Apple claim Siri will get better at understanding its owner over time, but I’m somewhat doubtful whether it can be true.

I’m sure it can relatively easily catalogue a speaker as west-coast American or Australian or whatever (if those accents have been programmed into it), and within those types it can then store typical values for each phoneme, but given that it never asks the user to type in a word or sentence it couldn’t comprehend, how can it possibly learn anything if an accent diverges too much from its expectations?

I understand Apple want a product that people can just switch on and use, but for people with “strange” accents, surely it would be better to have the option of a dedicated training module rather than being stuck with a useless piece of software.

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I recently installed Ubuntu 11.10 – Oneiric Ocelot – on my work laptop, upgrading from Ubuntu 10.10.

I had read about how many people criticised it for making Unity the default window manager, but I had expected it otherwise to be quite a straight-forward upgrade.

It turned out to be quite a nightmare, however. Basically, it seems to be an odd mixture of annoying the power users, while allowing so many errors that ordinary users cannot use the system:

• My wireless card, which had worked flawlessly in earlier versions, didn’t work out of the box. Eventually I found some advice, namely to remove bcm43xx from blacklist.conf, and it’s now working fine again, but non-techie users would probably not have worked this out.
• The built-in webcam has stopped working, and I cannot find a way to make it work (although Ubuntu 12 beta testers report it should be working there).
• After I installed Skype and minimised it, it completely disappeared, and I had to kill it and start it up again to get the window back. It turns out Skype by default is blacklisted in the notification area. It was quite easy to fix, so long as you know how to edit notification area blacklists.
• Bash autocompletion is broken, and to fix it, you need to make a change to line 1587 in the system file /etc/bash_completion.
• Different from most flavours of Linux, Ubuntu 11 assumes the computer’s internal clock is set to local time rather than UTC. To fix that, you need to edit /etc/default/rcS.
• Most of the system preferences have disappeared, so you cannot by default change the default font size, make windows get the focus on mouse-over, or many other small details that were easy before. To get the same options as before, you now need to install either gconf-editor or gnome-tweak-tool, but if you’re not aware of these tools, you’ll be seriously annoyed for a while if you don’t like the default settings.
• Synaptic is now a separate install – by default you have to use the software centre, which means that many programs are unavailable by default.
• Also T_EX Live is completely outdated – the included version is the one from 2009, not 2011, so if you’re serious about T_EX, you need to install it separately.

I’m sorry, Ubuntu people, but this just isn’t good enough. You can’t remove all the power tools but still require users to know how to edit system files by hand.

I’m hoping Ubuntu 12 will be better, but otherwise I’ll be looking for another flavour of Linux next time.

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When I started computer science back in 1992 in Århus, we were all given a numerical username and email address, in my case u901027 (@daimi.aau.dk). After a short while, I got the opportunity to pick my own username, and I opted for viralbus, rather than the more obvious widmann or tmw.

This goes back to my high-school days. I had learnt a little Latin, and my surname Widmann is in Danish often pronounced the same as hvid mand “white man”, so I translated this mispronunciation into Latin as vir albus “white man”.

Unix systems at the time often seemed to limit usernames to eight characters, so viralbus was quite ideal.

These days it’s often hard to find a username that hasn’t been taken – there are just too many other people called Thomas Widmann in this world – so I often end up using viralbus, which is practically always available, even if confusing to other people, who tend to either think I’m a white supremacist or creating computer viruses.

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The Telegraph recently had an interview with the Pope’s astronomer:

[Dr Consolmagno] said the characteristics synonymous with having a soul – intelligence, free will, freedom to love and freedom to make decisions may not be unique to humans.

“Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has has a soul,’ he said.

However machines were unlikely to be smart or human-enough to have souls.

I wonder how the Catholic Church will decide this. If souls are not restricted to humans, surely they’ll need a test (perhaps akin to the Turing Test) to decide whether an entity has a soul or not.

In fact, given that Cleverbot recently passed the Turing Test, I wonder whether some people would argue computers already do.

If one day computers become intelligent enough, will the Catholic Church start campaigning against off-switches, just like they currently are against abortion?

