Even today, voice recognition is poor enough that I’ve often wondered how we it would ever enter every day use. Plus, I couldn’t see us all sitting there in an office, or on a bus, or at the coffee shop talking to our computers. It’s noisy and you look really silly, just like when you use a bluetooth headset.

For voice recognition it’s got to solve a specific problem, not just be a fun demo and/or neat concept. Mice solved the issue that GUIs had too many function combinations for a person to remember (hey WordPerfect ALT+SHIFT+F8 I’m looking at you). The touch screen solved the problem of a lack of a keyboard. Which problem is voice recognition 1.0 solve first?

Recently I had two experiences that I think shows how this evolution will happen.

I had a the fortune to get some free upgrades and the fancy cars I rented had bluetooth phone links, which is easier than using a headset. The Volvo allowed me to voice dial using Siri, whereas the Volkswagen made me use the car’s built-in voice system. Oscar Mike Foxtrot: going from Siri to Volkswagen was excruciating. In my opinion, Siri is now easier to use than dialing with hands. Despite the inevitable typos it’s still quicker to have a couple of goes at dialing than fiddling around with a dial pad or list of text messages.

A few days later I was browsing the news over breakfast when I came across an article I wanted to tweet with a comment. Doing this with one of my kids on my lap and a cup of espresso in my hand was really hard. I would have loved to have spoken the commentary out loud and felt the urge to use Siri once again. That’s a killer sign the app is working. I didn’t do so only because I was on my MacBook and not on my iPhone but I would have if I could have.

Siri still needs a lot of work, especially if you don’t speak American (I’m from the UK), but it’s clearly now usable enough for folks like Apple to spend millions on improving it, and for others to spend even more making their own versions. We’re on our way.

For instance, I saw a tweet about the new Tesla S going on show and headed off to the Tesla site to enjoy these beautiful machines. On the page where you get to actually build your own Tesla (yes! my Tesla! and I built it! pity I can’t buy it…) I saw this:

Yeah, that’s right: battery size has replaced engine size. Instead of “3.5 liter” it now says “85 kWh”. Maybe my kids will hear about petrol engine sizes and wonder what they mean like I used to hear about old (British) money and wonder what a tuppenny-bit or a half-crown was.

I for one love living in the future.

Enjoy!

These photos were taken during the filming of the new Eurofighter Typhoon jet from the back of a Hercules C-130 transport aircraft (why?).

Apparently they asked the pilot “How much closer can you get?” Quite close as it turns out….

Source: Major HH.

So far the phone is highly recommended. I just wish Motorola sorts out at least the Ugly list real soon.

Enjoy!

The Great

• Boy it’s fast! I wonder how much faster on 2.2?
• It basically works – no crashes, no hangs, no dropped calls (but see bug list)
• Decent processor means even when running stuff in the background little noticeable pauses or slow downs
• Nice large screen (not as hires as a retina but still very nice)
• Regular on screen keyboard way easier to use on larger screen
• App store doesn’t feel like i’m missing all my favorite apps any more (‘cept Netflix!!)
• installed 40 apps on the phone in no time and with very little slow down
• It’s Verizon!

The Good

• Loads of very nice smart improvements over my N-1:
  1. smart power: turn off power after 15 mins of no use but only at night (why not 15 mins of no move too?)
  2. smart vibrate: place the phone face down and it automatically goes to vibrate mode
  3. automail and quick upload of clips & pics is a big time saver
  4. speed dial: hold down a number and it dials (just like regular cell phones)
  5. dial pad autoshow for things like service numbers
• Loud speaker, good for playing music and hearing the phone from another room
• Surprisingly light, it feels less hefty than my N-1
• It’s not as big as the reviews make out
• Great noise cancellation
• Google Voice is just marvelous
• 720p HD video
• Bright flash
• LED flash is actually a very usable flashlight
• Bulge at back may look ugly but gives it a pleasant angle when using on a flat surface
• Cool hdmi output handy for family events and watching stuff like netflix (when it gets here)
• Car dock works like a real car dock
• it goes into a full driving mode and works like a Garmin
• FM Radio
• Swype keyboard as standard
• Deskstand turns phone into a nice alarm clock automatically
• The Motorola widgets are useful (things like speed dial on the desktop)
• Nice soft back
• Fast bootup vs N-1

Niggle List

• I don’t like the real buttons. I know it’s silly but N-1 screen buttons are nicer. Maybe I just got used to them?
• Would be lovely to hook up a bluetooth keyb & mouse, and pump out via the hdmi
• Standard screen protector only covers display area and not the whole front, giving a sharp edge and some glass exposed to keys, scratches, etc.
• Radio doesn’t work unless headphones are plugged in (must be the aerial)
• Google N-1 seems to have a slicker interface, for instance the scrolling app page
• Would love to see a rotate lock switch

The Bad

• Universal inbox now has all your twitter & facebook sH*t in it
• Already some scratching on the back!
• No front camera
• Dial assist puts an ugly icon up top
• It’s 2.1, not 2.2 (froyo)
• No flash player available yet
• Connectors aren’t really made for seamless docking
• You still have to have a gmail account (but you can configure it so you don’t really know)
• Rear camera has the inside a swimming pool signature cellphone pic effect
• Autoupload of pics doesn’t work very well
• No netflix or hulu plus apps yet
• Camera use is unintuitive, still can’t figure out how to take a pic on demand reliably
• We saw some weird contrast issues, for example yelp front page and the wallpaper app scroll buttons

The Ugly

• The only options for picture source in address book are Twitter or Facebook. Drives me crazy when some silly Facebook pic pops up when a buddy calls me.
• When looking for an address the filters (by account) don’t stick between uses. As the address book is now cluttered with all your Twitter & Facebook friends, this is a big deal
• Cancel/ok button wrong way round on account setup, resulting in too many times you press the button that everywhere else means OK but in this case means Cancel. Especially irritating it’s on this screen as you’ve just painstakingly tapped out a password using your keyboard.
• $20 a month for mobile hotspot
• why???
• One email notification icon per inbox! Why not one for the universal box only
• No easy way for me to sync with itunes music and iphoto pics (but we knew that right?)
• Crazy power cord for docking station which takes up 2-3 plugs if you’re using a power strip, it’s the most insane design I’ve ever seen for a power adapter

First there is the iPhone. Over the two years I’m likely to be an owner it’s going to cost me about $1750 in extra data fees + the original price. And it doesn’t work as a phone. Pretty much 75% of the time I’m on a voice call for more than 10 minutes it drops the call. I don’t live in a big city, I live in Kansas City (the biggest small town there is) yet they can’t even make it work as a phone.

Then there is the iPhone store. You can buy Mein Kampf and an app that provides you with soft core pornography but not an app showing (very flattering) bobble heads of your members of Congress or a better version of the mail program. The very idea that you can review and approve each app is so out of tune with today’s web it’s just silly.

And now I’m onto iTunes and the Apple TV. At last, after several years, there is some decent content on the iTunes store: Star Trek, Up, free Sesame Street programs, etc. And here I am baby-sitting my two kids while the wife has an afternoon’s R&R. So you know, I’d like to watch some cartoons with them. Let’s drop $20 on the HD version of UP.

Most movies download a bit and you can start to watch them immediately. This was the case with UP but when I started to watch, it said I “wasn’t authorized to watch this content”. Hrm. A few Google searches suggest I should restart my unit, so I did. Now it’s 3 hours from being ‘ready to watch’.

What god-forsaken moron decided it should work this way? Why doesn’t it just fricking work? This is an Apple unit. You charge me 2x to 3x what everyone else does but it Just Works. If it doesn’t Just Work, then it’s called Windows or Dell or something like that.

If you don’t get your sh*t together you lose your value proposition. Get your sh*t together, please Apple, before you become just like the others. And send someone round here right now to keep my boys happy as they’ve got nothing to watch right now.

Grrrr…..

* “The Steve Club”: you pay $395 every month to Apple and they send you one of everything.

UPDATE: I’ve been inundated with the latest Apple Fail example: they won’t repair computers used by smokers due to claimed OHSA violations.

After a lot of digging around I solved the issue by getting off FileVault. I travel a lot and don’t want somebody to be able to get all my data when the inevitable happens and I lose my laptop. I’m not certain whether it’s my machine (I didn’t do a clean install for Snow Leopard) or 10.6(.1) itself. Either way, even if I created a new user with FileVault I saw stuck processes, without FileVault they are very rare.

Sharing with the world in case you too are in this boat.

PS: Yes, I did run Disk Utility and fix preferences both before & after install. SMARTD is showing no problems either.

