 07, 2006
OpenSync progress redux
More work on the Opie plugin for OpenSync. After testing synchronisation with KDE PIM it seems there are still a lot of bugs. I fixed quite a few obvious ones, but a major problem that still remains is UID mapping. If you create an entry on the non-Opie side it doesn't have a unique ID that Opie understands, so when that entry is synced across and subsequently modified by Opie it gets assigned a new one. At the next sync it appears to OpenSync as a new entry and so you get a duplicate item. This pretty much makes the plugin useless at the moment, but I think I know how to fix it.
It's nice to finally have a few users testing the plugin too - it gives me some motivation to keep working on it :)
It's nice to finally have a few users testing the plugin too - it gives me some motivation to keep working on it :)
Wednesday, October 04, 2006
I am
You are Geordi LaForge
You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.
Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz
Which OS are You?
Which File Extension are You?
Which 24 Character are you?
No, I'm not kidding, I really am Jack Bauer (according to multiple tests even!) although I think I'd rather be Tony Almeida - and with a wife like that, who wouldn't... :)
And, as you can probably tell, I'm bored...
You work well with others and often fix problems quickly. Your romantic relationships are often bungled.
| Geordi LaForge | 75% |
| An Expendable Character (Redshirt) | 70% |
| Jean-Luc Picard | 60% |
| Worf | 60% |
| Spock | 54% |
| Data | 43% |
| James T. Kirk (Captain) | 40% |
| Leonard McCoy (Bones) | 40% |
| Mr. Scott | 40% |
| Chekov | 40% |
| Beverly Crusher | 35% |
| Deanna Troi | 35% |
| Uhura | 30% |
| Mr. Sulu | 30% |
| Will Riker | 30% |
Click here to take the Star Trek Personality Quiz
Which OS are You?
Which File Extension are You?
Which 24 Character are you?
No, I'm not kidding, I really am Jack Bauer (according to multiple tests even!) although I think I'd rather be Tony Almeida - and with a wife like that, who wouldn't... :)
And, as you can probably tell, I'm bored...
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
OpenSync progress
It's surprising what can be acheived with a solid weekend's worth of hacking. The Opie plugin for OpenSync now syncs contacts, todos, and events. I still need to sort out categories, alarms for events, and a few other fields, plus improve robustness (improve error handling, etc.). Still, it's getting towards the point where it will actually be useful.
Thursday, August 31, 2006
Update
Well, here we are again, 8 months down the track.
LCA was good, met a few cool people and I definitely enjoyed my stay in Dunedin. One thing I did not like however was how all of the recordings of the talks have somehow been lost or weren't even recorded correctly. Yes, I know the people helping out were volunteers, and I know from my own experience how difficult running a large event like that can be. On the other hand, I paid a fair amount of money for the conference and having been promised recordings of all the talks, that's what I expected. I have to say I am less than enthusiastic about making a special trip to Australia for LCA 2007, although I won't necessarily rule it out.
Over the last little while I haven't had much motivation to do work at home, but in the last week or so I have managed to fix up the Opie plugin for OpenSync a little bit - syncing contacts (or at least, retrieving them from Opie) is now working again. There's lots more work to do and hopefully now I've figured my way around the recent internal changes in OpenSync itself I can start to make some headway, possibly with help from a few other people. It would be nice to have a real syncing PDA again, I have missed that from the days of my old Palm.
For the last few weeks I have been going to a local pub quiz every Tuesday night, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm not so great at the sports questions, or "Who's that?" picture rounds, and the music round seems to consist of mostly 1950s stuff that I've never heard; but often there's someone in our team who can fill in the answer. I've been surprised by how often a guess turns out to be right as well :) We've managed to come second or third a few times.
Turns out I was wrong about the X-Files seasons 8 and 9, which on the whole were surprisingly good. The new characters worked, and a lot of the stories were just as engaging as in the previous seasons. The "mythology" (conspiracy storyline) gets weaker in the later seasons though which let the show down a bit.
LCA was good, met a few cool people and I definitely enjoyed my stay in Dunedin. One thing I did not like however was how all of the recordings of the talks have somehow been lost or weren't even recorded correctly. Yes, I know the people helping out were volunteers, and I know from my own experience how difficult running a large event like that can be. On the other hand, I paid a fair amount of money for the conference and having been promised recordings of all the talks, that's what I expected. I have to say I am less than enthusiastic about making a special trip to Australia for LCA 2007, although I won't necessarily rule it out.
Over the last little while I haven't had much motivation to do work at home, but in the last week or so I have managed to fix up the Opie plugin for OpenSync a little bit - syncing contacts (or at least, retrieving them from Opie) is now working again. There's lots more work to do and hopefully now I've figured my way around the recent internal changes in OpenSync itself I can start to make some headway, possibly with help from a few other people. It would be nice to have a real syncing PDA again, I have missed that from the days of my old Palm.
For the last few weeks I have been going to a local pub quiz every Tuesday night, and it's been a lot of fun. I'm not so great at the sports questions, or "Who's that?" picture rounds, and the music round seems to consist of mostly 1950s stuff that I've never heard; but often there's someone in our team who can fill in the answer. I've been surprised by how often a guess turns out to be right as well :) We've managed to come second or third a few times.
