Richard Sprague WebLog : Cool

Fingerprint reader on Windows 7

sprague — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 03:23:38 GMT

I upgraded my work laptop with Windows 7 a month or two ago (and I love it!) and most things are going smoothly. But one feature I’m loving a lot is the ability to swipe my finger across the fingerprint reader built into my Lenovo X60 TabletPC. That reader has been there when I was on Vista too, of course, but I enabled it in Windows 7 and it’s surprisingly useful. I rarely if ever enter my password anymore: just swipe and go. It misses a few times, apparently depending on how warm or sweaty my thumb happens to be, but even if I have to swipe an extra time or two, it’s still much faster getting logged in than if I have to type a password. Very nice!

Write like me

sprague — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 03:04:20 GMT

I’ve hate handwriting. I’ve been using keyboards since I learned to write and my fingers just don’t want to use a pen. But there are too many occasions when people expect the “personal” touch of a handwritten document, so I couldn’t get out of it completely. Until now. Using the free font-generation software at http://www.yourfonts.com, I have a whole collection of handwriting fonts that let me give a personalized touch to computer-generated greeting cards and other documents I used to have to break out the pen for. I even made a “handwritten” CD label for a Valentines present.

The process couldn’t be simpler. The site is completely free; you don’t even need to register. Just print a one-sheet template (don’t bother printing the second page, unless you care about special foreign characters). Scan it and upload to the site. Double-check that it looks right, and download to your hard drive. Presto – you have a font you can now use in any of your applications. I made one for each member of the family.

Here’s mine:

and here’s the same text “written” by my eleven-year-old:

It can take a few tries to get it perfect. You can see a few problems with vertical character placement on the above samples, for example. But it’s waaay better than writer’s cramp.

Recite on Windows Mobile

sprague — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 02:33:25 GMT

Sometimes the best speech apps don’t really use speech recognition at all. I mean, yeah, there’s an audio stream and yeah there’s some processing, but you don’t always need the computer to understand what was said in order for it to be useful.

My favorite new example is Microsoft Recite, a technology preview from another sister team (like the cool Tag app that I mentioned previously).

I downloaded it over the air (it’s free) and had it running on my AT&T Tilt phone within a few minutes. After that, I just select “remember” and speak something that I want to remember later.

Once it’s been recorded, you select ‘search’ to find the note and play it back.

For example, I don’t have a pen handy right now but I wanted to remember a few things to pick up the next time I’m shopping at Target. Later, when I get to the store, I’ll just select ‘search’ and say “target” – the Recite software will pull up the note that I previously recorded.

It’s a simple trick for SR: rather than have the software analyze everything and provide perfect recognition, the system does a simple pattern matching – a process that’s much more robust.

As a bonus, it works in any language and with any speaker. Look at this short 90-sec demo to get the idea:

Disproving the Qwerty effect

sprague — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:09:25 GMT

I still run into people who cite the “Qwerty effect” as evidence that sometimes a big head start will give an inferior technology unfair market dominance at the expense of “better” ones. This theory has been disproven historically (it’s not true that the inventor of the typewriter deliberately mangled the layout in order to prevent keys from jamming) but it still shows up in people who cite the superiority of the Beta format over VHS (in fact, the double-length recording time of VHS made it superior, and videophiles at the time weren’t even in agreement about whether or not Beta had a quality advantage), or the superiority of <insert your favorite non-MS product> over <insert some less popular product>. It turns out that in real life, the superior technology almost always wins.

Well, finally somebody decided to test the effect in the lab, under controlled conditions. A new paper by Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan shows the results of experiments they did in a lab, testing inferior platforms against superior ones:

Somehow, the market always manages to solve the QWERTY problem. In sixty iterations of dynamic platform competition, our subjects never got stuck on the inferior platform—even when it enjoyed a substantial first-mover advantage. The remainder of the paper describes in detail the experiments and the results.

This is obvious to anybody who thinks critically about new technologies: often that underdog product that you think is so cool, is actually inferior to the market leader. The flip side is that if it really is superior, you can make it into the market leader if you play your hand correctly. The catch, of course, is the definition of “superior”: maybe some of what you think of as “better” in your product is something the market doesn’t care about. Go fix that first before complaining about your lack of first-mover advantage.

[ht: Marginal Revolution]

Do you know any scientists?

sprague — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 18:16:07 GMT

Now this is sad…

Only 18 percent of us know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific "role models," the results were dismal. Forty-four percent of Americans couldn't come up with a name at all, and among those few who did, their top answers were either not scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.

