First things first: happy 21st!

Those irrevocably consigned to the nine circles of geekdom will be pleased to know that Google has officially beta'd Chrome for Linux. In other news, you can now post comments to the new quizzical quincunx; simply visit the post page and fill out the handy comment form. In the process of hacking this together, I finally became frustrated enough with the WordPress API to toss this gem into my functions.php:

function trap_output($function, $args = array()) {
  ob_start();
  call_user_func_array($function, $args);
  return ob_get_clean();
}

Also, I've decided to go with reCAPTCHA instead of post moderation; I'll be interested to see if this is sufficient to defend against the spammer hordes of the Internets.

So - test it out, and let me know if you find any problems!

It was only a matter of time before Google did this - let the battle begin.

In the grand annual tradition - enjoy.

Not even voicemail can escape Big G, it seems - Google Voice, built off Grand Central's technology, will transform your voice messages into email transcripts. In the era of mobile computing this could be a wise move indeed, although it will certainly enrage privacy advocates.

At heart, this is a fairly basic application of speech recognition software; simply strap together a recognition engine, a mailing script, and something to monitor your phone and you've got a working replacement. Replace the phone with Skype (or, better yet, open-source equivalent Ekiga) and the monitoring step becomes a great deal easier - you could even use it to archive all your phone calls. For the paranoid, you could toss in an extra pass through PGP and skip the mailing script, archiving instead to a TrueCrypt'd partition. (Of course, you'd have to encrypt your calls in the first place.)

Last term, I had the immense pleasure of participating in NaNoWriMo - that hallowed annual event wherein would-be writers consent to a month of grueling lexical vomitus in exchange for, well, nothing (unless you count pride and a sense of accomplishment as material.)

My tool of choice? Google Docs. Despite some slowdown on the sluggish university lab terminals - especially towards the end of the month - the experience was relatively smooth. The greatest benefit, however, was being able to easily share it with friends and have them track the development of the story. Try doing that with MS Word. Anyways, here it is.