South Park and Scientology
The “Trapped in the Closet” episode of South Park that parodies Scientology, Tom Cruise, John Travolta, and R. Kelly is available from Xenu.tv.
Voxify Engineers Run Windows on Intel iMac
Two engineers (Eric, a.k.a., Narf, and Jesús, a.k.a., Blanka) with whom I work at Voxify won a prize of nearly $14,000 from contributors at OnMac.net for being the first people to publicly get Windows XP running on an Intel-based Macintosh. I was kind of surprised when the Mac showed up in Jesus’s office a few… Read More »
Fix for Treo 600 Hangs
I suffered through about a month of misery of having my Treo 600 hang on me, typically while trying to place an outbound call or just seconds after receiving an inbound call. The screen would freeze for about ten seconds and either the outbound call would never go out, or the inbound call would be… Read More »
RIAA Attacks Radio Recordings
The RIAA isn’t satisfied with just taking back existing consumers’ rights with respect to music recordings sold by record labels. They now want to greatly restrict the rights consumers have to record radio broadcasts via the proposed “Audio Broadcast Flag Licensing Act of 2006,” H.R. 4861. The RIAA wants to eliminate automatic recording of radio… Read More »
More on Caller ID
This week an AP originated article appeared in the Oakland Tribune on caller ID spoofing. My previous post on caller ID spoofing generated quite a few comments, including a lot of email requests for the source code or for me to provide it as a paid service. Just to cut short further requests, I have… Read More »
SpeechTEK West 2006 Day 2 Afternoon
In the afternoon, I attended two sessions on multimodal applications. Dave Raggett from the W3C started the session with a talk on Speech Enabling Web Browsers. He has been working on some prototype applications that combine AJAX with speech. He uses a local HTTP server to handle audio on the device (which, for now, is… Read More »
Backup Your Photos Now
I’ve uploaded many photos to my website gallery and to this blog, but Hurricane Katrina has made me realize just how important it is to use my website to backup the photos on only one of my computers and the photo prints I have still yet to scan. Although Dreamhost’s servers are in earthquake country… Read More »
Trouble with NBC HD Signal
If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and have an HD over-the-air receiver, you may have run into problems in the last week if you tried to watch the Olympics in HD on NBC 11. Instead of getting a nice, crisp HD image of people moving quickly across the white stuff, you would… Read More »
SpeechTEK West 2006 Day 2 Morning
Tuesday morning I attended sessions on core speech technology and dialog design. Dr. Randy Ford from Sonum Technologies, talked about using strong Natural Language Processing (NLP) to improve speech recognition. He claimed that by using N-gram substitution (e.g., replace the likely misrec “think you” with “thank you”), phonetic tumbling, or a hybrid of the two,… Read More »
Tasmanian Devils and Cancer
New Scientist recently ran an article on an unusual infectious cancer that has killed one third of the wild population of Tasmanian Devils. I took this picture of a Tasmanian Devil at the Tasmanian Devil Park and Wildlife Rescue Center in Taranna in Tasmania, Australia. Several of the Devils there had terrible facial scars along… Read More »