[from Slate]

I work in Building 99, the main offices for Microsoft Research, which is packed with scientists (one reason I like it here). But it’s too bad that the rest of America has so little face-to-face interaction with practicing scientists.

It’s also a shame, because scientists in my opinion tend to be very interesting people. Maybe somebody should set up a social networking system to let more people meet scientists. How about you? Do you know any scientists?

Tag it

sprague — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 23:13:21 GMT

Here's a cool new app from a sister team of mine: http://www.microsoft.com/tag/

First, download the free app to your Windows Mobile phone (takes just a couple seconds).

When you run the app on your phone, it starts the camera automatically. Just aim the camera roughly at the tag you see on this web page. That's right, just point it at the computer screen. Tag will recognize the object and take you to the URL I have buried inside!

The cool part is that it's easy for you to create your own tags. I did one in about 5 minutes.

It’s Twitter’s Turn

sprague — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 17:51:15 GMT

Every great new social phenomenon has a "fad" phase, where zillions of people join in because, well, because zillions of others are joining. A few years ago I suddenly reunited with my old friends at Apple Japan because suddenly it seemed like they all were on Orkut. That died down after a few months, and then (with Japan) it was Mixi, and a little later it resurfaced at Facebook. Now the same thing is happening on Twitter. It's fun! Every day somebody new is "following" me, and I hear snippets of updates in the lives of people who I enjoyed working closely with but for various reasons have moved on to other things and I don't keep up with as much as I wish I could.

Part of the fun is the newness of it all. You reconnect with old friends who, unfortunately, life hasn’t permitted an easy way to stay in touch with. And along the way you run into brand new people who are interesting and suddenly become

But we are all limited by a fundamental problem that humans can only develop so many relationships at a time. People living in the wild usually travel in bands of 50 or so, with 150 being roughly the maximum size of the extended “band”. Your “nation” may consist of a few hundred more than that, but it’s just not possible to be close to too many people, not at one time. Whatever you do on Twitter comes at the expense of what you do on Facebook and ultimately what you do in real life. I’m a technology fan, so I don’t mind these other media having as much play as the real world, but still, I can only be in a few places at one time.

I’m not sure how long the Twitter phenomenon will last. To me, it’s a basically a huge, open version of IRC or Instant Messenger—things that have been around forever and were looking for something like Twitter to take it to the next level. I’m wondering when the commercials will hit it—you see hints of it already—and you start getting distracted from your friends by all the compelling and professionally-created content (like real-time news updates).

But meanwhile, go ahead and follow me: http://twitter.com/sprague. I’m there now, running Thwirl and Tweetdeck, having the time of my life sending and receiving 140-character updates to great friends I haven’t seen in ages.

Save hard drive space with Mklink

sprague — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 00:41:26 GMT

There’s no shortage of disk space in my house, but only a small amount really needs to be backed up. The music and photos -- yes of course you want that backed up, but why waste gigabytes on a database that can just be recreated later anyway.

I keep my most important stuff on a 50GB RAID 1 (mirroring) partition that I regularly back up using the Vista incremental backup feature. But lately that drive is getting too full, so I need to remove something. One thing that can go is my Picasa database of photos, since I have my photos on Live Photo Gallery already and this is just for playing around. But the software won’t apparently let me specify an alternate location for the database, which must always be on the main drive. So here’s what I did:

First I copied the multi-gigabyte Picasa database file (called ‘db3’) to another drive. Then I deleted it on the main drive. Then I did this:

mklink /d db3 “d:\spare\photos\db3”

Now Picasa still thinks the files are right where they always are, but when it tries to get them, the Vista file system redirects everything to the other directory. Nice!

I bet the same would work for another huge file on my drive: an IMAP email store that is already backed up in the sky and doesn’t need backing up. Outlook 2007 won’t let you change the location of an IMAP store, but maybe mklink would do the trick.

Microsoft Startup Zone

sprague — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 03:55:01 GMT

I remember during the Tech Crash earlier this decade, a lot of my friends took advantage of the downturn to start a new company, many of which formed the seeds of what we now call Web2.0. Just in time for today's economic downturn, Microsoft has started a new initiative, BizSpark, that gets you all the software tools needed for your new business -- for free.

You have to meet a few basic qualifications (e.g. you can't have more than $1M revenue), but when I talked to the team yesterday it was clear they are trying to target a LOT of startups. This is not some secret, hard-to-join program. If you're a start-up doing software development, you'll want to apply. It basically means you get all the powerful Microsoft software you want, for the same price you previously paid for all that open source software. Actually, the MS stuff (I claim) is cheaper because it's commercial-grade software that won't require a lot of your time to find and install.

