My Colleague Roland Racko Who Runs The Website Voicewizardcom Warns Me That I May B

My colleague Roland Racko, who runs the website voicewizard.com, warns me that I may be prematurely enthusiastic about Dragon's capabilities.  I've dictated this blog entry on my mobile device, an Axim PDA, whether the transcription works, we'll have to see. [Note: It misspelled Axim and missed "to see"]

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Drools (Java-based inference engine) ported to .NET

Drools.NET is a port of the Drools library to .NET. I have a bg, big architectural decision coming up for a client and I am debating about whether to tackle the issue with an inference engine or a scripting language. So I've been looking at Drools pretty closely. It's …

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Blown Away by NaturallySpeaking

Against my better judgment I bought Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 from Amazon.  Over the years I've tried lots of dictation software and have been uniformly disappointed.  The new NaturallySpeaking says that it achieves a high level of accuracy out of the box without extensive user training.  Many people say that "Gee …

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Joins: COmega-style Concurrency for All .NET Languages

I quite liked COmega's model for concurrency. Joins is a library from Microsoft that implements the same model using .NET 2.0 generics. I haven't played with it yet, but it's definitely in the queue.

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Learning WPF in 5 Days

I like Karsten Januszweski's 5-day tutorial on WPF (via \<a href="http://www.knowing.net/ct.ashx?id=efab0325-bace-41c3-b0bf-50441130484f&url=http%3a%2f%2ffeeds.feedburner.com%2f%7er%2fAContinuousLearnersWeblog%2f%7e3%2f10102168%2flearn-wpf-in-5-days.html"" target=_blank rel="noopener noreferrer">Steve Pietrek). Instead of writing something himself, he's structured advice on …

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Panorama Stitching: A Solved Problem

Everyone's buzzing about Photosynth, Microsoft's impressive technology that stitches together photographs and presents them in a 3-D space. However, all that is available today is a video.

In the meantime, though, it turns out that automatically stitching together photos to create panoramas appears to be a solved problem. \<a href …

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Compress Wikipedia, Win 20,000 Euros

Brilliant! The Hutter Prize for Lossless Compression (http://www.hutter1.net/prize.htm) takes as its challenge the task of compressing 100MB of Wikipedia text into the pre-competition best of \~17MB. The idea is that a chunk of Wikipedia text that big has characteristics relevant to compression that go beyond …

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Jeff Atwood pooh-poohs quad core systems. I disagree.

Jeff Atwood, of Coding Horror, says that "the benefits of moving to quad core and beyond are less clear." He produces some numbers to reveal that many of today's processor-intensive applications (media, gaming, databases, etc.) are not multithreaded and, therefore, do not run significantly faster on multicore machines. He observes …

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Insane Guitar Solo

You just have to watch this guitar solo to believe it. Amazing.

via http://feeds.feedburner.com/LessIsBetter.?m=168

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Inflation in the lab?

I'm an easy-going guy, but the idea of trying to create a universe in a "bubble" in an accelerator seems like a bad idea.

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