Casey Chesnut has written a client for the Pocket PC Phone Edition that records your voice, shoots it off to a .NET Web Service running a speech recognition engine, and returns the results to your client. The best use of this is certainly for constrained input, not continuous speech recognition. Is there a killer app? The one that comes to mind is hands-free routing: a GPS still costs a few hundred bucks and inputting a destination is a pain, especially when driving. "I'm at mile 200 on route 50 in Nevada. How far to the gas station?" would be a pretty cool thing to be able to ask your phone.

Delightfully, Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox argues that voice interfaces are poor choices for the majority of applications. Compare and contrast.

Dot-com tell-all Website sued by former CEO. The ex-CEO of a now-defunct company for which I worked is trying to quash Fabian Gonzalez' iMind Parody Site for detailing how the company burned through $15M in investment while having employees share toilet-cleaning duty.

Substance abuse; first class plane tickets, five-star hotels and limos on a bottomless expense account; the presentation to the Chinese Ministry of Education that fell-through because the CEO flew to the wrong city (Beijing, Nanjing -- they all sound alike).

These stories are not in dispute, but the ex-CEO contends some other details on the site have caused him emotional distress. Gonzalez' site is alleged to have contributed to the collapse of another multimillion-dollar investment "opportunity" helmed by the ex-CEO and is being sued by both the CEO and the CEO's new company, so the deeper pockets are on the side of silencing the site. Visit it while you can and consider contributing to Gonzalez' legal defense fund.

Baby sleep aid says: "I hate you". "a Vancouver, Wash., family discovered that the toy they unsuspectingly attached to their son's crib utters the words "I hate you" amid the rhythmic ocean sounds designed to lull the baby asleep." Link Discuss (Thanks, Jeremy!) via [Boing Boing Blog]

This brings back fond memories of the time I spent 45 minutes on my college radio show trying to extract the phrase "Toke on a leaf for Satan" by playing "Stairway to Heaven" backwards. (If you're open to suggestion, you can hear it starting at "...there's a feeling I get...").

I guess this is a classic case of people with way too much time on their hands via [Lambda the Ultimate] by way of [Sam Gentile's Weblog]

Bacteria Memory. Scientists have successfully stored information into artificial DNA strands and injected them into bacteria that maintained the data by reproducing. via [The Daily Nugget]

So... has anyone done the obvious corollary to this and looked for a smiley face embedded in the human genome? 

Met with Serguei Dmitriev and Eugene Belyaev of JetBrains, the makers of IDEA, the best IDE for Java. I was trying to show them some of Marin, but just as we got to the ocean, it started pouring. "We're from Russia," they said, undeterred. We walked for, oh, 3 minutes before retreating to a bar in Sausalito. They're looking for star programmers.

The future is not objects

Managage code is language-neutral, right?  No!  Right now the CLI is very much tilted in favor of Object-Oriented languages (C++, C#, VB, Java).  This is fine for now, but looking around the computing landscape leads me to a hypothesis:

Hypothesis: The interesting programming models in the next three years are not going to be Object-Oriented in nature. 

There's just too much interest right now in other ways of doing things.  XML andWebServices for example are both non-OO at heart (heck, guys like Tim Ewald and Don Box have even been talking about the joys of weak typing).  This hypothesis is sort of academically interesting, but there is a corrollary:

Corrollary: The long-term success of the CLR may hinge on its ability to accomondate non-OO models of programming

and this is an interesting idea to me. So, Discuss.  Am I all wet?

[Managed Space]

No, you're perfectly dry; I ranted similarly the other day. Object-oriented imperative languages are a pragmatic sweet spot today, but there are other programming paradigms thare are known to be more productive in certain situations. Several of the most talked-about challenges of building applications today such as persistence strategies and "business rules" are fundamentally easier to solve non-imperatively. The history of visual form builders, which are a type of non-imperative programming, argues for your point -- the primacy of reflection in language and library design emerged largely because of the realization that visual form-builders had become a necessity. So while visual form-builders are layered on top of OOP, they fairly dramatically influenced language and library design. Some changes, though, such as new multiprocessing paradigms, will undoubtedly require evolution (or even revolution) of the CLR. I'd submit that Microsoft's behavior re Rotor compared to Sun's behavior re the Java Community Process is a much better strategy for evolving the fundamental substrate of their platform.

....Arguing whether keyword synchronized is better than keyword lock is all well and good, but it's irrelevant to why .NET is going to become the dominant platform for software development....: An article I posted to the DOTNET-CX mailing list today.

I'm trying to stretch the definition of "holiday season" over the weekend as an excuse for hacking up an xBack server for .NET that works with intermittently-connected Radio clients (the cool thing about Radio Userland is that it runs locally on your work machine and uploads static HTML pages to your generic server). Writing the server is easy enough (TrackBack uses REST, PingBack uses a single XML-RPC verb) but I'm trying to figure out how to incorporate the results into Radio Userland. I can't quite figure out what to do: I'm thinking I have to use a server-side include to combine the Radio Userland-generated HTML with the Trackback server data. Any other thoughts on how to transform:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<TrackBacks>
  <TargetURI>http://target.com/target.html</TargetURI>
  <References>
    <Reference>
       <ReferrerURI>http://referer.com/referenceToTarget.html</ReferrerURI>
       <Title>Response to target</Title>
       <Excerpt>I disagree with target...</Excerpt>
       <BlogName>Referer's Blog</BlogName>
    </Reference>
  </References>
</TrackBacks>

into HTML inside of Radio's production of target.html?

Friday Five

1. Do you wear any jewelry? What kind?

I wear my gold claddagh wedding ring.

2. How often do you wear it?

I only take it off when I'm swimming / diving.

3. Do you have any piercings? If so, where?

I have a pierced ear, but haven't worn an earring in years.

4. Do you have any tattoos? If so, where?

Nope. I like the sun too much to keep a tattoo in good condition. 

5. What are your plans for the weekend?

I'm going to work tomorrow and then on Sunday watch the Niners beat the Giants.

Why is pingback / trackback a good design? Why isn't the referer [sic] header the way to automatically track pages that link to you? I was thinking of writing a pingback server for .NET, but on closer look, it seems inelegant. I only had a few hours sleep last night / this morning -- the above is a link to my fuzzy thoughts on the matter. Design reviews requested.

P.S. Happy New Year!