m0serious you are my hero!
Please, I beg you. If you ask people to make a website for you or if you are an artist/designer that gives templates to a scripter or coder, watch this video all the way!
Category: Technology
All things geeky.
It’s people. Soylent Jott is made out of people. They’re making our text out of people.
Last night, Lissa Kay asks if I know how Jott works. I used to work at The Learning Company in its foreign language division which was bleeding edge when it came to speech recognition (which is different than voice recognition btw). I knew all about Lernout & Hauspie and how to trick Dragon Speech. Jott’s accuracy (not demonstrated last night) has always amazed me because there is no training involved. You sign up for an account and instantly start using it. Most speech-to-text software requires some training which usually involves reading several paragraphs of text to the software so it can learn the nuances of your speech patterns.
As it turns out, Jott combines machine translation and humans to convert the speech to text.
If we were dealing with a very limited set of words, in a known context, spoken very clearly by a accentless person in a noise-free environment, then pure machine-driven Speech Recognition might have been the way to go. Instead, we wanted to be immediately useful and simple to adopt, letting any English speaker jott using an ordinary cell-phone, their natural voice, in a realistic setting (their car, running between meetings, etc.). So we use a mixed Human/Machine method for transcription, and that blend will change over time. [Source, Entrepreneur27, Interview with John Pollard of Jott]
Since Jott uses humans, you can spell difficult words to assure they get turned to text correctly. I have inquired to see if Jott plans to support IM, SMS, and emails sent to the inbox.
See a screenshot, the numerous services to which Jott can post, and my thoughts on Jott at the bottom of Rough Week Behind Redux to Follow.
I lost my DOM plugin
In what has to be the dumbest thing I have seen all week, the DOM Inspector plugin is available on the Mozilla website only at its 2.0.0 version. The DOM Inspector 2.0.0 is only compatible with the unreleased Firefox 3. The current stable version of Firefox is 2.0.0.13. I was having trouble with Firebug not displaying styles and one troubleshooting step is to reinstall the DOM Inspector. Whoops. Not anymore! Guess I have to install the FF release candidate or just wait. I’m not a huge Firebug fan anyway. I can wait.
Update: To get the DOM Inspector working, follow these instructions:
I exited Firefox, edited the xpti.dat file and replaced the
line
223,inIDOMUtils,{ffffd059-13d1-4ef7-acb1-91188c6e31dd},2,-1,1
with
223,inIDOMUtils,{78fd16c2-bdfb-4b1d-8738-d536d0a8f430},0,-1,1Started Firefox again [Source, Bugzilla, DOM Inspector "CSS Style Rules" panel suddenly does not display any selectors Comment #22]
Note: For me it was line 237 so make sure you are editing the actual line with inIDOMUtils.
Performance Issues?
If there is one thing that Reality Me shouldn’t have is performance issues. I was told that today it saw 500 errors. Not as in the quantity five hundred but as in the server was having a problem. Reality Me is on a shared host which means that the one computer servers out web pages for many different people. In other words, the same box might have a very popular website unrelated to any of my websites and the server could have performance issues because of stuff they are doing. Of course, it could be me. I could be demanding too much of the machine with an inefficient WordPress plugin.
In short, I need to do troubleshooting which could take a lot of effort. If you notice problems with Reality Me or Domestic Psychology, please email me or Twitter me and let me know about the issue or error message. I am also going to try out the WP-Cache plugin so I would be interested in hearing about any odd behaviors (or improvements) it created. Thank you!
WordPress 2.5 post by email broken
Yesterday when Comcast was down for scheduled maintenance I tried to blog it by sending an email from my phone to Reality Me via a secret email that WordPress checks once an hour. I actually sent two posts via email and neither were ever seen on the blog. I just found both the posts with a "pending review" status. This seems to be a new behavior in WordPress 2.5 and not a feature that I like. There does not appear to be a setting that allows me to change this behavior. Perhaps it is my turn to write a plugin.
I think having the ability to post by email when I cannot otherwise reach the blog is a powerful feature. Having the post hidden from publication by slapping it into a pending review status makes posting by email a bit useless, at least for my purposes.
Cathy recognized by Alltop
I think Cathy’s writing is fantastic but I happen to be biased. I find Domestic Psychology a pleasure to read (again with the bias). I am tickled to announce that Cathy has been recognized by Guy Kawasaki and has joined the likes of Jack Lail in Alltop! Cathy is in the Alltop Life category along with some familiar blogs such as xkcd.com, indexed and Sarcomical. Congratulations to Cathy! (Does this mean I don’t have to program anymore?)
Job Market 2009
How to have sex while 5 children are in the house
Someone has finally figured out how to have intimate moments without fear of scaring the minds of your youth by having them accidentally walk in on mom and dad being gross. See this worksafe link for the details. Via BoingBoing.
- 1.25″ Polycarbonate Bulletproof Plating/Shielding
- Bio-Chemical Filtered Ventilation
- Rebreather
- Control Panel Mode Selection (i.e., Basic System Ops., Intruder Setting, Energy Status, Lock Down, etc.)
- Cover & Door Actuators w/ Emergency Release
- One way see through head cover (reflective mirror on 2 sides and front)
- Safety Features (Proximity Sensor, O2 Sensor, Smoke Det., Motion Det. Ect,)
- Emergency Communication system (Cellular, Short-wave Radio, CB ect.)
- Audio Amplifier (Amplify sound from out side unit)
- Air/Water Tight Sealing
- External Override Key Pad & Remote Control
- Battery Backup Power
- Toiletry system
Please remember the vasectomy campaign!
I like robots
I’m considering outsourcing
I just didn’t realize all the possibilities!
Report: Many U.S. Parents Outsourcing Child Care Overseas
I have been excited about outsourcing since I read about A.J. Jacobs outsourcing his life. I know I can do some of that! Read more.
WordPress Convert
Kari the Herbalist, of The Lifted Lorax Show fame, has moved from iweb to using WordPress! Head over to YurtTrash and check our her story and a very well designed blog.
As a reminder, my standard offer is that if you get yourself some inexpensive hosting, and want to setup a WordPress site, I will happily help you. If your site is personal, you can also find volunteers to help you install from install4free.
Teenage Boys Have It So Good Today!
I didn’t have anything like the online dressing room when I was a teen! I would have never left the house!
That’s probably not a worksafe link.
Loren Feldman Portraying a “Nice Guy”!
Oh, and he interviews Peter Semmelhack of Buglabs…
Note: The first time I saw Loren Feldman was on Seesmic and he hooked, lined, and sinkered the whole bunch into a series of angry videos that brought down the servers. I don’t usually get into this negative humor but I found it very amusing because in the first few seconds of his video I spoke aloud that "this guy is playing a character" and it was entertaining to see so many people invest themselves and their emotions into responding to him without seeing through the ruse. I could be wrong. Perhaps Feldman is just an angry ass. I have since seen him engage many of the tech celebrities such as Robert Scoble and their banters are amusing because reports have it that in person they are chummy. Many of us portray ourselves transparently on the web/blogosphere exactly how we are and who we are. Loren Feldman made me rethink this as perhaps Blogosphere1.0. As Hollywood loses ground to independent entertainment producers on the Internet, will Blogosphere2.0 be more people putting on masks and portraying characters online? As people in real life declare, "I saw you on the Internet and I can’t believe…" will you be able to respond, "oh, that’s just a character I play on the Internet!" That’s going to really screw with companies relying upon Google for background checks!
China and US at war
I said it was happening. Now CNN has caught on!
What is Seesmic?
Btw, I still have a few invites.
