Life Outside PLT1

Film Strip #2

Film Strip

Voicebot tester

As promised a debug build.

Fixed version

Use at own risk. No documentation, but I suggest looking in config.xml.

Cups of Brown Joy: Harney Teas, Black and White

For lack of content, it seemed like a good idea to post reviews of teas. We’ll begin what could become a series (if I bother) with a double-review.

Our two flavours are both from Harney Teas: Big Red Sun and Winter White Earl Grey. Big Red Sun is a bold black blend of Kenya and Ceylon, while Winter White Earl Grey is a subtle Chinese white tea with lemony bergamot. They represent an interesting contrast — in fact, two opposite ends of the tea spectrum — so I thought they would be a good way to sample Harney’s teas.

Continue reading Cups of Brown Joy: Harney Teas, Black and White…

Bringing star trek a little closer

Lectures are over for uni at the moment, so it’s that time of year again when I start doing work. Inspired from watching Iron Man the day it came out in NZ I decided to build my own voice powered bot.

I’m too lazy to write my own speech recognition engine, so I started using SAPI 5.3. But I’ve switched over to using the .NET 3.5 Speech library at the moment.

The hard part now is defining the formal grammar, as all it does now is check for “computer email” and opens up webmail for me. But given that dynamic grammars can hook directly into databases the possibilities are incredible.

Unfortunately I need to grab another 900MB SDK to quickly build these up. Otherwise I’d have to work with the w3c spec by hand. So I’ll leave it on hold for a bit until my XPS 1530 arrives (I don’t have 900MB of room left on my hdd…)

Also I need to think about how to map the resulting accept state into the list of actions to perform. Since currently I just know that I have an accept state, and the string, but what I really want to have is the list of states that I had to pass through to get there.

i.e it’s no good knowing that “computer fetch images from my documents”, what I want is something like:

computer -> fetch -> images -> from -> my documents
Not computer -> fetch -> images -> from -> my -> documents

as I’m too lazy to do a double parse.

That way I quickly build up some sort of structure for scripts, so that it can look for “computer fetch $1 from $2″ and just pass along the required variables.

Though since a week is a long time to wait I’ll write a speech to action program for unique speech strings on wednesday.

So to keep Mathew happy, since it can run an arbitary url you can in fact have “computer order ice cream” and it’ll work.

Shadowmoor in Lorwyn Block Constructed

Alright, so at time of writing, the Lakers are 2 games down against the Celtics; close games though, so maybe the home team advantage will work for the Lakers in the next 3.

Moving right along to Lorwyn block constructed with Shadowmoor…
While people were busy with Standard, munching on Quick’n’Toast and hating on Faeries, I was busy messing around with Vivids, Reflecting Pool, and Bitterblossom. Errr… The point being that Lorwyn has a lot of powerful cards that are pretty much defining Standard right now, and thus should have a heavy impact on Block constructed.
Continue reading Shadowmoor in Lorwyn Block Constructed…

I took one for the team

Guinness fudge. Do not attempt this.

It’s a sunny day outside

If i had my camera with me i think i would take a picture

Instead, I read online comic strips

Little Gamers

xkcd

Penny Arcade

Ctrl+Alt+Del

Dueling Analogs

A Softer World

Saturday Photoset

Total chaos as usual.
Food.
Nobody mention Hard Candy ever again.