Dragon test run

HelloI am testing Dragon NaturallySpeaking with the new microphone. So far it looks like it might be working okay. Although it's too soon to tell. I'm speaking particularly quickly this time. I hope that Dragon NaturallySpeaking will be able to keep up with me. There have been two errors so far. I hope this isn't a trend.

Hello (again). I'd like to talk to you today about spam. Spam is some kind of luncheon meat. I'm not entirely sure what it's composed of. I've been told it's composed of spiced ham and meat although this is only a rumor. I've only managed to taste it once and I haven't been impressed. It's not that I thought it tasted bad it's that I didn't think it tasted much like anything. I have always liked ingredients with strong taste. I like things like onions and strong cheddar and spiced turkey breast and hot pickles with maybe a gherkin as a side dish and some sour balls for dessert. I guess I like the feel of a nuclear explosion in my mouth.


While we're not on the topic I'd like to change the subject to which ingredients go best in sandwiches. My personal fav is old cheddar, mayonnaise, cucumber and tomato. If I can be bothered I sometimes chop up some onions and throw them in there as well as sometimes some spicy hot pickles. I used to make the same sort of sandwich but add in some lettuce. I've slowly been coming to the conclusion that lettuce in sandwiches is just a waste of space. It doesn't really offer much in terms of flavor and while it's true that it does create a pleasent crunchy texture you can get much the same effect with cucumbers.

One thing I can't understand is why anyone would put cheese and meat in the same sandwich. In my opinion a sandwich should based on one or the other. Tthey are both superstar ingredients. Both cheese and meat deserve their own show; they deserve to have other ingredients bask in their glory. To put both in the same sandwich is doing both a disservice. First of all they don't go particularly well together. Both meat and cheese have similar textures and basic tastes. Unless you're meat is salami and cheese is Swiss then I can see that. The worst combination is ham and mild cheddar. If you do that you might as well just shoot yourself or use spam.

The worst damage I've ever made is one that use plain white bread with butter and mild cheddar. That's absolutely completely unpleasant. I'm pretty sure that sandwiches classified as a torture device under the Geneva Convention.

Anyway, this concludes my test of Dragon NaturallySpeaking with a new microphone.

New USB microphone: Plantronics 655

Wait a moment, I never told you about which microphone I got.

So when you get Dragon NaturallySpeaking you get a free microphone in the box. I really like this microphone as it's free and I only had to pay $100 for Dragon to get it. As a rule, free stuff you get with other stuff you have to pay for is good. The best place to make use of this philosophy is at a convention where you get a whole bag of free stuff for going to the thing you had to pay for which you can then throw at people you went with and sometimes they even give it back which is all good but I digress.

After buying Dragon NaturallySpeaking I started to use Skype quite a bit. I used my Dragon NaturallySpeaking headset with Skype. If I could digress once again I'd like to point out that anyone who's not using a headset of some sort when talking with Skype is inflicting terrible pain on the other person. Whereas the person with the headset is producing beautiful, CD-quality audio without any background noise but I was not using the headset is creating an echo chamber full of background chatter, claiming pots and pans any inevitable crying baby noises.

Okay, now what was I talking about again? Oh yes, my old headset with intent to use that as a lead-in to my new headset. Well, that kind of went off the rails. Man, you'd think I'd be able to fix all this by editing it after I dictated it. Too bad Dragon is dictating this in "pen mode" and I don't want to leave any whiteout on my screen. Oh well.

So anyway, Skype got me addicted to headsets and I started to use it more and more often. Then Starcraft II came along and my life would never be the same again. You see, I play Starcraft II with a friend over Skype. This is great but the Dragon headset really isn't up to the task. For one thing it only has a speaker for one ear. For another it seems to be meant for someone with a really skinny head. After a few hours of playing it becomes extremely uncomfortable. So I went out and got myself a good, new, stereo headset.

What I got was a sort of middle middle-of-the-road Plantronics 655 USB headset. My intention was to use this headset for games and for dictating to Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Also keep in mind that my friend Guillaume had written a very nice article explaining how to purchase a headset for use with Dragon. As a result I also got a stereo, noise reducing, USB headset.

So far, it's worked quite nicely for both Starcraft II and Dragon. Having the full stereo headset makes a huge change for Starcraft II. I can hear a pin drop and can drop a siege tank on the poor SCV that dropped it. I can also dictate to Dragon NaturallySpeaking very nicely too. The headset also works nicely when listening to music and has two little buttons on the side of the earpiece that can control the sound volume.

The microphone is not bad. The recording is buzz free although it does pick up more background noise then I would like. It doesn't seem to pick up more than my old headset but I guess I was hoping that the noise cancellation feature would do miracles.

When used as a pair of headphone headphone, one thing that's so good it's almost creepy is that there's no buzzing. Usually a headset plugged into the stereo mini jack on the computer will create a tiny background hum or hiss all the time. This is typically because the audio card on the machine isn't perfectly isolated from all the electrical noise coming from inside the computer. Because this is a USB headset, however, there is none of that. It sounds as if the headphones are not plugged in if the computer is not playing any sound.

Now, if you're looking for super amazing sound quality then you might want to look elsewhere. I say "might" because I really don't know if they're any good or not. I don't have any fancy equipment at my disposal to test with and I don't have a golden ear either. All I know is pretty much matches what I've come to expect from full ear headphones.

The headphones also don't isolate you from noises in the room very much at all. It's got to be the least sound isolation I've had from a full-ear headset. I'm not sure this is a good thing or a bad thing. It would probably be a good thing if you're working in an office and somebody wanted to interrupt you. It's probably a bad thing if you're working in an office and you don't want to be interrupted. At least I'm aware of how loud I'm talking into the microphone.

