Posts Tagged Software

Signs of strain at Google?

Feb 17

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

OK the missteps that Google has made with Buzz this week are well chronicled. They jammed a product out without really thinking it through.

That doesn’t hit me that much as a user. But today using the iphone map app I am getting continuous errors — here is the map of drugstores near my current location. Not unique to me, I’ve heard of this from many folks today.

And I’m looking at the ESPN boxscore page for Purdue/OSU right now and first the google toolbar tells me it is in Portuguese, and now in Catalan, and asks if I want a translation.

One wonders if Google is spreading itself a little thin.

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Software notes

Jan 30

Posted by john in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

  • Soundhound way better than Shazam on the iPhone. recognition much faster, lyrics support nicer
  • Stunned that Windows Home Server doesn’t support the generic network adapter on a whitebox computer from BestBuy. Supported under XP, Vista, &, and Ubuntu, but dead in the water under Windows Home Server. Stunned.
  • Word 2010 beta seems to support Latex parsing for equations tho buggy as hell. Cool tho.
  • Steam up to 25M users. Steam is so awesome. Why isn’t all Windows and Mac software distributed this way?
  • Conversely, Apple app store has so much crud in it with no real quality editorial voice. Trying out Chomp and app.itize.us.

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Recent utility software of note

Jan 6

Posted by john in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

My MacBook is entering middle age and as my intensity of use has grown over the last 6 months (due to coursework at UW) I’m finding I need to start focusing on productivity a little. Some tools that seem helpful:

  • Popchar provides much better special character insertion than the standard OSX tool. Helpful for entering math symbols, etc. I love this. The basic OSX system tool is weak.
  • Keycue from the same guys, cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts. Better than it sounds. I cannot remember all these keyboard shortcuts and this is way way way better than help/manual/online search.
  • Hazel for automagically managing files. My use case is dealing with downloads from various UW course sites and automagically handling. Keeps my downloads folder in order. Handy tho not absolutely mandatory.
  • Path Finder as a replacement for Finder. Definitely more handy for moving files between folders.
  • Growl — not sure why I installed but all the cool kids seem to use.

Also on my new Windows 7 setup I am starting to play with some things:

  • Win7 multimonitor taskbars — haven’t tried these but probably should try one.
  • Feedroller — well I wanted to love this, and it looks great, but seems to have problems updating its content.

And across both machines:

  • Helvitical and its friends Helvetimail and Helvetireader certainly improve the looks of google apps. A little buggy tho.

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Matlab on OSX — pay attention to file names

Oct 21

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

BTW, this is a powerful but incredibly finicky piece of software. It is an X11 app, and I wonder how much that is affecting it.

One thing to watch for is the path length limitation on the names of m files. it is 63 characters total for the full path — that is right, the FULL path. the full path by default is some long path pointing into a MATLAB directory in your documents folder, in my case, 52 characters were already used up. So when i put a nice long name on an M file, I exceeded the 63 limit and got some completely nonsense error message about the file not being on my path. Well ok the error message was true, the truncated filename file wasn’t on any path anywhere, but stupid. 

The other thing I’ve noticed is that Matlab really doesn’t like m files whose names begin with a number — ie it just will not run something called “55.m”. you need to start with alpha.

Silly. It’s 2009 guys. These feel like MSDOS restrictions circa 1990.

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Software/tech I have to look at further

Oct 3

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

After fall quarter ends…

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Installing MatLab on Snow Leopard

Sep 18

Posted by john in Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Getting myself up to speed on MatLab for this fall’s classes, the activation fails on Snow Leopard with some ugly error message. Fix is easy — in the Java Preferences app on your system, make 32-bit Java the default. All is well after that.

Details on the matlab support site

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Thinking that intrigues me

Sep 2

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  • Touchable holography. Uses tracking cameras and directed ultrasound to create interaction and physical sensation. Cool demo.
  • Algortihmatic - online library of algorithms and IDE. Cool tho limited.
  • The LED’s dark secret. Droop in LED performance to be overcome for broader use.
  • Plasmobots — “their previous research has already proved the ability of the mould to have computational abilities”.
  • Ford Mike Rowe video. I didn’t realize they automatically tracked every single assembly operations through the tools. Fascinating.
  • Brad Feld’s open office hours. An intriguing idea. Commendable.

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Quick software/hardware trial notes

Aug 30

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

  • WPTouch plugin for wordpress is awesome. check out theludwigs.com from your iphone.
  • Messing around with Slingbox finally. Works well tho I had to massively reconfig home network to get rid of routers — configuring to get through one router was reasonable; getting through two was nearly impossible; getting through the three I had in place would have required several PhDs.
  • Download Manager Tweak. Probably prefer download statusbar
  • Vacuum your firefox db. No idea if this actually did anything. Didn’t seem to make Firefox explode so I guess that is a plus.
  • Polymath. Lots of great links to math formatting services for the web.
  • Gliffy plugin for wordpress. Seems like it could be useful as well.

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PogoPlug Buggy With Drive Letters: Pogoplugged

Aug 8

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

PogoPlug Buggy With Drive Letters: Pogoplugged. Trying out pogoplug, key note here — you can’t control which drive letter pogoplug will grab easily.

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The Year of Speech Recognition

Aug 2

Posted by john in Uncategorized | No Comments

Is this the year of speech recognition? GigaOM thinks speech recognition is getting ready to take off — Is Speech-Recognition Technology Finally Ready for Prime Time?

IN 2006 AnandTech had similar headlines — Speech Recognition — Ready for Prime-Time?

CNN called it in 2001 — Speech Recognition Technology will hear you now — “After years of hype and false starts, automated speech recognition (ASR) technology is ready for prime time”

SpeechTechMag made the claim in 1999 — Speech recognition technology is “ready for prime time”

Apparently Comdex buzz in 1998 was that 1999 would be the year of speech recognition. Again.

At one point in the mid/late 90’s, the Microsoft Speech Recognition team worked for me thanks to a reorg. All great people, very enthusiastic speech supporters, and convinced that widespread speech recognition was right around the corner. I loved the team but it seemed apparent that the hardware and software were both generations away from achieving useful speech recognition and so ultimately I worked to get the team moved to Microsoft Research.

So call me a skeptic. Over the past 15 years, you would have done well to always bet on “No” as the answer to “Is this the year of speech recognition?” I don’t see a lot of reason to change the bet. Speech is tough, we are demanding, we expect a system to respond to conversational input — rapid, lots of colloquialisms, speaker-independent, etc. Yes there are systems that can respond reasonably well to very limited inputs but as a general use technology, I’m not yet optimistic.

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