I don’t know what’s with the strange title thing, but there it is.

Microsoft has been reviled and hated by a lot of people for a long time now. I won’t say that Microsoft is my best friend, but they have also done some things that I appreciate. For one, IE is a good browser. It supports CSS, and recently has shipped with XML support built in too. Yes, I know that there are other browsers that do the same, but IE also exposes an object model, which allows anyone with an active-X capable development platform to use the MS HTML renderer within their own application. Witness Scope which uses the IE engine (as well as the Mozilla engine, though not the latest Mozilla for some reason) with its own interface. I like Scope. I use Scope on a daily basis. That’s not why I’m writing about microsoft though.

I was recently playing around with Microsoft’s Agent technology, when I stumbled across Microsoft SAPI, which is a Speech recognition/Text to Speech programming API. Basically, with one line of code, and three components dropped on a form, I was able to create a program that allows the user to type in text, and have the computer read it back. I haven’t tried any of the Voice recognition, cause my old computer can’t do it anyways, but I’m going to look into it, and I expect that it will be similarly easy to use. How much does Microsoft charge for SAPI? Absolutely nothing (well, my eternal soul, but what the heck, I run Windows at home, so I figure they already had it.)

I realize that there are open source voice packages out there (I spent some time investigating them) but none of them offer the instant gratification of whipping up a dumb little VB app that talks back in under 5 minutes. At least none that I’ve found.

The really neat thing is that the AT&T Natural Voices thing is SAPI compatible, which means that if I had the inclination to spend $49 (US) I could plug those great sounding voices into my application, and it would be super sweet.

More importantly though, I will be able to add voice recognition to the frontend for my arcade cabinet, which will be super cool (I hope:) I should spend some time on that this week I suppose.

Simpson’s quote of the day (as spoken by Natural Voices - click to hear it): “Me fail English? That’s unpossible!” - Ralph

I contributed to my first open source project on Friday - that little searchbar thingy. I added a search for IMDB.com, and Pricewatch, so if you want those, they’re in the latest version and stuff.

As the comment for Friday’s thing says, I forgot to do the first weekly feature thing (doesn’t bode well, if you ask me.) so I’m going to do it today. Here’s a wallpaper taken from a picture that I took with my fancy pants digital camera. I actually only have the 1024×768 version here, but if someone wants a bigger version, let me know, and I’ll try to find it in the archives. Click on the picture to see the full size version…

Hopefully that works - that’s the first picture that I’ve posted on here (as far as I remember)

Simpsons quote of the day:
Homer: “Whoa, careful now. These are dangerous streets for us upper-lower-middle-class types. So avoid eye contact, watch your pocketbook, and suspect everyone.”
Snake: “Three card monte!”
Homer: “Woo hoo! Easy money!”

I found the coolest little windows addon - it almost makes me want to fix my IE install, so that I can use it better. It’s a little search bar that sits in the task bar, and lets you do things like search Google (among other search engines) do math right in it (ie, type 2+2 and it gives you 4 - advanced functions too, like sqrt() and stuff like that.) and other cool stuff. It’s GPL, and it’s just an HTML page, so it’s pretty extensible. I’ve got a couple of suggestions already that I’m going try and implement and send them into the author and see if he wants them or not. Either way, it’s pretty cool.

Oh, I suppose you want a link. It requires IE5.0+ installed (I don’t think it requires IE5.5, but I’d have to reread to be sure) At any rate, check it out, cause it’s the coolest thing I’ve seen in a while.

I read the last couple of days of posts, and realized that I forgot to do the “Beaded seat cushion” joke about Gino Odjick that I meant to. Oh well. Too late now.

Simpson’s quote: “It started out like Romeo and Juliet, but it ended in tragedy.” - Milhouse

I just read this story that talks about a Coors employee who accidentally sent 77,500 gallons of beer into a creek. That’s a lot of beer. The question that needs to be asked though, is why on earth a Coors employee has the capability of sending that much beer into the creek by flipping a switch. Surely they must have anticipated this type of event when they install such a switch. They likely even had it labeled with scary phrases like “Don’t touch this switch, or the fish will be swimming in beer” or even “You spill it, you bought it.” I suspect foul play however. I think it went down a little something like this:

College fish 1: “Hey man, I like beer”

College fish 2: “Yeah man, me too. You know where they’ve got a lot of beer?”

College fish 1: “I dunno, where?”

College fish 2: “At the Beer making place - the whatchamacallit - the brewery”

College fish 1: “I hear they’ve got this switch that sends beer to the creek, but they’re not supposed to touch it”

College fish 2: “Man, that would be so cool. Imagine if that were true. We could get them to switch it on, and we could have all the beer we wanted. We wouldn’t even get ID’d”

College fish 1 & 2 then went to the Coors brewery, and changed the sign to read “Flip this switch, or you’ll be swimming with the fishes” or something like that. After a huge fish frat party, they forgot to get the switch turned off, and were all killed by alcohol poisoning.

Well, maybe that isn’t how it happened, but what the heck.

Simpson’s quote: “Okay, brain. You don’t like me, and I don’t like you, but let’s get through this thing and then I can continue killing you with beer.” - Homer