Mixed emotions about this. I bought a Dell Inspiron 1525 last October (it didn’t actually arrive until November). I have no complaints with the hardware. Honestly, I only have two complaints with the software, because I wiped Vista and installed Ubuntu Linux. But those complaints were just too much to overcome:

• I never found an email client I could stand
• There’s nothing like Accordance, which I need for too much of my work.
• I never found the time to get my Wacom tablet working.

To be sure, if I had a Mac, that would enable me to use other great software as well: MacSpeech Dictate, Address Book and iCal, and the iLife and iWork apps. And Pixelmator. (Which isn’t quite as capable as Gimp, but which works with a Wacom tablet.)

I’ve been using MacSpeech Dictate for about half an hour, once or twice a week, since early spring. My experience is that it is great out of the box and has gotten better as I’ve learned to use it.

The hardest thing about using voice-recognition software is to not watch it guess. I do best reading material (from a book, for example). To compose, I have to turn my head away from the screen, or I … start … speaking … in … single … words.

When I look away and just talk, MacSpeech Dictate does much better. I’ve found that, when I’m reading from another source, I do best when I speak in complete sentences, or at least long phrases. Then I go back and fix whatever it guessed wrong.

I was impressed at MacSpeech Dictate‘s vocabulary. It routinely guesses words that the Mac’s spell-checking doesn’t know. (I remember being impressed when it guessed “Tertullian.”)

I was also impressed that they keep any eye on what people say about it on Twitter. A shocking number of software companies aren’t so clueful.

MacSpeech Dictate does what it claims to do, and does it well. For that reason, I’d give it five stars. But I won’t. I’ll give it four, or more honestly 3.5. Here’s what I don’t like about MacSpeech Dictate.

• It’s poorly-documented. It’s skimpy, and seems in places to be wrong. (But it’s so skimpy maybe it’s just missing the facts I need.) Why not give me a PDF or URL with extra information about how to do something tricky, like using voice commands to select text?
• It’s not Spaces-friendly. I’d like to be able to use my other apps in the middle of dictating, but MacSpeech Dictate comes with me wherever I go and jumps in front of my windows. Thanks a bunch.
• It’s nearly impossible for me to use the voice commands to select and modify text. Sometimes, it even misunderstands “forget that” and “go to end” misunderstood — still, after months of use!

Because the voice selection/modification features aren’t useful to me, I find the recognition window indispensable. But it has UI problems of its own:

• the transparency won’t adjust down to zero, i.e., become opaque. Why? What good is transparency anyway? just make the whole thing spaces-friendly.
• the font is too small, and likewise the color of the window. (I know, black HUD-style UI’s are the new black.) Let me choose font size and black-on-white text. Steve Jobs can get away with “do it my way” but you aren’t Steve Jobs.
• let me double-click a word to fix it. The software works best when I give it long phrases. But if I see a problem and double-click it, the text-entry box acts like a choice button. Why not let me use the choice button you already put there, and have the text-entry box act like a text-entry box?
• why not highlight the differences between the various guesses? If the phrase in question is 10 words long, and the only difference is between the words “sent” and “cent” and “sense” and “incense”, why not display the differences in bold, or in different colors? Take a look at the Filemerge utility that comes with the Mac’s developer tools for inspiration.

Since we finished Latin, my Mondays are pretty much free time for me. I spent yesterday writing some code. (I even wrote unit tests and put my changes under source control.)

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From Slashdot today, a lengthy piece: “New Legislation Would Federalize Cybersecurity.”

The bill, containing many of the recommendations of the landmark study “Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency” by the Center for Strategic and International Studies …

Who is this? Anybody with expertise in computers and/or security? According to their web page, no. But it does include (among others) Sam Nunn, Zbig Brzezinski, Richard Armitage, William Cohen, Carla Hills, James Schlesinger, Brent Scowcroft, and (of course) Henry Kissinger. It looks like a blue-ribbon commission in-waiting, made up of ex-Secretaries of State and Defense. Could even one of them tell you what SSL is? Not how it works, just what it stands for? I doubt it.

So, what is it they want to do?

…would create the Office of the National Cybersecurity Adviser, whose leader would report directly to the president and would coordinate defense efforts across government agencies. The legislation calls for the appointment of a White House cybersecurity “czar” with unprecedented authority to shut down computer networks, including private ones, if a cyberattack is underway.