The last minor quibble I have is that my standard speakers don't work with the headset plugged in. This means I'm forever unplugging the USB headset in order to switch to my regular speakers and back. My original headset used a typical stereo mini jack and I have two of those on my machine so I could keep the headset constantly plugged in and still play audio through the speakers. I just wish there was an easy way to flip the audio without unplugging the headset or going into the windows sound control panel and switching the default sound output device. Maybe some sort of keyboard shortcut? Hum, I'll have to look into that.

(OMG it works with skype!)

Links ahoy

Yeah, I haven't said anything in a while. The reason: Starcraft II. It's highly addictive. So, while I'm playing my way through the campaign here are a few web pages I've found interesting:


Jeef Atwood's posted on the latest developments when it comes to SSDs. Apparently, they've gotten cheaper and faster. Ah but who's the fastest?
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-state-hard-drives.html

xkcd's worried that the windmills will kill us all.
http://xkcd.com/556/

.. and my good buddy Guillaume's posted his take on how to get the most out of Dragon Naturally speaking. You don't have dragon? You should. :-)
http://blog.gmarceau.qc.ca/2010/09/dictate-to-your-computer-like-pro.html

Also... did I mention starcraft II?

Dialog Boxes

Dialogs suck. They rudely jump in your face, block you from doing anything else, can be cryptic and are often just plain pointless. When a dialog comes up users (that includes myself) want to make it go away as fast as possible. It is the computer equivalent to wack-a-mole. As a result nobody is really interested in what the dialog is trying to say.

When a dialog pops up in front of a typical user they will start looking for the fastest way of making the dialog go away. The easiest thing to do is look at the buttons first. If the buttons are labeled "Save", "Don't Save" and "Cancel" then you really don't need to read the rest. It's a save confirmation dialog so press save if you need to do that, "don't save" if you don't and cancel if you were really trying to do something else. Labeling dialog buttons with what they do is excellent practice.

(This isn't the standard windows buttons order but otherwise a fine example)

Even if you don't buy the speed argument, putting the actions on the buttons themselves can help the user decode the rest of the dialog text. Example: A dialog with the text "The pliny has splonged the wirly. A momi is required." with "Get Moni Now" and "Get Moni Later" buttons is probably asking whether we'd like to do something now or a delay it until a little later. This isn't the best dialog because it's not clear what the consequences of the actions are but it's nice to see we can continue our work without getting a moni right away. Hopefully the pliny can limp along with a splonged wirly until then.

If the dialog has two buttons "Yes" and "No" then the user has to read the dialog text to find out what to do next. You can make this even worse by asking the user a question in the dialog text that doesn't require a yes/no answer. "Do you want to save or discard?" with "Yes" and "No" buttons, for example. That is not a yes or no question! You forfeit the rest of your questions! Again, labeling the buttons with the actions the user can take can avoid this class of error.

(Consider which options to put in a dialog carefully. 3 buttons is plenty. Don't be WinSCP.)

If the dialog text is incomprehensible the user starts to cast about looking for clues. This includes reading your dialog's title. Most of the time a dialog boxes' title is not that informative so the next thing the user tries to do is close the dialog with the close box. The idea here is the the close box essentially maps to cancel and so "canceling" whatever the dialog box is talking about is usually a safe action. Knowing this don't go and disable the close box action. That's like removing a panic button and replacing it with a profiterole.

So there you have it: a user will tend to look at the buttons first, then read the text then start looking for clues in the dialog title. They read them backwards I tells ya!

Undefined C programs and Game Loops

If you're in the habit of using C (and who isn't), you'll want to read this. It's a fantastic description of all sorts of way you can write programs with undefined behaviours in C. It also goes over the horrible and unintuitive things that can happen when you do.
http://blog.regehr.org/archives/213

I've also been looking at tweaking the game loop inside space smilies and found an excellent article on how to write game loops. If you've ever want to write a game, read this first!
http://dev.koonsolo.com/7/dewitters-gameloop/

My Clock

One day I woke up and was surprised to see I had time traveled to the year 2108. Then I realized it was only the 21rst of August and went back to sleep much relieved.

Scroll-wheel follows mouse

One of the few things I like about using the Gnome based system at work is that it scrolls the widget your mouse cursor is pointing it. It doesn't matter if the thing in question has the focus or not. It doesn't matter if it's in another window that doesn't have the focus it just scrolls whatever is under the mouse cursor. It's really nice.

Windows 7 doesn't do this. I miss this behavior.In Windows 7 you have to click on whatever you want to scroll to make sure it has the focus. Sometimes you don't want to click because it's hard to find something "safe" to click on. That is, something that won't screw up what you're doing. Using the window explorer/file manager is a good example. The way I use it, there's a pane on the left hand side that shows me the list of folders and where I am in the file hierarchy. Clicking just about anywhere in that pane changes the selected folder and moves you around in the hierarchy. If I want to scroll this pane I have trouble finding a place where I can give it focus while not getting myself lost in a sea of folders. Having the mouse cursor determine which scroll pane is scrolled, rather than the focus solves this problem nicely.

I've managed to find a utility that enables this behaviour. It's called WizMouse. Give WizMouse and the scroll-wheel follows mouse a try. In a little while you'll wonder how you lived with it any other way.

2012-11-08 - There are a few other products like this and I've tried a few of them. They all seem to have the problem of causing pauses/freezes. The pauses are so bad that even the mouse cursor will stutter its way across the screen. I've had to uninstall these utilities because the pausing has been more annoying than the default windows scrollwheel behaviour. Oh, and don't think I didn't notice that Chrome supports the gnome model.. at least within Chrome windows.