Entries for serishema

Windows Vista speech recognition. [Windows Vista speech recognition.]

serishema — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 16:23:52 GMT

Windows Vista speech recognition rocks!
I have to write up a big assignment but I hurts to type because of RSI. So I've been talking to my computer for the past couple of hours, dictating my assignment. It is doing surprisingly well, most voice recognition systems can't understand the kiwi accent. But Mr. Wallace recognition handles this fine.

I am very impressed, I actually made this post by voice.

I really had to type to logon, and click a mouse ones to activate the post body field.

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services for unix is cool [services for unix is cool]

serishema — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:46:06 GMT

Services for unix is the answer to computer science students everywhere's linux problems. I no longer have to load up linux in virtual pc. I can do my assignments using visual studio with the services for unix (interix) SDK which is just excellent :-)

No more hacking files because an upgrade my the vpc video display go all funny.

edited to add: i don't have anything against linux per say. I just don't run it on desktop/laptop machines. Only servers.

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an idea for ipv7 when it gets drawn up [an idea for ipv7 when it gets drawn up]

serishema — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 18:37:12 GMT

the next networking protocol should support transperant handoffs to different connections, that would be excellent.

Immagine being able to walk out of wifi range of your home or work place with you laptop and have file transfers, vpn and remote desktop sessions automatically hand off to 3G/UMTS/HSDPA

that would be very cool, though sadly i recognise the difficulty of implimenting something like this.

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a windows "your" edition [a windows "your" edition]

serishema — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 13:29:54 GMT

I was looking at the feature lists of the different vista editions the other day trying to decide which one i would buy when it comes out.

And i got an idea. What if you could choose the features you wanted and only pay for what you'd actually use?

I don't know how this would work out for microsoft. But say you could choose to have IIS with 10 incomming connections and services for unix (something ever computer science student who runs windows has wanted for years. Thank you microsoft!) but not any of the bussiness networking features because you don't need them for a home network. That kind of example. That way the edition you get could be exactly what you need for a given problem.

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vista performance and video memory [vista performance and video memory]

serishema — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 13:06:51 GMT

I have a laptop with intergrated video.

I don't play games, so on windows XP i had set the shared video memory amount as low as possible thinking that would mean the maximum amount of ram was available to the system to run programs, etc.

But it seems this is not a good idea on windows vista. I have an intel 915gma graphics controller which doesn't support WDDM so no areo for me. I recently increased the video memory setting to the maximum which is 128mb. I noticed that this actually seems to improve performance, not make it worse which doesn't make sense to me. The laptop also doesn't run as hot.

I thought the vista basic theme was rendered purely in software and didn't care whether you had a 4mb S3 trio 64v or a modern 3D acellerator.

Can someone in the know explain to me why this is the case.

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windows media algorithm, could we have a video? [windows media algorithm, could we have a video?]

serishema — Sun, 29 Oct 2006 22:13:08 GMT

I'd like to see a video about the windows media audio codec and how it works in as much detail as is allowed.

I've always been using mp3 files until now. Back with the older windows media codec, the one that shipped with the inital release of XP sounded awful at 64kbps. But the codec that ships with windows media 11 seems vastly improved.

I'm curious as to how this was acheived as i thought you couldn't mathematically do better than splitting the audio signal into 4 bands and then performing a DCT (discrete cosine transform) on the 4 bands and storing that data, which is how mp3 works.

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flexwiki forms based authentication [flexwiki forms based authentication]

serishema — Fri, 21 Jul 2006 05:03:55 GMT

I'm setting up a website based on flexwiki for a student union group. They want only designated people to be able to edit topics.

I've gotten the login page to appear when the user tries to edit a topic but the login page doesn't appear to do anything. When i checked login.aspx.cs the login handler was blank.

I read on a the web that the current version doesn't work with authentication and tried to use a previous version however the previous version cannot find my default namespace with the same configuration as the current version.

Is there any easy bit of code i can add into the login handler to make the login page work in the current version?

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"your chosen programming language is not l33t enough" ["your chosen programming language is not l33t enough"]

serishema — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 03:02:24 GMT

Why do people insist on having relgious wars about programming languages? Some of my class mates have told me that various projects of mine sucked because of the language they were written in. Apparently it's cool to hate JAVA, C# Standard ML, F# pretty much anything going that's not C/C++. Has anyone else noticed this trend?

Is this merely tunnel vision or resitance to having to learn and understand many different programming languages or is it simply people being unable to accept the mere existance of an alternative point of view as affects many who get involved in OS religious wars?

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Immagine if coffee was illegal [Immagine if coffee was illegal]

serishema — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 04:58:02 GMT

Immagine what the world would be like if coffee was illegal. You'd have to go down to some shady alleyway or something each morning to get a cup of coffee and the software industry would grind to a halt as all the programmers suffer from caffine withdrawl. Eventually programming sites/books/languages would be declared illegal caffine paraphinalia and we'd have to go back to the computer free stone age!

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uptake of windows in computer science departments [uptake of windows in computer science departments]

serishema — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 18:01:34 GMT

Who here does computer science? Who else here has noticed that computer science departments seem to run linux and that staff members hastle students with laptops who aren't running linux? One of my professors once claimed that gcc has better conformance to the ISO/ANSI C/C++ standards than Visual C++ which is not even true! gcc as far as i know doesn't support true multidimensional arrays.

eg int tictactoe[3,3];

Will not compile on gcc. (Okay i haven't actually checked and i haven't written unmanaged C++ code in 100 million years it could be a CLR thing don't flame me if i 'm wrong)

He also went so far as to claim that Visual C++ was the reason my program didn't work when he couldn't find my mistake, and i had indeed made a mistake, a classic dangling pointer.

I hate linux now, especially GCC and the lack of decent debugging in mono (I used to run FreeBSD and switched to windows because visual studio was so much better than what i'd been using, especially the debuggers) but it seems i can't win so i'm reluctantly installing linux on the virtual pc trial which it seems i'll most likely have to buy along with more ram to keep it happy since it seems to be working so far, unlike two different open source emulators that both crashed before they could get to the fedora core install screen.

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