Over Macho Grande

Okay, so this is something of a rant, but given my experiences with the laptop, how can I not? Backstory:  Corporate IT maintains a list of acceptable portables, all of which are made by Toshiba.  After looking over the list, it looked like the best choice was the Portege R830.  It had the best possible CPU and it wasn't a giant clunker that looked my back-in-the-day 15 pound Inspiron 7000.  As a bonus, it was available with a reasonably priced docking station. My first conception that something was wrong when, after first boot, I checked free memory.  Physically, 4GB is installed, but windows says that only 2.7GB is available.  The Intel HD3000 video setup is eating the rest (1.3GB!).  Okay, no big deal.  I can reboot and change that in the BIOS.  Oops.  No option.  Well, maybe it's just some old drivers.  Nope.  Drivers are latest from Toshiba.  They're not particularly new, so maybe the generic Intel ones will fix it.  Damn!  Toshiba has crippled the video so that it

I _really_ like Twitter's Bootstrap.  It saves me from making any number of questionable content design choices.  I'm using it in an MVC3 project and one of the things that bugged me was the inability to get Microsoft's unobtrusive validation working with the fancy form control states in Bootstrap. Well, after looking around on StackOverflow and poking and prodding MVC, here's what I've got: If you correct the error, the state changes away from error and you get this: I hacked this into place by inserting a shim error placement function.  It saves a handle to the original Microsoft implementation, changes the class on the nearest div with a CSS class of "control-group" and then calls the Microsoft implementation to display the actual error text. $(document).ready(function () {             var esettings = $.data($('form')[0], 'validator').settings;             // Get a handle to the original errorPlacement function             var

I'm pretty impressed with Microsoft's System.Speech API.  It took less than 3 days to throw together a proof-of-concept application.  The hardest part was probably coming up with the grammar -- documentation for that is pretty thin on the ground. Anyways, here's the application source code on GitHub if anyone wants a look: ObserverLengthSampler project If nothing else, I'd recommend it as a starting point for someone needing a number recognition SRGS grammar in an XML format.

I just got a short side project @ work:  Use speech recognition to capture fish species and length from tuna observer samples.  I'm going to try the win7 version first but I'll probably wind up giving sphinx a try too.