That’s not the Incinolet Burning

By | May 24, 2008

There was flame and smoke at our cabin in the Tahoe National Forest early this morning, and it wasn’t from the Incinolet burning off the remains of a burrito. An electrical fire in the wall upstairs resulted in about 2/3 of the cabin suffering major damage. The new part of the cabin didn’t burn, but… Read More »

Shiner and Independence Brewing

By | May 18, 2008

I have fond memories of Shiner Bock from when I lived in Austin, and I always have a bottle or two when I go back to visit my brother. I agree with Stan at Appellation Beer that while Shiner doesn’t make the greatest of beers, they are better than a lot of people give them… Read More »

Peabody Hotel Orlando

By | May 15, 2008

While in Orlando visiting a prospective client this week, I stayed at the Peabody Hotel. This chain of three hotels is famous for having ducks march down a red carpet and hop into a fountain in the morning. In the late afternoon, they hop out and head back up the red carpet to a more… Read More »

JavaOne

By | May 11, 2008

I went to JavaOne last week and was once again amazed by the number of attendees. I heard someone say 15,000 people had registered. I believe it. Other programming languages like Python and Ruby might be gaining in popularity on Java, but Java is still pretty dominant. And just like last year, the queues for… Read More »

Security error accessing url

By | April 26, 2008

Adobe recently rolled out a patch to Flash Player 9 to mitigate some bad security vulnerabilities (my favorite Flash vulnerability was hilariously described at Matasano Chargen). One of our Flash apps at work suffered collateral damage from the update. If you get the message “Security error accessing url” after applying the April 8 Flash Player… Read More »

Bizarre Bike Safety Video

By | April 24, 2008

When I think bike safety or car safety video, I mostly think about boring instructions on how to ride a bike or drive a car in the most conservative fashion. But what if the kids in the safety video had monkey faces and curly tails? That would make even the most Ritalin deprived kid pay… Read More »

2008 MySQL Conference

By | April 14, 2008

I’ll be at the 2008 MySQL Conference the next three days. If any of the three or so of you that read these posts will be there, let me know and I would love to meet up down in Santa Clara. Even better, I’d love to carpool with someone from Oakland to Santa Clara. Besides… Read More »

Earthquakes are Back

By | April 14, 2008

The San Jose Earthquakes played their first regular season home MLS match (though at the Oakland Coliseum) last Saturday since the team got moved to Houston by the low lifes at AEG. Sadly, they lost 1-0 to the Chicago Fire, though the Earthquakes far outplayed the Fire. Chicago is a pretty good team, but they… Read More »

Voicemail to Text

By | April 9, 2008

When I posted a couple days ago about Spinvox taking in a very large funding round, I missed an announcement that same day about Nuance’s new voicemail to text service, which they have decided to cryptically call Voicemail to Text. Nuance is providing this service only through telecom carriers. The thing I found most interesting… Read More »

Gartner’s IVR Magic Quadrant

By | April 9, 2008

An article in Speech Technology magazine reports that in the most recent update to Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IVRs, Microsoft Speech Server and Nuance Voice Portal got dropped. The disappearance of NVP is no surprise, since Nuance announced at their Conversations conference over two years ago that they would no longer enhance it. Microsoft moved… Read More »