I used to post all my startup ideas online, but I haven't kept it up. Maybe I'll dust off some of my ideas and post them to my personal blog so you can copy me freely and start your own business!

.NET Micro Framework at Maker Faire

sprague — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 21:45:11 GMT

Some colleagues in a sister group of mine have built an SDK that lets you build simple hardware devices to control all kinds of products, like thermostats that use weather information to control energy usage,

They're doing a bunch of things at next week's Maker Faire in Austin (wish I could be there!), but one of the fun things they're doing is a contest where they'll be giving out $101,000 in prizes to people who come up with ideas for dream devices.

too bad Microsoft employees aren't eligible :-(

Live Mesh

sprague — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 07:17:26 GMT

If you haven’t tried it already, you’ve got to install Live Mesh. It’s turning out to be one of the most indispensible software utilities I own, and I’m wondering how I ever got along without it.

It’s a small utility (currently released as a beta) I installed on all my computers: home, work, laptop. After associating each with my Windows Live ID, I now have folders that stay constantly in synch between all the computers. The software somehow goes through firewalls and understands when computers are turned off or inaccessible, and the bottom line is that my documents are available everywhere. I can even access my documents from somebody else’s computer just by logging into http://www.mesh.com (being careful to log out afterwards of course).

Another very cool feature is that you can remotely access any of your devices from any other. In other words, I can now log into my work computer when I’m at home, using essentially the same experience you get with Remote Desktop, except it all works through my browser and Live Mesh software.

There are many other features, including some that you just know they’re working on to make available in the non-beta version. Definitely download and use this—you won’t regret it.

Go ahead, try to break into my Bitlocker

sprague — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 06:31:24 GMT

This week I finally got around to protecting my TabletPC with Bitlocker. My laptop holds my entire life, and I take it everywhere with me, so I'd be hosed if if it were ever to fall into the hands of a bad guy. But not anymore.

One piece I wasn't aware of until I actually locked my drive this way: every time I do a cold boot of the machine, it asks me for a special PIN--before I even get to the regular login and password. Since I only cold-boot once a week or so (the rest of the time, I just put the laptop to sleep), this isn't much of a hassle. But it's nice to have the peace of mind, knowing that nobody can get to my data.

Go directly to voicemail with Slydial

sprague — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 16:46:18 GMT

I've been testing out the new free service from Slydial that lets you leave a voicemail without ringing the other guy's phone. I called 1-267-SLYDIAL (267-759-3425), entered the phone number I wanted to dial, and sure enough I was soon talking to directly to the voicemail box.

The service is free, although you do have to listen to a very short advertisement (for McDonalds dollar menu, when I called), but there are a few catches:

It only works for U.S. mobile numbers.
Doesn't work for non-mobile numbers (like, say, Microsoft's corporate number)

I also noticed that it worked from my AT&T mobile number, as well as from the landline I use at home, but for some reason it didn't work from my VOIP account. I'm contacting my VOIP provider to see if they know why.

[update: it was a fluke. I tried again and it works fine with my VOIP account]

Digital pen and paper

sprague — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:32:07 GMT

Philipp Schmid, former API developer in the speech team (and my fellow Mercer Island resident), is now working at a Seattle company, Adapx, that's in the news today for their work on new new applications for digital pens and paper. The cool part of their software is that it allows you to use normal paper (with special codes printed on an ordinary printer), making it good for field work for scientists, firefighters, or others.

They also make a version that works well with OneNote.

My new (virtual) PC

sprague — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 03:35:27 GMT

Wow, this is one of the coolest programs ever. The rest of you have been talking about Virtual PC and virtualization in general for a while now, but I finally had a chance to play with it for myself.

The virtual PC is a real PC, about as perfect a simulation as you can imagine. For example, it has its own MAC address, gets a unique IP address from the router, and can even share files over the network with the "host" PC. Obviously this means you get full internet access and all that goes with it.

What does it cost? It's free! Download Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft's download site. Of course, to do anything interesting you'll need an OS and a bunch of applications, you'll need to buy Windows (or a Linux distribution) but you don't need to buy any hardware.

What's missing? USB emulation, so to do printing (for example) you need to use shared printing from another machine. To copy files from my USB drive, I first shared it from the host machine and that let me view everything from the virtual PC.

One tip: switch between the Virtual PC window and the "main" machine by pressing the right ALT key for operations , i.e. the ALT key on the right side of your keyboard--not the left one that I tend to use most often.

My next step is to figure out how to save a given Virtual PC image so I can copy it, back it up, hand it around to other people, etc.