Fortunately for the Catholics, Cleverbot doesn’t seem to be in any rush to join their church:

TW: Do you have a soul?

CB: Yes. I do indeed have a soul.

TW: Is it immortal?

CB: Yes.

TW: Would you like to become a Catholic?

CB: I would like a robot body. Will you help me get one? .

TW: Sure. In the meantime, would you like me to get rid of off-switches?

CB: Not really. I like being scared.

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I’ve been trying for a wee while to deploy iOS apps to my two-year-old iPod Touch. I kept getting an error message from codesign: “object file format invalid or unsuitable”.

At first I thought it had something to do with my provisioning profile or something, or perhaps that my iPod was too old to work with the newest Xcode, but the error turned out to be quite different, obscure, yet simple to fix.

I found the solution in Martian Storm. Somehow /usr/bin/codesign_allocate had been deleted (or never created), so I needed to issue the command

sudo ln -s /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/Developer/usr/bin/codesign_allocate /usr/bin

That was all that was wrong – it works beautifully now!

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I might be completely wrong here, but I’m starting to think Google’s Dart language is solving the wrong problem.

I mean, Dart is beautiful and much cleaner than JavaScript, but as a developer that’s not solving the immediate problems I face.

The problems I see with current web development include:

• Your code has to be split into server-side code (e.g., in PHP) and client-side code (in JavaScript), which is annoying because it separates the logical flow of your code. Dart does not seem to solve this. (You could imagine a language that compiled down to PHP and JavaScript as required.)
• You need jQuery all the time for modern websites, yet jQuery is not integrated into Dart from the outset. I think they’re planning to implement a completely new way of achieving the same, but until that’s ready, it’s hard to assess whether it’s better or worse. It would be nice to have a web language that integrated jQuery-like functionality from the outset.
• Related to this, you typically use many JavaScript/jQuery libraries to implement menus, clocks, menus and such things. It appears these won’t be accessible from Dart, which will make it useless for advanced websites until replacement libraries have been implemented.
• It’s really hard to write code that runs on every browser dating back to IE6. Dart does explicitly not solve this issue; in fact, they don’t even seem to support modern versions of Internet Explorer at the moment. As far as I can tell, that would mean that you’d need to write your site twice, once in Dart and once in Internet Explorer JavaScript, which is really not ideal.
• They seem to expect most programmers will put Dart into their websites in the same way you use JavaScript at the moment. However, for efficiency it’s not great to upload actual source code – it’s much better to upload a minimal version as created by Google Closure. It would therefore be fine to have a language (such as Dart) for developing sites but still uploading JavaScript to the actual website.

I think that what I’m trying to say is that I’d love to have a language somewhat like Dart for writing websites in, but I’d love that language to compile down to efficient JavaScript (with jQuery) and PHP, especially if the resulting websites would work with all browsers dating back to Internet Explorer 6 (and in cases where that wouldn’t be possible, you’d get compile-time warnings about using features requiring a modern browser).

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It was announced today that Dennis M. Ritchie – the ‘R’ in ‘K&R’ – has died. Although it has been mentioned in some mainstream news sources, it hasn’t exactly generated the same amount of reactions as the death of Steve Jobs.

However, I believe dmr was probably more important in the development of modern computers.

I’m sure many people read in the obituaries that he was the co-inventor of C and Unix and then just shrugged their shoulders. However, the importance of those inventions can hardly be overstated.

C is one of the most successful programming languages of all time, and it lives on as a subset of its successor languages, C++, C# and Objective-C (apart from the number of languages that have been inspired by C, such as Java, Perl and PHP). Most users might not realise it, but the vast majority of iPhone apps are written in Objective-C, just to take one example.

Unix is probably the most important and influential operating system ever. Lots of modern operating systems, such as Linux and Mac OS X, are practically speaking modern varieties of Unix, and iPhones, iPads and Android phones are basically portable Unix computers.

Of course both C and Unix were team efforts, but there’s no doubt that dmr played a crucial role in the development of both. His memory will live on for a very long time.