Turns out I was wrong about the X-Files seasons 8 and 9, which on the whole were surprisingly good. The new characters worked, and a lot of the stories were just as engaging as in the previous seasons. The "mythology" (conspiracy storyline) gets weaker in the later seasons though which let the show down a bit.
Wednesday, January 11, 2006
Happy New Year to all
Happy New Year!
I'm off to linux.conf.au in Dunedin this month. I figured it would be shameful not to go on the one year they decided to hold it in NZ :) I've never been to Dunedin and there's lots going on at the conference so it should be quite interesting. Maybe I'll get to see a few of these people whose names I keep reading all the time.
I have been a bit slack lately - emails going unanswered, open source stuff I should have been doing not getting done, etc. and for that I apologise. Maybe it has something to do with the pile of DVDs I got for Christmas, most of which I actually bought myself in the after-Christmas sales. In particular I now have seasons 1-7 of The X Files, which at 45 minutes an episode and ~25 episodes a season is quite a lot of sitting in front of a screen. It's a lot better than I remembered it, though, and I've found that my earlier impression of the series was clouded by just a few not-so-great episodes in the later seasons. I'm still holding off on seasons 8 and 9 though, I'm not convinced that wheeling in other characters to replace Mulder & Scully was such a great idea. Then again by the time they started screening those episodes on TV here I had stopped watching it regularly, so maybe it's not as bad as I think.
Anyway, back on the "stuff getting done" thing, I have started using KOrganizer (part of the KDE PIM suite) more lately which should help me remember things I need to do, and hopefully soon I will be able to spend some time finishing off the OpenSync plugin for Opie so that I can sync my Linux-powered iPAQ with it.
I'm off to linux.conf.au in Dunedin this month. I figured it would be shameful not to go on the one year they decided to hold it in NZ :) I've never been to Dunedin and there's lots going on at the conference so it should be quite interesting. Maybe I'll get to see a few of these people whose names I keep reading all the time.
I have been a bit slack lately - emails going unanswered, open source stuff I should have been doing not getting done, etc. and for that I apologise. Maybe it has something to do with the pile of DVDs I got for Christmas, most of which I actually bought myself in the after-Christmas sales. In particular I now have seasons 1-7 of The X Files, which at 45 minutes an episode and ~25 episodes a season is quite a lot of sitting in front of a screen. It's a lot better than I remembered it, though, and I've found that my earlier impression of the series was clouded by just a few not-so-great episodes in the later seasons. I'm still holding off on seasons 8 and 9 though, I'm not convinced that wheeling in other characters to replace Mulder & Scully was such a great idea. Then again by the time they started screening those episodes on TV here I had stopped watching it regularly, so maybe it's not as bad as I think.
Anyway, back on the "stuff getting done" thing, I have started using KOrganizer (part of the KDE PIM suite) more lately which should help me remember things I need to do, and hopefully soon I will be able to spend some time finishing off the OpenSync plugin for Opie so that I can sync my Linux-powered iPAQ with it.
Wednesday, August 17, 2005
Conference, VMware
Obviously I'm back from the Citrix iForum conference (about 3 weeks ago in fact). I had a great time, and it was worthwhile from a business perspective as well - I got to see all of the new Citrix product features first hand, talk directly to Citrix engineers and developers about specific problems, and listen to Kevin Mitnick give a fascinating talk about social engineering. The party with free drinks on the second night didn't go amiss either ;) After the conference was over I did a few touristy things in Sydney as well. Once I sort out web hosting that will actually let me install a gallery, I'll see about putting up some pictures.
Citrix had an expo running during the conference, mostly for the benefit of their partners. Most interesting to me was the presence of VMware. VMware Workstation is a product I knew about previously, but had never used, mainly because it was too expensive for me to even consider. However, at the stand they were giving away free copies of VMware Workstation in exchange for filling out a form, which I did. I finally got around to installing it last weekend, and I must say I'm very impressed. It's fast, stable, and it's one of the most polished commercial Linux applications I have used so far. The best thing about it though is it lets me do Windows development without having to reboot, which is a big help as all of my other important stuff (emails, CD burning software etc.) is in Linux. I'd certainly recommend checking it out if you need something that works well for doing testing or cross-platform development.
Citrix had an expo running during the conference, mostly for the benefit of their partners. Most interesting to me was the presence of VMware. VMware Workstation is a product I knew about previously, but had never used, mainly because it was too expensive for me to even consider. However, at the stand they were giving away free copies of VMware Workstation in exchange for filling out a form, which I did. I finally got around to installing it last weekend, and I must say I'm very impressed. It's fast, stable, and it's one of the most polished commercial Linux applications I have used so far. The best thing about it though is it lets me do Windows development without having to reboot, which is a big help as all of my other important stuff (emails, CD burning software etc.) is in Linux. I'd certainly recommend checking it out if you need something that works well for doing testing or cross-platform development.
Tuesday, July 19, 2005
Off to Sydney
I'm heading off to Sydney tomorrow for the aforementioned Citrix iForum (returning on Sunday evening). Should be interesting. Weather permitting, I plan to do the Sydney harbour bridge climb as well as a few other non-conference things while I'm there.
