dop’s blog

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…

For those who know me, I am a F1 McLaren fan… However, it seems that my favorite F1 team is falling apart. It recently lost Adrian Newey that went to the Red Bull Racing and those days, Nicholas Tombazis - who BTW is Greek like me - left and returned to Ferrari.

Come on guys, what are you doing? If everyone is gone, then your drivers will go too…

How many years will pass till we - I mean the McLaren team and fans - take the championship? I’m tired of waiting…

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?

I had a revelation blah,blah,blah..

This came to me today: some of us have cellphones or PDAs with GPS. We can use it and repost our coordinates every once in a while in a site.

We call our friends to register to the site and create different groups of friends (based on location, hours we want them to see where we are etc. etc.) that can access our coordinates information and be presented with our current location using Google Maps…

I think it’s fun!!

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

I have started to add my small programs. I have a lot more, but only this small fraction is supposed to be really bug-free and fully working.

In time, more will be added and I will notify of any changes.