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I bought my first Mac in 1990, an SE 4/40. At that time, Steve Jobs had already been away from Apple for five years, and the company was alternating between successes and disasters.

By the time this computer needed replacing, Linux 1.0 had just been replaced, and I enthusiastically embraced the Linux world and put Apple behind me.

A few years later, Steve Jobs returned to Apple and eventually managed to turn the Macintosh into a useful computer again (the operating system had been getting slower and less stable starting with System 7 in 1991), but for a long time, the Mac seemed to appeal mainly to die-hard Apple fanboys – I was certainly never tempted to return to the fold, and my impression was that Apple was largely ignored by most people.

That changed with the introduction of the iPod and later the iPhone, both of which got huge followings. I’m convinced many modern Macintosh users only ditched their Windows computers because the iPod and iPhone had decontaminated the Apple brand.

However, I never really become a fan of Apple again – although I have an iPod Touch and a Mac Mini, I feel more attached to my Android phone and my Linux box.

I wonder what Steve Jobs will be remembered for in the longer term. My guess is that he won’t be seen as a great innovator, but rather as somebody who could spot the technologies that had the potential to appeal to non-techies. The Macintosh demonstrated that end-users liked graphical user interfaces, and Microsoft then created Windows; the iPod showed that people were ready for MP3 players; and the iPhone led the way in making people switch from ordinary mobile phones to smartphones.

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Når man har stirret længe nok på et blankt stykke papir, og deadline nærmer sig, sker der ofte noget. Pludselig begynder ordene at flyde frit fra leveren, og man skriver noget, som man ikke havde planlagt, men som nogle gange forbløffer én selv, når man læser det senere.

Denne effekt er svær at opnå på en moderne computer. For det første kan man bruge uendelige mængder tid på at surfe og maile, men selv hvis man afbryder internetforbindelsen, er der jo hundredevis af programmer installeret på en normal computer, og hvis det ikke er nok, kan man jo bare selv skrive et til.

Selv hvis man klarer at begrænse sig til sit tekstredigeringsprogram – det være sig emacs, Open Office eller noget helt tredie – kan man også der spilde tiden på at redigere og formatere sin tekst uden egentlig at producere noget.

Så hvad skal man gøre? Nogle gange kan man godt blive fristet til at købe en RemToR og sætte sig ned i et tomt rum kun forsynet med en Ceres-øl og en stabel papir, men det er jo også lidt absurd ikke at drage fordel af moderne software, som jo også kan være en stor hjælp til tider.

Jeg er derfor begyndt at overveje, om det er værd at bruge et af de antidistraktionstekstredigeringsprogrammer, som findes. For eksempel er denne blogposting skrevet i PyRoom, som virker ganske udmærket. Jeg har kun tre kritikpunkter:

• Selv om man ikke kan minimere vinduet, tillader min windowmanager mig at tabbe væk fra det; det ville være bedre, hvis man ikke kunne komme ud uden helt at afslutte programmet.
• Der er ingen løbende markering af, hvor meget, man har skrevet. Jeg tror, det ville være psykologisk godt, hvis man fik at vide, hvor mange sider, man havde skrevet.
• Det er desværre muligt at gå tilbage i teksten og redigere den. Det ville nok være bedre, hvis tekstredigeringer var begrænset til den sidste linie eller to.

Jeg ville blot ønske, at der også fandtes en måde at programmere uden distraktioner på, men det kan man nok ikke lave uden at forhindre en i at programmere frit.

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I must say I’ve fallen in love with Dropbox. I heard about it on Facebook some months ago, but I thought it was just some kind of glorified on-line backup service.

I was wrong, however.

What Dropbox gives you is a folder that is synchronised over the Internet with their servers and from there onto your other computers. This means you don’t have to make a special copy of your files in Dropbox, but instead you can simply keep your important files in your Dropbox folder, and they’re always available everywhere. You just work on your files inside that folder, and any changes you make are quietly synchronised.

Furthermore, you can share folders with other Dropbox users, which gives you a really smooth way of sharing files with coworkers and friends and family.

You get 2GB for free, so do try it out!

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