Words, Parsing and Ads

I sent an email using GMail to someone today. After I sent the email, the next ad that was displayed by Google, was exactly on the topic that I had written the email about.
While I knew that the system does parse emails to display the appropriate ads - it was a tad surreal to see the ad so accurately reflect the content. (This wasn't a simple word matching, it was more complex than that.)

Risks

Thank you to a certain someone.

[If you don't know what I'm talking about - Don't ask me. I will not tell you.]

Another bike in the pool

We found another bike in the pool. Looks like this is becoming a Friday night ritual for someone or some group of people.

Speech Recognition update

Update:
The speech recognition thing works quite well. More training has helped it improve accuracy.

However, there is one issue that needs to be fixed before I can have it replace typing for large text entry. The fact that it is slow.
I can type (and hence input data) faster than it takes to listen to my voice (which has to be at a controlled pitch and speed) and then transcribe it totext.

Also, I find that I'm not used to dictating stuff to my computer and hence end up with lots of junk input in addition to the main text. Typing is more focused and controlled input of data in my case.

Speech Recognition!

So last night, I was talking to a friend and I began to wonder why my computer could not convert speech to text. So today after school, I came home and looked up online to see if the Linux operating system had any utilities that would allow me to do this. While looking around online, I saw (to my surprise) multiple entries pointing to the fact that Windows XP and Office 2003 seem to have some sort of dictation software.

Since I had Office 2003 professional on my machine, I went to take a look to see if the I had the software utility installed. After about 10 minutes of poking around the innards of my computer, I realized that I could indeed get this thing to work.

Once I got the software installed, I spent a couple of minutes (about 20 minutes in all) training the package to understand my voice. Because of the fact that I am not a native English speaker the package takes longer than usual to understand my pronunciation of some of the words. For some reason it seems to think of the word 'package' as packet, and packet as 'kicked'. I obviously need to train this package some more so that it can understand me better.

Oh, and a thank you to Amy, for introducing me to a project ;) that convinced me to go look up speech recognition from my computer to prevent me from having to type out pages and pages and pages of text.

It may be that further posts on this web site will be powered by speech recognition. Let’s see what happens.

The above post was composed using the dictation feature, then formatted and edited before I posted it here. To demonstrate how accurate (or not) the software package was with about 20 minutes of training, I have enclosed the raw text generated by the software below. Take a look, I'm rather impressed with the quality.

---

So last night I was talking to a friend and I began to wonder why my computer could not convert speech to text Saturday after school I came home and looked up to see if the linux operating system had any utilities that would allow me to do this while looking around on the day of useful runs as a multiple entries pointing to the fact that the news expert and office 2003 seem to have some sort of dictation software

Since I had office 2003 perfection of on my machine I went to take a look at if I had the senior treaty install . after about ten minutes of poking around that he notes off my computer and realized that I could indeed get this thing to work


Once I got the package installed I have spent a couple of minutes training the packets to understand my voice
because of the fact that I am not a native English speaker the packets take longer than usual to understand my pronunciation of some of the words. . For some reason it seems to think of the word package has been kicked

I obviously need to train this packet some more so that it can understand what is better or for the first 30 minutes I think this is doing pretty well
The law PCI and each time a friend using major project which required me to go look up speech recognition from my computer to prevent me from having to type out pages and pages and pages of text will obviously using me introducing me, it may be free to post on this web site will be powered by speech recognition. Let’s see what happens.

Bikes, chairs and swimming pools

We found a bike and two chairs in the pool of our apartment complex over the weekend.
While we didn't hear/see the folks responsible for this, one of our neighbors reported hearing people making a lot of noise the night before. Perhaps the drunken revelry lead to an idea about a new place to store your bike.

Happy Diwali

Happy Diwali folks!

(See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diwali if you want to read a bit about
Diwali)

From "Tips and Tweaks" to Techbite

Steve Bass - the author of the technology column (Hassle-Free PC) and blog (Tips and Tweaks) has left the organization that he used to work for.

Steve wrote the Tips and Tweaks News letter - a source that has given me quite a few pointers to nifty tips and utilities. Before this he used to write the Home & Home Office column. He was also the founder of PIBMUG (www.pibmug.com). Search this blog itself for a couple of entries/posts which are courtesy of Steve's blog/column. If I've ever shown you the little program on my pc that simulates a martian surface flyby- that program is courtesy Steve from one of his newsletters.

As one of the first writers that I encountered when venturing into the WWW some ~7 years ago, I've been following his column and blog for a while now. I enjoy his writing style and personal touch to the column, a trait missing in many other technical writers.
Steve will now be starting his own column at Techbite (www.techbite.com).

If you were a follower of the Tips and Tweaks blog or the newsletter, hop on over to Techbite, where Steve will be continuing to run his weekly newsletter.

Original Tips and Tweaks : http://www.pcworld.com/blogs/id,43/steve_basss_tips_and_tweaks.html

Techbite: http://www.techbite.com/

Chocolate Chip muffins

I made some chocolate chip muffins today. They came out pretty good.