Thursday, June 09, 2005
Apple, fbvncserver
The Apple move to Intel
I can't believe the amount of rubbish that is circulating about the Apple move to Intel processors. Examples of the drivel I have heard so far:
"Ooo, it'll make it easier to port PC games to Mac" - ever heard of DirectX? It'll be no different than porting games to Linux, and that doesn't happen that much yet (sadly).
"I'll be able to run OS X on my PC!" - Apple have clearly stated they will not support this, and they might even go to extra lengths to prevent people from hacking around it. Besides, you'd be missing out on half of what makes Macs what they are - the standardised hardware platform.
"Is there any point in starting Mac development now?" - the situation now is no different to what it was before. All of today's Mac applications will run on the new Macs thanks to Rosetta. Besides, most of the time you're coding to an API, not to the processor, unless you're writing in assembly language.
"This will kill Linux" - No. Linux will be unaffected on the server. It might take a hit on the desktop, but only if the move makes Macs significantly cheaper, or the normally PC-buying public decides that Mac-on-Intel is somehow more appealing to them despite being much the same thing.
It's quite simple - almost nothing has changed. Macs will still be Macs, PCs will still be PCs.
fbvncserver for iPAQ working again
fbvncserver has been updated to work on Familiar 0.8.2, and works brilliantly. For a while I was trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to it using VNC and then I realised some new icons had been added to the Opie launcher to start and stop the server. Last I checked, there isn't a working free PocketPC VNC server, so there's yet another win for Familiar. Woot! :)
I can't believe the amount of rubbish that is circulating about the Apple move to Intel processors. Examples of the drivel I have heard so far:
"Ooo, it'll make it easier to port PC games to Mac" - ever heard of DirectX? It'll be no different than porting games to Linux, and that doesn't happen that much yet (sadly).
"I'll be able to run OS X on my PC!" - Apple have clearly stated they will not support this, and they might even go to extra lengths to prevent people from hacking around it. Besides, you'd be missing out on half of what makes Macs what they are - the standardised hardware platform.
"Is there any point in starting Mac development now?" - the situation now is no different to what it was before. All of today's Mac applications will run on the new Macs thanks to Rosetta. Besides, most of the time you're coding to an API, not to the processor, unless you're writing in assembly language.
"This will kill Linux" - No. Linux will be unaffected on the server. It might take a hit on the desktop, but only if the move makes Macs significantly cheaper, or the normally PC-buying public decides that Mac-on-Intel is somehow more appealing to them despite being much the same thing.
It's quite simple - almost nothing has changed. Macs will still be Macs, PCs will still be PCs.
fbvncserver for iPAQ working again
fbvncserver has been updated to work on Familiar 0.8.2, and works brilliantly. For a while I was trying to figure out why I couldn't connect to it using VNC and then I realised some new icons had been added to the Opie launcher to start and stop the server. Last I checked, there isn't a working free PocketPC VNC server, so there's yet another win for Familiar. Woot! :)
Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Look, it's a blog
My first blog entry. Well, actually I was kind of blogging long before the word "blog" existed, but I guess I didn't really update it often enough to count. Maybe this time round :)
Anyway, work's been pretty busy lately as it's release time again. I'm still enjoying it though. The application I'm currently working on (Pocket RAMM) has given me an opportunity to do some good OO architecture work, building on our previous "Pocket" applications except redoing a few things properly this time, internally that is. It has the potential to be a very useful application for our clients as well, which is always motivating.
Looks like I'll be heading off to Australia next month for the Citrix iForum conference. I decided to take the weekend as well so I'll have to find some interesting things to do in Sydney (hope I get some good weather!).
Movies seen lately:
Anyway, work's been pretty busy lately as it's release time again. I'm still enjoying it though. The application I'm currently working on (Pocket RAMM) has given me an opportunity to do some good OO architecture work, building on our previous "Pocket" applications except redoing a few things properly this time, internally that is. It has the potential to be a very useful application for our clients as well, which is always motivating.
Looks like I'll be heading off to Australia next month for the Citrix iForum conference. I decided to take the weekend as well so I'll have to find some interesting things to do in Sydney (hope I get some good weather!).
Movies seen lately:
- Hostage - not bad. I went and saw this because I was locked out of the house one evening, and it was time well spent. Some great action, although Bruce Willis's acting was a little weaker than usual in parts, but still good.
- Revenge of the Sith - about what I was expecting. Visually spectacular, and it had some great moments, but Hayden Christensen's acting was so bad it spoilt the whole movie. I can't understand why they cast him as Anakin Skywalker. Oh well, I don't suppose George Lucas really cares, the film is still raking it in.
- And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself - highly recommended. Antonio Banderas gives the performance of his career.
- Parallax View - good story, but the direction and production left a lot to be desired. Still, I guess it was 1974; a lot of films from that era have a similar feel.
- The Quiet American - worth seeing. Great performances and a compelling story.
- Garden State - very entertaining. I was particularly impressed by Natalie Portman, and Zach Braff shows his skill as a writer/director as well as an actor.
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