Voice Recognition - in Scotland
Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:03PM If you have a problem with bad language - well- then your going to have a problem. Funny though.
What am I?
I'm a technology consultant, focused on enterprise collaborative applications. I'm based in North-east Scotland but work all over Europe, and sometimes I present at technology conferences using a mixture of deep-technology and humour to keep the audience awake.
I'm married with one grown-up daughter of whom I'm immensely proud, and have family members covering most significant time-zones. We took 'hide and seek' seriously.
Other interests include making excuses not to go to the gym, testing the tolerance of my peers with humour, and sometimes bringing my 20-year old ZZR 600 out of the garage to terrify myself with.
I've been blogging since it was called 'Talking cr@p on the internet' and at one stage hand-rolled my own blog. Fame and fortune for this minor technological greatness is still 'in the post'.
Enjoy my little outpost on the web and take cheer that it could be worse - I could be a Silverlight consultant...
How to get in touch?
I have a mobile phone number which has been unchanged in 15 years. Most folks have that. Or you can try eMailing me - look at the domain name and take a good guess which will work. Most things will. I'm on Linked-In for the business stuff, Facebook for the personal stuff, and Skype for the face to face stuff.
I'm a freelance consultant, and I'm engaged by enterprise or government customers. Most of the work I do I cannot speak about, so excuse my somewhat clumsy evasions. Don't for a second assume that the work is in any way interesting or challenging.
Thursday, September 2, 2010 at 11:03PM If you have a problem with bad language - well- then your going to have a problem. Funny though.
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 at 9:42AM Imagine living in a corporate world where you had no choice. All for very good reasons, of course, but here is where software (and dreams) come to die.
For instance, the IM client in operation is something called 'Mindalign' (in this case v6.5). Its a POS in almost every sense of the word. Unreliable,. buggy, non-persistent, unfriendly. And today, just to put the chery on the poo-cake that is Mindalign, I got this:
Wait. So if I log out, I lose messages ?
Classy. I guess what I'm saying is before you engage on a long term basis, do one of two things. Either check in advance and make a decision on how much you can tolerate this rubbish, or just lower your expectations. And I mean IBM-Marketing-Lotus-Notes-low, or even Microsoft-reliable-software-low.
After all, its only work.
Monday, August 30, 2010 at 11:51AM I recently got the Scirocco fitted with a VW branded car kit - on the invoice, it was called an iTouch. In reality, its a rebranded Bury CC9060. A fantastic car kit, and Barnetts in Dundee did an excellent job in fitting it. It worked really well with my temporary BlackBerry and SWMBO's iPhone 3Gs.
However.
When I got my new iPhone 4, it started:
All in all, very frustrating. It would appear that Apple iOS v4.0.0, v4.0.1, and v4.0.2 all have the same issue. There is apparently an update from Bury which might fix it, but when I wasted three hours over the weekend (farting around with Bluetooth drivers, windows XP, The Bury Update manager, bad documentation, etc), the upgrade program (on the PC) denied that it had the correct firmware downloaded from the Bury site.
Bury, if you ever read this:
I called Barnetts this morning, and they're taking the car back on Friday AM to check it out. They've not seen this yet.
In the meantime, using my Apple developer ID, I'm upgrading my iPhone to iOS 4.1 (beta 3) to see if this irons it out. (Hint: Pay $100 for the iPhone developer stuff, register your device on the developer portal, download the firmware from the site, hold down 'Ctrl' whilst clicking on 'Restore' to select the new firmware, reload phone, restore from backup. Amazingly, I got almost all of those steps completely wrong the first time and it still worked fine).
So. Finally. Does iOS 4.1 (Beta 3) solve the issues ?
Ah. No. Bugger.
Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 11:19PM With all this excitement over new API's in the 8.5x code stream, I thought I'd go and have a peek at the latest copy of the C-API toolkit. Its over here.
Well, it should be. There's last been a public release in March 2009. When 8.5.0 was released. Whilst its a little soon for 8.5.2 to be out, I would have thought 8.5.1 would have been released by now.
Ah well. Even my lowest of the low expectations have been dashed.
Sunday, August 29, 2010 at 10:51PM A weekend of Painting, and a day of working, followed by a bank-holiday day of working. Rock and roll.
Stil, the chocolate-coloured bedroom is now done: