rwandering.net
The blogged wandering of Robert W. Anderson
Archive for April, 2009
April 29, 2009 at 9:12 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
Ironically, this message is intended for those who won’t find it in their feed reader.
I had hoped the transition to rwandering.net would be mostly automatic, but it seems that many feed readers ignore the “permanent” in the 301 redirect. That is, they are happy to redirect but ignore the fact that the feed URL changed. So when the old feed stops redirecting, b’bye.
The feed for this blog is http://feeds.rwandering.net/rwanderingMain.
I am making this statement for completeness.
April 17, 2009 at 9:50 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
We had a call this morning with Giles Thomas and Glenn Jones of Resolver Systems. They demonstrated Resolver One running on the Digipede Network.
They used my IronPython Worker sample and customized the front-end Python code, leaving the C# adapter as-is. With very little coding they had an elegant grid-enabled spreadsheet. Try doing that with a spreadsheet or grid that isn’t based on .NET . . .
Giles said they will have support for this in Resolver One 1.5, coming out in the next couple of weeks.
Very cool.
I’ve just installed Resolver One to take a closer look. Already I’m impressed, but I’ll leave that for a future post.
Tags: Digipede, Excel, IronPython, Python, ResolverOne
April 16, 2009 at 5:08 pm · Filed under .NET, Miscellaneous
This is a public service announcement to release engineers and developers out there.
Your installers — and core components for that matter — shouldn’t be performing checks that preclude new versions of Windows.
This is particularly relevant with a new version of Windows coming soon. In fact, I’m writing this because recently someone told me that his team’s software wouldn’t install on Windows 7. The release engineer fixed it by increasing the high version limit.
That is the wrong approach.
The right approach is to eliminate any upper bound on a version limit. The premise is that developers shouldn’t assume that their software won’t work on future versions of Windows.
Windows Logo requirements have required this for some time, and in fact there is a certification test called the HighVersionLie that tests for just this case. The test sets the Windows version to an artificially high number to see if the tested software still installs and runs.
BTW: One reader from Microsoft told me a similar story at last year’s PDC – this posting was prompted by a different conversation altogether.
Tags: HighVersionLie, Windows, Windows7
April 13, 2009 at 9:14 am · Filed under Miscellaneous, Web 2.0
I use speech recognition a great deal – and I recently switched to Windows Speech Recognition on Vista. And I’ve been using Chrome exclusively for Google Apps, because I think it offers superior performance for JavaScript apps.
Unfortunately, Chrome doesn’t support WSR. According to Rob Chambers this would be easy for Google to do, and I suspect it is just an oversight on their part (both in terms of making their software more accessible as well as following Windows best practices).
Google: when are you going to put the effort into this? The Chrome 2.0 Beta doesn’t do it either.
Rob Chambers: how easy is this really? You also said that Firefox does support WSR – maybe it does, but not in Google Docs.
So now, I’m using IE8. Google Docs with WSR works great there.
Tags: Chrome, Firefox, Google, IE, IE8, Microsoft, WSR
April 9, 2009 at 8:15 am · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am migrating this blog from http://et.cairene.net to http://rwandering.net.
This should be transparent, but if I lose you in the process, you’ll know why.
Tags: blog
April 6, 2009 at 6:31 am · Filed under .NET, Grid Computing
. . . or IronPython-ipede (Part II).
I have been playing with IronPython a little. With the release of Digipede Network 2.2, I am now able to post the sample I wrote. It shows how to distribute IronPython objects on the Digipede Network. You can find it on the Digipede community site. See the posting there for details and download instructions.
The sample uses IronPython 2.0.1 and the included version of the Microsoft Dynamic Language Runtime (DLR). While I focused on IronPython in this sample, it would be pretty easy to expand it to support other DLR-based languages.
Comments welcome. I am specifically interested in feedback on DLR integration and initializing ScriptScope objects for each worker thread. It seems that I should be able to do some of this only once at global scope.
By the way, one thing I like about this sample is that it shows how to keep user code completely de-coupled from the Digipede Network while still taking advantage of our deployment and payload distribution model. This has always been supported by the Digipede Network, and this makes a good example.
Tags: .NET, Digipede, DLR, IronPython, Python
April 1, 2009 at 1:57 pm · Filed under Miscellaneous
I am a heavy user of speech recognition technology. I find that I can write faster than typing (and I have a reputation for being a fast typist).
I have been using Dragon NaturallySpeaking for several years now. Every new edition has gotten a little bit better. And I’ve found it quite useful except that the last two versions have tended to get corrupted databases. And now, I will very commonly get some error that causes it to lock up. I have found that it tends to fail if I switch around between different applications.
Of course, I am an avid multitasker, so these errors has become really irritating, and essentially stopped me from using voice recognition. I just can’t commit to staying in a single application for very long.
Today, I started using the speech recognition built into Vista. While I am struggling a little bit with differences in the verbal commands,I am already sold. Why?
- It feels much faster.
- I can switch between applications with no problems.
- The recognition engine is doing a terrific job with very little training.
I know that while I continue to use this I may come up with some problems, but so far I’m blown away.
Plus, Vista doesn’t try to sell me things through its auto-update feature.
Tags: Dragon, Speech, Vista, WSR
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