Nothing to Declare

What a missed opportunity. I’m so disappointed I could scream… silently of course. What am I talking about - voice recognition.

Oh, that one, they say. You’re into that, they say. True enough - but on and off, truth be told. When I wrote the portability article at The Reg a few months ago, I was struck by the revelation that voice rec was just waiting for the right form factor of computer. Now, examples of said form factor are starting to roll off the production lines, and very sexy they all look too, with one HUGE proviso - they mostly lack a microphone socket. Perhaps I could hope that connectivity such as Bluetooth, builds in the idea that wireless mikes are the way to go. However I’m assured by people in the know that the sound quality over Bluetgooth is insufficient for voice rec. Wired mikes are the way forward, in the short term at least, and only a minority of the devices support this. Notably the Antelope (available now) and the Tiqit (later this year). The latter’s processor is a bit poor, but an older version of Dragon Dictate should work just fine*. As for the others - the Oqo, Vaio and Flipstart, just don’t go there.

Ahm tellin’ ya, voice rec’s the way. The time savings possible from being able to dictate any time, any place etc, together with the improved QOL (quality of life, lummox) from not being slumped in front of a glowing screen, will more than make up for the still-dodgy battery life on these devices. It’ll probably transform blogging as well - watch this space!

* Obtaining an older verison is not as easy as it sounds of course. Having purchased the latest version and finding it didn’t work on my PictureBook PCG-C1X (now retired to the cupboard, incidentally), I resorted to eDonkey to download an older version. To this day I’m still not sure I did anything illegal.

This post was - doh! - typed.

I know that much of life is a facade, created by cold-hearted businessmen with an eye only on shareholder value. All the same, a small part of me still wanted to believe there existed such a thing as “music of rebellion”, even if the bands delivering it up were signed to the major corporates.

So, when I stumbled across the web site of Grabow (tagline: “putting showbiz into your biz”) and found that many so-called rock heroes were available for office parties (albeit big ones) and corporate events, I was just a little bit uncomfortable with the whole thing. Nothing wrong with the model, I’m sure the Grabows lay on a great show - but with just about everybody represented I just feel slightly sad. It does conjure up a raft of images however - fancy Slipknot playing at the shower curtain ring sales summit (John Candy RIP), or Eminem at the oil seed suppliers convention? Perhaps if I started saving now, I could get AC/DC to play my retirement bash in 20 years’ time. Maybe we could share the occasion.

I shouldn’t be so surprised - a few months ago I had the dubious honour of seeing Carlos Santana play at a Cisco event. Frankly he didn’t look like he was enjoying it much - a bit like if his kids had disturbed him in the middle of his favourite TV show and asked if he would play a few songs. Might not be too far from the truth.

OK. It’s addictive. So there. More soon.

I’m still quite a newcomer to this sort of thing so I’m commenting on the blog of a usual suspect - Jonathan Schwartz at Sun. I intend to grow my horizons as I get the hang of things.

“As will become more obvious by the day, you can compete against a product, but it’s close to impossible to compete against a community,” says the man here - largely in reference to Netbeans vs. Eclipse. This may be correct if “you” is an individual, but in large part most of the “you”’s will be communities themselves, variously supported by vendors and other bodies. Competition occurs between communities and within communities, so I wouldn’t be rushing to prepare for the death of the individual competitor just yet, as it might not exist.

Also, and just an aside, if Jonathan’s so into the new thinking wrt communities, blogs, “the conversation” and the like, why doesn’t he allow comments on his blogs? Looks a bit singular to me.

Our good friends at The Register mention the launch of FLOSS - standing for Free/Libre/Open Source Software. FLOSS is an EU initiative to promote understanding of Open Source. Laudable perhaps, but the same cannot be said for the acronym. Quote: “FLOSS is a global phenomenon, particularly relevant in developing countries, and thus more knowledge on FLOSS outside Europe is needed.” Absolutely - but for those with less knowledge of IT it could be an ill-scoped initiative for dental care in the third world.

All the same, its good to see they’re cottoning on, and that they have the bit between their teeth.

… is a fine word and should be used more often. As is flange.

I wonder whether, statistically, there is a tendency for people who speak in short, clipped sentences to favour communication by Blackberry and other Smartphone types.

(Sorry for the short message, this was sent by PDA )

Everyone else seems to have been writing about the Nokia 770, so I thought I would join in. Looks like a sexy device, indeed, battery life may be an issue, but that’s true for any portable computing platform with a decent colour screen. I remember two years ago I said I would never want to replace my PalmPilot with a colour PDA, as I never would remember to plug it in. Well, here I am with my Dell Axim, my Archos jukebox and of course my trusty Vaio, all of which would think five hours of battery life was a good run. What ever happened to those mats that you could just put a device on (suitably modified, of course) and it would charge without cables. One day, every table should have one.