VNC, firewalls and iptables

VNC requires port 5900+display_number to be open through the firewall.
For eg: for vnc display on :1, you need port 5901 open.

vnc displays are found to be at server.example.com:PortNumber

Or look in your .vnc folder for an entry that states example.com:X.pid
(where X denotes the display number)

[The following requires root (or sudo) privileges]
---
1. Add rule to firewall by adding the following rule into your iptables
script:

-A RH-Firewall-1-INPUT -m state --state NEW -m tcp -p tcp --dport
5900:5906 -j ACCEPT

[This opens ports 5900-5906 through the firewall for the tcp protocol]

2 .Then restart the iptables daemon using the command :

service iptables restart

Now you should be good to go. Connect into vnc using vncviewer or a
program such as RealVNC or TightVNC
---
For fedora 9,
iptables is a textfile at /etc/sysconfig/iptables
service is an shell script at /sbin/service

Ubuntu 7 (Gutsy Gibbon)
- implements iptables as an executable. ( located at /sbin/iptables )
Run the command, by prefixing 'sudo iptables' in front of the -A
command, and remove the string RF-Firewall-1-INPUT and replace it with
the string INPUT
eg: sudo iptables -A -INPUT blah blah blah

The Ubuntu community has a set of nice guides which should be helpful.

The main HOWTO: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/IptablesHowTo
Ubuntu Forum guides :
BASIC :http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=159661
ADVANCED_USERS : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=668148

Future Spam

Spam creators have apparently found out how to send messages across time. On

Thu October 02, 2008 07:07 PM CST, I have emails with Saturday, Oct-4 as the timestamp.

:P

Boilerplate responses

I'm a fan of having a boilerplate (otherwise called template) response available when multiple people ask you the same question again and again and again. I am however against form letters that don't give you any useful information. I believe a template letter can do the job, IF it provides some useful information.

I found one such template recently and enjoyed it. This template is to be used for responding to people who come up with their latest idea of "How to solve the Spam problem". Fill in the appropriate sections with a X and you are ready to go.

----
Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) $BigCorporation will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) $PopularEmailClient

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, $expletive ! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

Medium Sea Green

you are mediumseagreen #3CB371

Your dominant hues are cyan and green. Although you definately strive to be logical you care about people and know there's a time and place for thinking emotionally. Your head rules most things but your heart rules others, and getting them to meet in the middle takes a lot of your energy some days. Your saturation level is medium - You're not the most decisive go-getter, but you can get a job done when it's required of you. You probably don't think the world can change for you and don't want to spend too much effort trying to force it. Your outlook on life is brighter than most people's. You like the idea of influencing things for the better and find hope in situations where others might give up. You're not exactly a bouncy sunshine but things in your world generally look up.

the spacefem.com html color quiz

Reciprocative Communication

Its a new communication strategy. Its simple in concept - Person A keeps in touch with Person B to the amount that Person B keeps in touch with Person A.

It works because it requires that both people put in the same amount (or lack of) effort to stay in touch. If the one person doesn't put in an equivalent effort in keeping in touch, why should the other person have to carry the load ?

Perhaps I should try this out. There are some people I know who never seem to be interested in keeping in touch from an 'initiate a conversation' angle.

So lets see how this goes shall we?

Computers cannot score essays (yet!)

Computers cannot and should not be used to score/grade an essay. At least for the current state of art, this is a fact. 10 years from now this post of mine might be ridiculous.

With the current state of art, if you depend on a computer algorithm to grade people's writing skills, you are making a big mistake.

Here's [yarnsoftheheart.com] one person's account of her experiences with an 'online essay scoring system'.

Read the 'essay' that was scored and the score that the system assigned to it. If you were the teacher grading that essay, would you give it the same score ? If you have a child going to a school that uses something like this to grade essays, you may want to have a talk with the teacher.

[via Kem's Utterly Merciless Guide to Essay Writing]

Busy tuesdays

With the new semester is fully underway, my Tuesday schedule seems to be the most solid booked of the lot.

Here's what it looks like at the moment:
Group Meeting : T 1200p-0200p
TA.Lab : T 0200p-0350p
Advisor Meeting : T 0400p-0500p

Without anything else, I'm booked solid every Tuesday from 12-5.

Add in the fact that I'm the department representative to the Graduate Student Council this year, and every 1st and3rd Tuesday of the month, my Tuesday stretches to 6:15pm. [The GSC meets 5:15p-6:15p ]

Should be interesting to see how this works out.

Random Win

Last night, I randomly decided to go to a graduate student mix-and-mingle event organized by the nice people at AGOSS (Adult, Graduate & Off Campus Student Services - part of the Offices of the Dean of Student Life)

There was a game of bingo in it, and believe it or not, but I won!
This is probably the first time I won something at one of these 'for-fun' events! :)

So what did I win? well, if you are reading this blog - you should have already heard about it from me. :)

If you haven't heard about it, then that should be an indication that you don't keep in touch enough.

Bugs

I stumbled across some interesting definitions of bugs on catb.org
--
schroedinbug: /shrohdinbuhg/, n.

[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for years.

mandelbug: /man�del�buhg/, n.

[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a heisenbug.

Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/, n.

[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug;

heisenbug: /hi:�zen�buhg/, n.

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug;
--
See more at The Jargon File at http://www.catb.org/jargon/

Clock Radio

I bought a clock/radio gadget. Not a simple one, a rather fancy one ;) Its got 21 different (independent) alarm settings, a nap timer, USB power out (for an external gadget that might need USB power) and more.

Now let's see if it can manage to get me up on time everyday.

You can see the site I bought it from and all the specs on this device from here [thinkgeek.com]

Cows point North ?

Apparently, cows have built in compasses. They can sense the magnetic North.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/2623809/Cows-point-north-thanks-to-in-built-compasses.html