speech recognition

I was reading through the google news item IBM Donates Voice Code to Apache, which reminded me of a interesting thread in the Full disclosure mailing list.

The poster to the mailing list said that one of his users had contated him with a weird problem. As soon as the user had turned their machine on, brought up Word, the following message started "typing itself"

": 121-nighters and windows of confidence in your own problems in the matters when the company has no problems regarding .... [snip] "
Though it may seem that there is a glitch in Word, or some overflow in the clipboard memory, it is possible that the speech recognition software was the actual culprit. If the speech recognition software is turned on and there is a radio playing nearby, it will pick up by the software and transcribed on Word.

Original thread here and here .

Defined tags for this entry:


to GET or to POST

As Macbeth would have said "To GET or to POST , that is the question". The general consensus is :

  • Use GET when you want to give the user the ability to bookmark a page (as all the data is held in the URL and does not rely on an existing session on the server.) The "get" method should be used when the form is idempotent (i.e., causes no side-effects).
  • Use POST when a form causes side effects (for example, if the form modifies a database or subscription to a service).

formed discussion over this topic in this usenet thread. Some words from the bible covering this topic. A more lengthy but not boring discussion on this topic is URIs, Addressability, and the use of HTTP GET and POST
Defined tags for this entry: ,

mp3 blogs

I knew that a whole different universe of mp3 blogs existed, but was never motivated enough to go out and investigate them. In my office, I have cycled through most of my music collection (I like to hear Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Ministry of sound, Yahel(sp?) while working) and decided to find out what these blogs offer. A good starting point is Fluxblog. There is also MP3 blog Aggregator (however it does not show full postings and there are just a "lot" of blogs being aggregated). This article MP3 blogs serve rare songs, dusty grooves, points out some good mp3 blogs too. I have bookmarked the following sites

Defined tags for this entry:

Interfaces for Staying in the Flow

There is a very interesting article at on interface design, which I am slowly reading and digesting. The authors say that a good interface has the following properties which allow the users to get "into flow"

  • Challenge and require skill
  • Concentrate and avoid interruption
  • Maintain control
  • Speed and feedback
  • Transformation of time

Defined tags for this entry:

law of the lost idea

The law of the lost idea states that

Any idea not put down on paper/harddisk within 10 minutes of it occuring will get lost.
Yesterday morning, I had thought of an ingenious workaround for a problem that we had been facing in one of our projects (while putting on my shoe). Now I have forgotten both, what the problem was and (quite obviously) what the workaround was.

Defined tags for this entry:

Go, kiss the world

My good friend, Teju, had pointed out the link to an inspiring speech (titled "Go, kiss the world") by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. The original url appeared to be quite shady. I have mirrored his speech at my site

Original link and on my site

Defined tags for this entry:

Page 59 of 61, totaling 427 entries