blog-j: Symbolizing, Coding, Objectifying, Processing

The fatal incident with Vista’s voice recognition demo was a hot topic in the office this morning. Not really a surprise, considering our love/hate relationship with Microsoft (and, no, it’s a not a “love to hate them” kind of thing - we genuinely like MS technologies, though, like most people, we do get bitten by issues every now and again).

I just noticed Larry Osterman taking responsibility for the bug. Worth a read - turns out it was a very fringe case, and has been fixed (in a different build of Vista), but that’s neither here nor there. It’s impressive that Larry stood up and blogged it like he did - that should show that Microsoft has taken a page out of the Macromedia book in terms of admitting and communicating on issues (at least in the blogosphere…ick…I hate that word).

In any case, one of my co-workers made the statement that voice recognition does not belong within an operating system, and that it should be featured as an add-in (third party, possibly). I get where he’s coming from, but I don’t agree. To me, that’s like saying that keyboard support should be an add-in, not built into the operating system. Sure, there should be an API and the ability for 3rd parties to hook into the speech API, but I see a whole lot of advantages to having it build into the OS. For one thing, it’s an input method, and, like keyboard/mouse support, there’s every reason to think that you should be able to boot your OS and have immediate support for voice commands, regardless of what applications you’re running (Flash: Draw Box, 80, 80, Red. Move To 100, 100. Duplicate. Move To 200, 220. F*ck [aka “Undo”]. ). I don’t see anything wrong with third party apps that use, enhance or even override the functionality offered by the built in functionality, but I still see value in it being an integral part of the OS.

Anyway, we had a nice little chat about it and the end result was that we resolved not to talk about such things unless we’re both really drunk.
Or in different rooms.

Well, in that case, stay off the meth and don’t invite them over. And, particularly, don’t invite them over if you’re on the meth. Although I couldn’t see anything indicating that this was an act of aggravated anti-Microsoft-ness, so chances are it was some other aspect of the encounter that led to the brutal stabbing and dismemberment…

Evidence showed Barzilai was stabbed 234 times, his left hand was cut off and the word “pig” was carved into his back after the two men agreed to meet for sex at the older man’s apartment in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle.

Read more @ theolympian.com

You’ve all seen the classic Mac vs. PC commercials, featuring everyone’s favourite nerd the dude from Ed, Dodgeball, and assorted other shows/flicks. But there’s a new kid on the block, and he’s…bigger.

Watch da vid @ forgetfoo.com,

Indeedly. You may never go back…

[Ed: myself, I actually picked up a Dell XPS M1710 last month, and I’m pretty happy with it. I suppose I’ll eventually consider installing OS-X on it, but buying Mac hardware? Nah. My iPod’s enough for me…<script>new FlameWar().Start();</script>]

This spring, an industrial designer named Jaren Goh unveiled a concept design for a truly bleeding-edge, luxury smartphone. Because this device would so expensive, no one really expected him to find any customers. Surprisingly, though, a European company has put in an order for five of them.

These will go on sale early next year for $300,000 U.S.

Seriously, for three hundred grand, that ought to include at least one Porsche…and a handsfree kit. Though why you would ever want to stop touching the phone, I don’t know…

Hell, for that much money, the phone ought to double as a teleport device. Star Trek, anyone?

Read a wee bit more @ brighthand.com/default.asp?newsID=12333
And read a bit more @ gizmodo.com

Kicks out to Ryan for the tip…

One of the cool things about C# is the way it handles "properties". When writing set statements, there is an implicit argument named "value" that holds the value passed to the property. Hence, within your implementation of the property, to get the value passed to the property you use the "value" variable, like so:

What's good about this? Well, you just didn't have to think of a name for the variable, like newName, or new_name, or name. Which shaved precious seconds of (wasted) thought off your coding.

Can we do this in Actionscript? Well, not exactly - there's no language support for it. But, if you think about it (and stop thinking about it), you can do it quite easily: use "value" as the name of the variable passed to every set method you write for the rest of your life.

This has a secondary (though equally if not more important) effect: it forces you to ensure the name of your property is sensible. You shouldn't need the parameter name of a property to clarify the intent of the property. If you do, you'll probably want to rethink your property name, which is way more important than deciding between new_name and newName. After all, when someone else is coding with or to your API, you don't want them to have to think about it, right?

Heck, take it a step further and use it in Javascript, too. Just for the fun of it.

Have a great weekend...

Yeah, webcams are cool. For sure.
But, with great power comes great responsibility, and most people are loathe to exhibit it.

Case in point: music.yahoo.com/jessicaforyou/
(click to view "Fans Only" video...and then cover your eyes, 'cause you will go blind...)

What's cool about this is it marks Sony BMG's first chance at eschewing DRM. Which is a bit of a switch, if you'll recall. Sony had some fun times with DRM, CDs and rootkits last year. But I won't bring that up again...promise.

Read Sony BMG Breaks MP3 Shackles at CNN Money

PS: If you really want to, buy me the Jason version. I have no real desire for it, but I get the feeling that for $1.99, your "personalized" song is not Jessica Simpson telling you how much she'd like to touch your body spend quality time with you, but a personalized filename. Heck, I'd give you that for fiddy cents...