We had a huge harvest from our Blenheim apricot tree four years ago, and this year the tree is bearing a similar amount of fruit. Rogue backyard animals got 30 or so, we’ve picked about 60 and I think there are another 75 apricots on what is now a very old tree. It had been… Read More »
Maybe this is the year I finally buy a cyclo-cross bike and experience the gut wrenching thrill of shouldering my bike up a steep, muddy hill, bouncing down trails through the trees, and then afterward drinking Belgian beers and eating grilled sausages with the people who lapped me repeatedly. The July issue of Wired has… Read More »
Now, if that name doesn’t make a product just sell itself, I don’t know what would. Anyway, I bought a D-Link DNS-323 NAS from a friend who I trust to do all the necessary research. He bought it, but because he is really picky and it didn’t do exactly what he wanted, he built up… Read More »
There’s a very detailed (and long) article on the state and future of speech recognition and speech synthesis in the New York Times from late June. Although the prognosis is not that positive, it is written almost with the challenge of a Turing test for speech recognition, i.e., a computer recognizing the semantics of human… Read More »
Not realizing there was a surfeit of newline characters in a largish mysqldump file I was analyzing, I tried to open it in TextMate. After a few minutes of listening to the hard drive in my Mac thrash away, I had to kill TextMate. One obvious solution was to split it into multiple lines, but… Read More »
It seems pretty simple, but still far too many web sites don’t set the focus on the input field that users are most likely to type into when loading a page. Let’s say you have a page with an HTML form with the ID login with fields named user and password. Here’s the HTML and… Read More »
The Austin Capital Metro CIO deserves a lot of credit for owning up on the Austin CapMetro blog to some major issues with their IVR applications for bus schedules, etc. It sounds like they have some grammar definition, timeout setting and confidence level setting issues with their app, though it is harder to know for… Read More »
Just finished watching Germany play Turkey in one of the semifinal matches of the Euro 2008 tournament. I enjoyed a smooth, malty Jubelfestbier from Bamberg during the match in support of Germany, though I’ve been very impressed by the Turkish team, and am sorry to see them go. They made some amazing comebacks, but time… Read More »
I finally got around to posting some photos from the epic cabin fire. Since I’m not keen on image crawlers indexing my photos, you’ll need to copy this into the location box on your browser after that http:// thingie. www.wombatnation.com/gallery/cabin_fire/ Here’s a couple samples. The first is the fire raging full on in the attic.… Read More »
Sometimes there are obvious connections between the books I read consecutively, but I never expected a fistula-based connection. A month or so ago I finished reading the bicep builder Quicksilver (Volume One of the Baroque Cycle) by Neal Stephenson. I don’t often read 900+ page books, but this one was worth it. Not sure I… Read More »