So, as some of you may know, I’m not a native English speaker. I’m certainly no native American speaker, even less than English. Today’s Dilbert leaves me bewildered – I was pretty sure I knew what the expression “a little bit pregnant” meant. There’s a similar expression in (my native language) German, and a Google search for “a little bit pregnant” doesn’t reveal anything I wouldn’t have expected. But that comic strip doesn’t make the least bit of sense to me… anybody care to explain?

One of my sessions has been selected for DDD 4, that much I’ve known for a few weeks. Problem was, I thought I’d lost the original notification email in a server crash, so for a while I couldn’t be 100% sure what that session was, given that I had submitted several sessions to the voting. Talking to a number of people, I passed on what I was pretty sure was the correct information, that the session in question was titled “Object/Relational Mapping in real-world applications”.

Turns out several things were not quite right here… first, I hadn’t actually lost that email at all. It had originally been categorized as spam on my server and that’s where I had found it, but I had forgotten all about that in the excitement of the server crash. Second, while I found that email and I was able to confirm that it really mentioned the “ORM in real-world applications” session as the one that had been selected, that information was wrong nevertheless… apparently one of the DDD 4 organizers mixed something up there, and the session that has really been selected is “Extensible LINQing”.

Good, that’s that. I still hope to see some of you in my session, even if it’s a different one

Scott Hanselman recently blogged about speech recognition in Windows Vista and so I went to try it myself.  In general, the results are good.  Throughout the process, I had a number of problems and so I’m not yet sure that I can dictate faster than I can type. In

• In  the initial configuration wizzard, there was a problem with the volume of my microphone.  Windows thought it could not understand me and showed the following funny window:

• Speech recognition seems to have enormous problems with the capitalisation of various words.  For example, at first it was unable to learn that Windows Vista had to be capitalised this way.  It also recognized the word Vista as Easter all that time – I’m still not sure it works correctly although I have corrected that problem a number of times. 
• There are also a number of problems that come up every now and then, such as the cursor jumping to a different place in the text when dictating single words.  In these cases, it helps to dictate the words in the context of a longer sentence.  I have not yet understood why this cursor jumping issue happens at all…  There must be some kind of command that makes the cursor jump to a special position, but I’m not aware of it. This also sometimes comes up when I’m trying to dictate sentences – I was trying to dictate a sentence starting with “Now let’s try…” for 10 minutes or so before giving up… the “now” always made the cursor jump around instead of ever inserting the right word.
•  Finally, a conceptual problem seems to be that the system regularly makes mistakes that I can’t correct using the automatic functionality.  An example of this is the insertion of short words into dictated sentences – there is no way to correct that kind of problem using voice commands.  In most cases, not even the selection of such words works correctly. But if I can’t use an automated functionality to do the correction, then the system obviously can’t learn from me.

Overall I get the impression that the quality of speech recognition is still not good enough to understand exactly what I’m saying when I just talk normally.  That may be my particular accent or the fact that I am not a native English speaker, but the result is that I have to do so many corrections that I could easily type the same text faster on the keyboard.  Plus, I’m using a good quality USB headset – I can’t imagine how bad the quality would be if I were using a built in microphone instead.  After all, I wouldn’t want to be sitting around with my headset on my ears all day just to give a command to my computer every now and then.

Most of this post was dictated instead of typed, and I guesstimate that it took me about three or four times as long as if I had just typed it completely.

Another quiet week, I know… I was over in Redmond for a technical lab at Microsoft’s, which was a lot of fun but also a lot of work. My computer had certain problems connecting to the hotel internet, and then in the middle of it all my email server at home broke down… so far I know of precisely one email that got lost, but I can’t be entirely sure, so if you sent me something important last week (especially after Wednesday) and you’re not sure whether I received it or not, consider sending it again.

Now I’m on my way to TechEd in Barcelona and my flight is late. At least they have internet here

Developer Express has a booth at TechEd and that’s where I’m going to spend most of my time. If you are there, please drop by – we’re going to demonstrate the upcoming beta 1 of the eXpressApp Framework as well as loads of other good stuff. See you there!