/dev/blog

Today, I have just discovered Speakable Items in Mac OS X, and, man, is it *awesome*!

I just turned on Listening in your System Preferences, and my iBook began listening for voice commands. It also provided a floating palette for feedback, so I could see if it heard me. I could optionally have it listen only if a key is pressed and held, or after I say a key word, like “Computer”. There’s also a Speakable Items palette that shows the user what commands the computer knows, and one can add one’s own commands by making AppleScripts that run the command, and name it whatever you want to say to run the command, then move it to the ~/Library/Speech/Speakable\ Items/ folder

I easily made some iTunes scripts for play, pause, and other commands.

The speech recognition worked real well, and understood my commands most of the time. What really surprised me was when it understood the command “open nFoldMan” and actually started the application.

Mac OS X continues to give me wonderful surprises even after I used it for a year. And I definitely don’t regret switching.

In CompSci class, we’ve just got an assignment where we have to work on a program in Java. It can be on anything and can do anything, but has to be worth about 4-5 weeks of work.

Well, I’ve decided to do something with Cocoa, just to start getting familiar with it. But, I need some ideas for the project. Someone in our group proposed a stock simulation. I think it may be too easy if we just pull stock information off the internet, and too complex if we simulate stocks by making our own class.

Well, any ideas on how/what to do with the stocks? Or maybe some other project we can work on?

And, no, it cannot be in Objective C. The class is *Java* orientated.

*Update*: Well, the group has decided to do a Chess game instead.

I was looking for a widget that can either run commands in the shell and display the output, or run the ‘cat’ command on a file. I was going to use it on Folding@Home, to display the unitinfo.txt file.

In boredom, I made a widget for Dashboard in Tiger that runs the ‘cat’ command in UNIX in a user-definable interval, and refreshes the result.

You can get it “Here(dashcat.v0.1.zip)”:http://lokisnake.com/widgets/dashcat.v0.1.zip

It is currently *not* user-friendly, but it gets the job done.

To change the settings, you would need to go into the .wdgt bundle, and edit the javascript and css files. It isn’t complicated to work with, but can be improved.

I will be improving this little by little. And feel free to submit comments and suggestions to lokisnake (at) lokisnake (dot) com

Tiger has now been officially released, and I got my copy at 6:15 p.m. local time in Pasadena. Installed it in store, and played with it the whole time.

Spotlight is amazing. Really instant search. It is *wicked* fast! Much faster than the beta version I tried out on a friend’s computer, and that was already fast. It indexes everything. When it finishes indexing my backup/external hard drive, I’ll see just how good it is, and report back here.

Dashboard also exceeded my expectations. It is fast on my iBook, and not just beautiful, but also useful. At a touch of a key, I can gather all the tidbits of information I need, like weather forecasts, airline flight status, stocks, times around the world, and can also search in the built-in dictionary, do simple calculations, convert units, search in the yellow pages, and much more. Other features can be added by installing third party widgets.

Safari RSS is simply stunning in its speed and the new features. It is now even faster than the original Safari, despite new features. The most remarkable being the RSS capabilities. I can visit a site with an RSS feed, Safari would find it and display a little icon on the right side of the address bar, and if you click on it, the built-in RSS reader would go to that feed. By doing a simple drag-and-drop, you can then bookmark the RSS feed, and Safari would put a number by the feed to show new entries. The whole thing is done elegantly, and is very easy to use.

Other new features that others find great and I have yet to explore include the new Mail.app, iChat, Address Book, iCal, Automator, the new Preview, and Xcode 2. I’ll be beginning to use these when I really start using Tiger to its fullest, and I’ll write something if I find anything I like about these new upgrades and applications.

As some of you know, Mac OS X Tiger is coming this Friday, and, well, there will be little celebration events at every single Apple Store from 6PM to midnight. That’s when I purchase my precious copy of Tiger, and install it right there in the store

Look “here(Apple Store Locations)”:http://www.apple.com/retail/ for a list of stores, and just pick one for details. You should see an image with Tiger World Premiere on it.

I’ve heard there will be drawings for Powerbooks and iPods. And also they might hand out T-shirts and the likes.

Possible destinations for me would be the Rancho Cucamonga store, or the Pasadena store (most likely).

If anyone is or might be going, leave a comment and state which store if you wouldn’t mind.

Hope to see some of you there! And have fun!

Who wouldn’t like to have their own butler?
How about a butler for you on your computer?

Well, get your very own Butler __today__!

Butler

And, yup, it’s Mac only.

It is an amazing little helper, and has worked nicely into my daily workflow. There are so many features that I still haven’t discovered them all of them yet. I currently use the shortcut keys for entering abbreviations for launching applications, for doing a Google or Yahoo search, controlling iTunes, for launching the Unix shell, Terminal, and also the shortcut for the stacked pasteboard, which saves a user-defined number of past cmd-c commands. Almost all of the features can be assigned a user-defined keyboard shortcut, and all the searches are quite fast.

It isn’t a Spotlight replacement, for it doesn’t really index what’s in documents, but instead is an app launcher and helper in general.

Oh, and, it’s free (as in speech). I strongly recommend all Mac users try out this application, and donate some money to the developer if you like it and use it a lot.

It is this kind of software that makes the Macintosh Experience® so enjoyable for me.

As Tiger wins the Masters, Apple announces the Tiger official release date, and it’s earlier than what I had originally thought.

__April 29th, Friday__

Guess what that means?

Yup, I’ll be going to the Apple Store right after school!

Study shows Microsoft, Linux costs neck-and-neck | Tech News on ZDNet

Umm, right. Of course it is…

Well, that is supposedly just on maintenance costs, which, yes, MIGHT be similar for Windows and Linux (more on this later). But, what about total ownership costs? All the licensing costs of Windows is just outrageous. And, for Linux, it is free.

Well, considering the chances of Windows crashing/having problems, maintenance might also be quite high. From my point of view, an office running Linux will have less problems overall than one running on Windows.

Toward the end of the article, there is this little section:
>On a scale of 1 to 10, companies rated Microsoft’s security at 7.6, double the rating in a similar survey conducted last year. Linux’s rating was mostly the same at 8.3

Above meaning company **heads** said this, the people that don’t do the administration of the systems. When you don’t do it, you simply cannot appreciate the difficulties in doing the stuff.

Oh and also this:
>DiDio said that Microsoft’s shift to a monthly security update cycle and increased efforts to combat security issues were the main drivers behind its new ratings.

Yeah, well, does that change the fact that Microsoft has decided to ignore and not patch several severe security holes?

IMO, the whole survey was designed for Microsoft, so that they would maybe buy the survey and use it to market their products.

But, we all know the truth. People don’t use Windows because of choice, but because they either have no choice or have no clue.

Macworld: News: Google intros Q&A service

“…Google Q&A is strong in areas such as geography, information about famous people and physical facts, such as the size of planets…”

Well, seems pretty cool, since it adds to the features like define in Google search. I would like to see it mature and make use of it.

I guess Google is just trying to match the wikipedia search ability of Yahoo search.

Well, many things are still not displayed. Like I tried “How old is Steve Jobs” and also for Bill Gates, but both had no results shown. I’d wait for the feature to grow over time, then come back and use it as it gets better.

EDIT: well, just found this on the Google Weblog.

Ah hah! My predictions are correct! GMail is becoming “bottomless”! Well, that’s good news for everyone.

Oh, and Google Maps now has satellite imagery. It’s pretty cool. Yeah, nothing new, but when it is something from everyone’s favorite brand name, all their beta products are something to rave about. Right? Yup.