This would be the same Federal government that runs the FAA’s computers. I’m sure they have all kinds of useful advice for anyone running a fleet of IBM 704s.

But the most predictable thing about the recommended legislation?

The legislation also would require licensing and certification of cybersecurity professionals.

Because that has worked so well in the areas of medicine and law. For the doctors and lawyers, I mean–not for anyone else.

Creating a guild — straight out of the middle ages — to regulate entry into and practice within a trade. It hardly augurs well for something as high-tech and 21st-Century as cybersecurity.

Bah.

And worst of all, it’s got Hasta La.

That’s actually the reason I got it. There’s something I need to do. It requires either a couple of weeks of my spare time to get it working on a Mac or on Linux, or $268 to get a new Dell and do it on a PC.

I’ve mentioned here my earlier purchase of a certified refurbished laptop from Dell. Well, I just purchased a PC with the following features:

• Intel Pentium dual-core processor E5200 (2MB L2, 2.5GHz, 800 FSB)
• Optical 2-Button Mouse and USB Keyboard
• Genuine Windows Vista Home Premium
• 4 GB DDR2 NON-ECC SDRAM 800MHz (4 DIMMs)
• 320 GB SATA Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
• 16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability
• 1 Yr Limited Hardware Warranty, In-Home Service after Remote Diagnosis, 24×7 Phone Support

For less than $300. No coupons, no mail-in rebates. Just order it. Amazing.

I wonder what I can sell it for in 3 months when I no longer need it? $100? $50? A venti latte at Fourbucks?

This article nails it.

When I was in college, I was in a team of three people that had to write an operating system. (One of us, Dan, who was clearly the most prolific and talented programmer among us, nearly torpedoed the project by doing something incredibly clever that kept everything else from working. Then he bailed out a couple of days after the semester ended, instead of sticking to his post when the cadets ran, leaving Kevin and I to finish the job in the final hours before grades were due.)

Anyway, I mention this because the name of our Operating System was “Enterprise,” and our terminology was adapted from TOS. (Which, in those days, was The Only Show.) For example, instead of having initializing processes, we “beamed aboard” “ambassadors.” Most of our analogies were equally poor. Something like this chart could have really helped us make clever diagnostic output.

xkcd explains correlation vs. causation. Not so easy, you might think, but here one is in just 3 panels and 22 words. Most impressive.

Of course, this is nothing, compared to its amazingly clear and easy-to-understand explanation of a SQL injection attack.

I’ve been looking for a software tool that would convert foreign characters into a poor substitute.

Call me Ugly McAmerican. I don’t care.

My language has been worn down — I would say, “polished” — like a river rock to the point where it doesn’t have a million characters or funny accent marks or any of that stuff. Now, I don’t mind if your language uses them. I don’t even mind if we have a common encoding. What I do mind is that none of my tools work with your stupid common encoding. When grep and sed and diff and ruby all know what to do with your ?q???????, give me a call.

In the meantime, I plan to go on working in ASCII as much as possible. Then, when necessary, I’ll use tools to convert ugly-quotes to pretty ones, or turn ... into ellipses, etc.

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Amazon’s front page today is all about the version 2.0 Kindle. I have to admit, it looks pretty sweet. Choosing B&W rather than color was a good trade-off so you can up the pixel density.

I looked up three books I’m reading right now, and they were all available. Interestingly, they were also (slightly) cheaper on Kindle than on paper. In my experience, electronic versions are usually no cheaper than the hardcopy. This is especially true of bibles and bible-study materials like commentaries and lexicons. I understand why the BDAG is $150 in print (well, sort of) but there’s no reason they should charge that much when you spare the trees.

On the other hand, the Kindle costs $360. How many years does that buy you? That is, what price are you paying for your new “bookshelf?” And will the next version read your ebooks? (And if it reads them at all, will there be a media conversion “upgrade” fee?)

Sorry not to be updating this blog more. Partly it’s that I’ve been terribly busy the last two months (it’s sort of the busy season at work). And partly it’s because of microblogs like twitter and time-wasting walled-gardens like Facebook. But mainly, it’s been because of my DSL, which has been horribly unreliable.

I dare to think that it might have been resolved now.
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