There’s plenty of stuff on Google, all of which says you have to set the options correctly. The most useful article I found was Oleg Andrev’s post of June 21st (with credit to an original article by Jared McFarland that did the heavy lifting). This didn’t work though as the provided options just weren’t getting through to the configurator.

The solution for us was to install the gem by hand using these instructions. And guess what, it worked! We had a few errors that I’m going to ignore for now. 7 out of 110 tests in test.rb fail but it does say these test cases were developed on Linux.

root# ruby ./test.rb -- localhost root Loaded suite ./test Started .........................................................FFF................F...F.....F.............F......... Finished in 0.486475 seconds.
1) Failure:
 test_fetch_bigint(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:799]:
 expected but was
 .
2) Failure:
 test_fetch_bigint_unsigned(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:812]:
 expected but was
 .
3) Failure:
 test_fetch_binary(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:1009]:
 expected but was
 .
4) Failure:
 test_fetch_mediumint(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:734]:
 expected but was
 .
5) Failure:
 test_fetch_smallint(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:703]:
 expected but was
 .
6) Failure:
 test_fetch_tinyint(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:672]:
 expected but was
 .
7) Failure:
 test_sqlstate(TC_MysqlStmt2) [./test.rb:1280]:
 expected but was
 .
110 tests, 330 assertions, 7 failures, 0 errors

We also saw warnings in the time_inspect and time_to_s functions about expecting integers and getting long integers:

 mysql.c: In function 'time_inspect':
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%04d' expects type 'int', but argument 5 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 6 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 7 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 8 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 9 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1708: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 10 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c: In function 'time_to_s':
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%04d' expects type 'int', but argument 5 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 6 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 7 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 8 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 9 has type 'long int'
  mysql.c:1721: warning: format '%02d' expects type 'int', but argument 10 has type 'long int'

I hope this saves you a few hours. It’s crazy that such a basic thing as the mysql gem isn’t working in the Snow Leopard preview. It’s not like OSX coders are averse to a bit of Ruby.

Thank-you guys. A special thanks to Jimmy.

There’s only one problem with all of this: all these plugins allow relatively inexperienced coders like me to try and do stuff. I’ve been coding since I was a boy, but haven’t been paid to write code since I became a manager 11 years ago. I like to dabble with coding projects in my free time and I hate to read manuals, and together this isn’t a good combination. My only comfort is I know there are a lot of us out there who hate to RTFM.

Which leads me to a frustrating afternoon spent trying to implement the imgpreview plugin. I applied to my little project and kept getting some utterly unintelligible error messages (so a is undefined, now what?). I tried the usual (Google – 1 hit with no answer), dug up a non-minified version of the plugin (error messages said it couldn’t find the block I was pointing it at) and downgrading my copy of jQuery to 1.3.1 (still no results), I decided to go back to basics and implement a simplified version of Jimmy’s demo. Aaaand still, no dice.

By this point I knew I was doing something really, really dumb. As anyone who has programmed for more than a few years knows, there are only two paths to true enlightenment and I switched from random to methodical trial-and-error to find my problem: I had to declare the jscript after my block, not before.

BAD

$(‘ul#first a’).imgPreview();
«/script>

• The Sun
• New York
• Office Meeting
• A Beach
• Global Technology

GOOD



• The Sun
• New York
• Office Meeting
• A Beach
• Global Technology

$(‘ul#first a’).imgPreview();
«/script>

By now I expect anyone with more than a few weeks of javascript experience will have stopped reading so I don’t expect any of the usual snorting and/or condescension. I felt pretty dumb and decided to pay my penance by writing up this ID-10T error for any poor souls following in my footsteps.

Apples Grocers

Sometimes you want to keep all the children records when you delete a parent. When this happens ActiveRecord tries to insert NULL into the parent ID field of your now orphaned children records and MySQL will do one of two things:

* In STRICT mode: reject the change as the field has a NULL value in it
* Otherwise, attempt to set it to some sane value, in this case the DEFAULT value

If you are using MySQL 5.1.24 thru 5.1.31 then the destroy action in this scenario will never work as the system is effectively in strict mode all of the time due to a fix introduced in version 5.1.24 for bug #33699. The change was rolled back with release 5.1.32. Version 5.1.30 was a general release (11/14/2008) and is the most likely version you’ll have problems with.

Lots of people complained about this and generally rolled back to the latest version of 5.0.