I just noticed an article on Ars Technica about a $750 discount on Dell Inspiron laptops priced at $1500 or more. Fortunately, I saw a notice about the sale in the RSS feed for More Stuff 4 Less Bargain Blog Monday. I also spotted it at TechBargains.com. The sale started at 4 a.m. Pacific Tuesday… Read More »
Even though I migrated from Movable Type to WordPress quite a while ago, I still planned to post some tips on fighting spam comments on a Movable Type blog. Well, no need for me to write that article, because Elise has already done a far better job than I would have done. If you use… Read More »
Neil Harrison and James Coplien’s book Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development was released this summer and was reviewed today on Slashdot. I worked with Neil at Avaya, and I can attest that he was one of the many smart men and women with whom I worked during my tenure there. Neil was very knowledgeable… Read More »
Whatever you thought this post would be about, given the title, you’re probably wrong. When I’m out on my bike, I always wonder about the spray-painted words and lines on the street. One of the most common, and yet most mysterious, scrawlings was “USA”. Often, I see “USA” painted on the street next to an… Read More »
I spent five wonderful years in Austin, Texas, in the late 80’s and early 90’s. While life there was mighty fine, just imagine if I could have been a contented resident of Austin, Minnesota. Instead, I’m left to dream about a potential vacation to Austin, MN, to see … the Hormel Spam Museum. Wired has… Read More »
John Eisenhower | Why I Will Vote for John Kerry for President John Eisenhower is the son of the late Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower. John served on the White House staff and had been a lifelong Republican until the last few years. In addition to his disapproval of the way the current leadership initiated… Read More »
VoIP Market Leaders Declare a Price War – Voxilla.com The recent drops in monthly rates for AT&T CallVantage, Vonage, and Broadvox Direct suggest that the consumer VoIP market is heating up and that these companies all expect adoption rates to take off at a much quicker pace soon. When the inflection point occurs, you don’t… Read More »
A beta version of Sphinx-4, an open source speech recognition engine implemented in Java, was recently released. Sphinx development is centered out of Carnegie-Mellon University, with major contributions from employees at Sun, Mitsubishi Electric Research Labs, and HP and smaller contributions from individuals at UC Santa Cruz and MIT. Ideas that are unlikely to come… Read More »
Okay, maybe not. But if Linux isn’t involved, why the heck are these penguins fondling a toilet on a studio set for Laugh-In? The rest of the page at the Toto site has many other fascinating photos that reveal more about Japanese culture than I thought possible in a set of marketing photos from a… Read More »
IBM is working with researchers at the University of Twente in the Netherlands to develop a system that listens in on calls received at a call center, uses speech recognition to identify topics that a caller is asking about, looks up related information, and displays it to a call center agent. Sort of like the… Read More »