As a quick little bit of code sharing, I gave my Sarah stocks plugin the ability to allow multiple spoken phrases for one command. For instance, a user can now say “check stock prices”, “get stock prices”, or “get stocks” to check their stocks. To do this, I added an array of phrases to the JSON file that describes the Stocks plugin.
Getting to the point of this post, the following Scala source code shows how to read an array of JSON string values using Lift-JSON:
On November 6, 2013, Wikipedia writes with some certainty about November 7th. If they could do that with stocks, that would be great.
One of the smarter things I’ve done in the last year is to buy a special pair of glasses that I use just for working on a computer. They’re large, almost as large as those shown in this photo of James Garner from The Rockford Files. This is nice, because I barely see the rims while I’m working, and that’s a big win. I have another pair of “progressive lens” (bifocal) glasses I use for everything else, but my biggie glasses are specially tuned to give me perfect focus in the 18-36” range, which is perfect for programming. I debated for quite some time about whether it was worth buying two pairs of glasses, but now I wouldn’t live without them.
I saw yesterday that the book Lean UX won an award (a Jolt award for productivity, I think), so I started reading it last night. I thought the following passage was an excellent description of the process, and of design in general:
I took a few days off from life last week, went to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and hacked the heck out of SARAH. This short new video shows some of the major changes to SARAH’s UI and capabilities:
To learn more about SARAH, check out all the details at my SARAH Kickstarter project page.
This is one of the best comics I’ve seen in a while. Why you shouldn’t interrupt a programmer (at least not while they’re coding). Here’s a link to the full comic.
SARAH is a speech interaction application for Mac OS X computers. It's a little like Siri for the Mac, though it's more limited in some ways, but also more open than Siri. It's open source, and developers can create plugins for SARAH.
I've received a lot of emails about SARAH since I first created it, so, in short, I decided to create a Kickstarter project to see if people would like to have SARAH created as a simple, easy to install Mac OS X application. (This will require several months of full-time development and testing.)
Here's a link to the Kickstarter project:
I bought one of these as a Christmas stocking-stuff while in New Mexico. Then I ate it. It was good. (One of the hazards of me trying to buy Christmas gifts early.)
Cool: Staying in a hotel, I put my coffee cup next to the television this morning, and started pouring some cream. Static electricity pulled the cream into the tv.
For about 15 years I lived in Louisville, Kentucky, just two hours south of Indianapolis, Indiana. During most of those years, Peyton Manning was the quarterback for the Colts. I can only imagine how emotional that game was for him.
