dop’s blog

Anyone remembers Tablet PCs? You know, that small PCs that look like big notepads (or books) and can be used with a pen. Well, there was much hype 2-4 years ago for those little machines - however, they were too big, too heavy and very expensive.

Now, Microsoft has resurrected the tablet PCs with the Origami Project. It looks like a cut-down PC or a big Playstation Portable (PSP). Could this be MS’s response to the successful Sony PSP? I dunno… However, if they pack it with useful software - and not just beautiful or innovative software - and sell at an affordable price - for God’s shake, 1000$ is too much guys - it could possibly find a place in many homes and replace some ordinary PCs or laptops.

And maybe give some specs out and see real innovation with Linux, XGL and some other really interesting open-source projects.

I am an ATI fan and I am using Linux (SuSE 10.0 that is) as my main OS - I occasionally boot into MS Windows XP as well.

I am an unfortunate guy that has an ATI Radeon 9600XT and X.Org 6.9. Yes, truly unfortunate… ATI has released new drivers (8.22.5 as of this time). Although my distribution is fully supported, X.Org 6.9 is not. None of the patches that I have found work - but of course, the drivers are for X.Org 6.8, not 6.9. So, I have a pretty good card and I cannot test any 3D application, game or composite manager.

The open-source driver - r300 Project - does not support my card.

And I am asking - is it that difficult to create a new driver? If only I had the time and resources and assist you guys in ATI.

I am thinking very seriously of selling my card and buying an nVidia one. Although I don’ t think they make better cards, they surely have better drivers. I am accepting donations through Paypal, using ipapadop_at_inf.uth.gr

From time to time, and since I use my keyboard a lot, my right wrist hurts. I can control it, however I tried to find another way of controlling my PC. So, the regular way is through voice and speech recognition.

Since I do not have the funds to acquire a commercial system and I certainly do not want to return to MS Windows just to use speech recognition software, I tried to find any speech recognition software that is available in GNU/Linux. Voice recognition in open-source systems is non-existant, period.

There was only one commercial system widely available, IBM’s ViaVoice - for only 40$. However, I cannot find it now. There was also XVoice which integrated ViaVoice with the X Window System. As I can’t find ViaVoice, it is also dead to me - the site hasn’t updated for many years.

One promising system is Sphinx-4 from Carnegie-Mellon University. It is a complete rewrite of C-based Sphinx-3 in Java. It looks good, it works somewhat OK and has had to be updated for 2+ years. Shame… I have used it and didn’t work flawlessly. However, I believe it is the best choice out there.

We also have the Open-Source Speech Recognition Initiative. It has started, but never released anything. The site is a bit poor, but expect miracles if the guys get proper funding. Nothing more.

The last piece of software is cvoicecontrol. It worked fine with me, although it needs to be taught to recognize your voice. Unfortunately, its author is now an employee in a speech recognition software company, so he stopped the active development. Anyone with speech recognition knowledge to resume development?

Although we’ ll have a full 3D environment in Linux in a few year’s time, we’ ll only detach ourselves from the keyboard in a decade or so. Unless Apple comes out with speech recognition software and integrates it with MacOS X. Because if Apple does not do such a thing, no-one will ever care.

In this page there is a comparison between the old AWT (Abstract Windows Toolkit), Java’s Swing and Eclipse’s SWT.

It is a very brief comparison, though beautiful at its simplicity…

As I was surfing, trying to find information on GNU/Linux POSIX conformance, I run into this page: http://people.fluidsignal.com/~luferbu/misc/Linus_vs_Tanenbaum.html

Yes, it is the quarrel Linus Torvalds and Andrew Tanenbaum. Just for historical reasons, anyone who is somewhat seriously involved in operating systems or Linux, should read it.

I have

Today I found this: Be.Ajaxilicious

It is a online movie database that is AJAX-based. It looks interesting, although I do not know how easy it would be to make the transition from ordinary text files or small databases we use for our movies.

Pay it a visit though…

Since I am always looking for small projects to participate and make some money if possible - hey, I must pay my hardware upgrades somehow - I joined RentACoder.

I’ve just started using it. Although it is a bit ugly, it really works and if you have a PayPal account you can be paid almost immediately. You only need to set up an account and provide some info.

I am in no way affiliated with RentACoder, I thought I should share this info with whomever is reading this blog.

The long awaited transition has been done…

In his blog, James Gosling, the father of Java, said that the new JVM and everything else worked flawlessly. This is the catch: EVERYTHING JUST WORKS!

Imagine now the games that have been written for Windows, using OpenGL: they could run in MacOS X x86. And wine could also be modified to run on MacOS X.

Maybe this is the end of DirectX?

1. Skype 2.0 for Linux (that supports GTK2, for God’s sake…)
2. A lighter KDE (although KDE 3.5 is a step to the right direction)
3. A new MacIntel laptop
4. Stable and working Linux for my Dell Axim X30 PDA
5. To start a PhD

To all listening out there and belong to the movie/music industry: DROP THE DAMN DRM AND FIND SOMETHING BETTER…

No, it is not the day that I lose my mind. I recently read about the new protections that will be imposed on all mediums in a local magazine.

For God’s sake people, you do not respet our hardware and you think that we will respect your Intellectual Property (IP) (and I’m referring to Sony’s DRM/rootkit/whatever)?

Maybe it’s about time developing new solutions and services that people will pay for using them, not because they ought to, but because they want to? Damn you managers for treating every user as a possible thief…

Those that want to steal IP know how to do this and can easily overcome ANY DRM you might use… So, why do you make the legitimate user’s life difficult?

Maybe it is the time to see open-IP (free as in speech).

Oh, and read this…