Of course there have been some quite significant advances in battery technology, but thus far they have eluded the mainstream. There was recently announced a battery that could charge in a matter of minutes, which immediately made me think of the possibility of charging stations in coffee bars and on high streets. “See you at the charging station at 3,” well, perhaps not. The other very interesting technology is to do with fuel cells, which (as far as I can tell) convert naturally available products into carbon dioxide and water, generating a trickle of electrical current as a by product. A fascinating array of companies are aligning to manufacture and deliver the fuel cell supply chain: all the usual suspects, plus companies like Bic, the Biro and razor company who also has a sizeable chunk of the global market share in disposable lighters and lighter fuel canisters.

The fear is that, to power one of these newfangled, high-resolution colour devices, we’ll all have to walk around with huge cylinders on our backs. You’d only had to add a virtual reality headset to get that frog man effect. Perhaps some smart company will bring out flipper-like shoe attachments, which generate additional electricity by capturing the sound of all that slapping.

As for those screens, I heard on the radio yesterday that the eggheads could now grow Nanotubes as an array, apply a connectivity layer and a phosphorescent layer, et voilà, you have a low-power, very thin screen. Prototypes are currently running at a few inches across, clearly production is a way away but its looking good.

So – while battery capacity may not be improving very fast, charge cycles times are set to improve drastically, and fuel cell technologies open up a wealth of new options (I would not be against carrying a can of methanol in my backpack, though it might cause some disputes at the airline check-in desk). Perhaps somebody could invent a fuel cell that runs on vodka. Recognising that alcohol is essentially a natural product, people might start wanting to create their own fuel. Indeed, it would be awfully green, however, it would also be totally illegal in many countries. The situation might arise where, in tumbled down barns at the ends of rutted farm tracks, secret stills would be producing a village’s supply of fuel cell fuel. But we digress

Meanwhile, spare a thought for the OQO. This can claim to be the first product to market as a fully fledged computer with a jacket-pocket form factor. It is shipped with Windows XP, but uses commodity hardware, so there would be nothing to stop running Linux. An application of these devices his voice recognition, which I firmly believe it still to have its day in the spotlight. There are several reasons for this, not least the number of people I know who are developing symptoms of RSI, or back problems, due to spending too many years typing at a computer. The technology is now here, in that the latest version of DragonDictate is perfectly adequate for transcribing one’s voice into words. I am shocked and stunned see that neither the OQO nor the 770 has a microphone socket, thus preventing it from being a perfectly serviceable and totally appropriate voice recognition device. Incidentally there is a version of IBM’s ViaVoice for Linux, but this needs a bit of work in more ways than one.

Incidentally, this entry is being voice dictated as I cruise down the M4. My computer is on the passenger seat, and I glance at it no more than I look at the speedometer or the clock. Fortunately in this sun, the VAIO has one of the best screens there is; equally fortunately, I have a 12 volt adaptor so my battery life is protected. Phew.

I was in Toronto back in November. A phenomenon that I have never fully been able to understand, is the prolific nature of wireless networking in Toronto, coupled with the relative absence of security. Wherever I would go in the city, there would be, it seems, some kind soul that had left their home wireless network open, to enable me to access the wider Internet. I don’t feel too guilty about this, after all it was Microsoft wireless networking that would stumble across the open port, but once I realised that this was happening, I found it both useful and intriguing. Looking more deeply, one thing I noticed was that many of the services were blocked to outbound SMTP access. This was a consistent finding. Even from the 22nd floor vantage point of my hotel room (the Days Inn on Carlton Street), there seemed to be no shortage of helpful souls in the apartment block opposite that were only too willing to spare a little bandwidth for my humble needs. At it seems that there is some kind of cooperative wireless understanding developing among the wireless illuminati of Toronto. If this is the case, then I am all for it.

Toronto was cold, gloomy, and rainy. My usual determination not to use public transport was beaten down by the force of the rain, so I waved for a taxi. To my heaven sent surprise, the taxi driver was local celebrity, Mr Geography. He opened with the question, “Answer me this, and I will give you your taxi ride for free - what is the country with the smallest land area in Africa?” I answered Lesotho but he said, “No, it is the Gambia.” He proceeded to tell me exactly how different the land mass of Lesotho was, compared to the land mass of the Gambia. He gave me another try, and then another, before introducing himself. It turns out he’s been on TV, and he was even in a copy of the most recent edition of Macleans magazine, ostensibly the Time magazine of Canada. What a way to brighten up an otherwise dismal day.

I think it was Mark Twain who was first quoted as saying words to this effect, and if he didn’t he should have done. I heard an alternate way of expressing the same on the radio this morning, a commentator said something like, “some people ascribe to conspiracy theories, I ascribe more to cockup theories”. These two principles relate to a third, expressed to me by Phil Tee (who recently founded Njini, having set up Micromuse and Riversoft, but I digress), “the world is rarely as complicated as you think it is.”

For some reason it is a human trait to expect the worst of others, and to react with suspicion or look for hidden agendas. Most agendas aren’t that well hidden truth be told, so we could all save a lot of time getting on with solving our own problems rather than inventing new ones. If we apply the law of Tee as well, we might all achieve our objectives a little faster.

Well. Having crawled my directories for articles, imported old blog lines, linked the links, chosen the template, uploaded the PDFs, tested the pages, and otherwise got things up and running, I find that I have a web site. All feedback welcome.