Windows

First impressions of NaturallySpeaking 5

Dave Farquhar Windows

I am dictating to this with NaturallySpeaking. I still have that cheap ESS sound card in my system, but thanks to the aftermarket noise canceling microphone I am getting decent results. I will install the new Sound Blaster when I get time. I only had to make one correction on this post, which is a tremendous improvement over my previous experiences with voice recognition (and I have some, dating back to 1996, since I was one of the 12 people who actually bought OS/2 Warp 4, which included a predecessor to ViaVoice).
The speed is pretty good on my Celeron-400. NaturallySpeaking doesn’t know that word.

NaturallySpeaking arrives, plus W2K hardware compatibility issues

Dave Farquhar Windows

Naturally Speaking is here. Along with my SB Live! card. But alas, I’m not. I’m up to my neck in a brochure for my church. I’d grade my writing an A or A-, my editing an A, my design a B+, and my photography a C. Not perfect, but it gets the job done, and there’s no time for perfection. And I never claimed to be anything more than a competent designer and I never claimed anything at all about photography, besides owning a good camera.
There’s no time for much of anything, I’m afraid. I even blew off the last person in the world I want to blow off at this point in time this weekend. Such is life. Three pages down and three to go, so I have no idea how much I’ll have to say in the next few days. I’ll have a lot to say when it’s finally over, I’m sure.

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From: “Gary M. Berg” Subject: Maxtor drives and Win2K SP1

Dave,

The reference I remember seeing (and could locate quickly) was in Paul Thurrott’s Winfo Daily Update for 8/11: (deleted because it’s copyrighted material, but it basically says some IDE and SCSI Maxtor drives report incorrect sizes or even data loss). I’m not sure what to make of this, and I suppose it might be reasonable to check with Paul to see if he knows anything more yea or nay on this

———-

Thurrot’s a pretty reputable source. I’ll keep my eyes peeled. I’m running W2K on a Maxtor but it’s not SP1 yet.

Thanks.

Babble, NaturallySpeaking, and Windows Utility Suites

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Thanks to those of you who wrote in. I’m glad someone agrees that there is more to life than these computers and the Internet. A computer (or a room full of them) is no substitute for a good five-friend rotation, a car, or someplace to go. Had I waited a few more hours I probably would have said things differently, but I think Sunday’s vent served its purpose.
Just to quell any speculation: No, I’m not depressed, distraught, or anything of the sort. Slightly frustrated, yes, because I can’t do all the things I once did, and that can’t help but affect you, even in other areas of life that shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Will this pass? You bet.

Dragon Naturally Speaking 5.0. The new version is now out, and the usual suspects (Staples.com, Onvia.com, and Buy.com, at least) are shipping it. I bought Preferred, just in case I needed it. Now I’m told that Standard (about $60 less) is probably fine for dictation and that Preferred adds computer-control functions. I wanted that, so I probably bought the right thing.

I mentioned www.speechcontrol.com last week. They shipped my order that day, so I should have it by Tuesday. So far I’m very impressed with this vendor–prompt answers to questions, a strong presence in Dragon’s forums, testing mics for suitability before deciding to carry them… And a price of $65 with free shipping for an Andrea ANC-600 mic is hard to beat.

I expect all my gear (mic, sound card, software) to arrive by midweek. I’ll keep you posted on the developments.

———-

From: al wynn

Subject: Best WIN98 settings for NU’s SpeedDisk and FixIt’s DefragPlus (to optimize the hard drive)

What are the best WINDOWS 98 settings for NU’s SpeedDisk and FixIt’s DefragPlus, to optimize the hard drive ?

———-
The settings haven’t changed since I wrote Optimizing Windows for Games, Graphics and Multimedia. It’s pretty long to duplicate here. Advice on using Norton Utilities is on page 97; advice for Fix-It is on page 101, and Nuts & Bolts is on page 103. I covered both hard drive and registry optimization.

———-

From: John Doucette

Subject: typing avoidance

Hi Dave

Nice to have you back in action. Other than voice recognition did you look at using something like a tablet and hand writing software like Jot so you would not have to type.

John

———-

Not with my handwriting. My dad was a doctor, as were both of his parents. I didn’t inherit their love of biology but I sure got their handwriting. Writing by hand can also aggravate CTS, though not as quickly as typing.

That’s a good suggestion for people who have decent penmanship, but not me.

Thanks for the welcome back.

Tongue-tied

Dave Farquhar Windows , , , , , ,

Anything to say? My sister (yes, she has a name–it’s Di) mailed me and asked me if I had anything to say today. Not really. I finally won a major victory at work that will result in the departure of two Macintoshes that have become the bane of my existence. The battle came at a high personal price–I’m exhausted and have little to say. Other than an observation that AppleShare IP 6.3 appears to be about as rude as its predecessors. It seems to like MacOS 9, but it also seems very willing to crash MacOS 8.6 and earlier clients. Seeing as these are 100, 120, and 132 MHz machines, upgrading to 9 isn’t exactly practical or worthwhile or cost-effective. So they’re getting brand spanking new Micron PCs with Pentium III 600 chips or whatever it is we’re buying these days. I will be very joyfully installing them in the morning.

———- From: al wynn
Does McAfee still sell Nuts&Bolts?

Exactly how do you use Nuts&Bolts to “sort directory entries by the file’s physical placement on the hard drive” (ie. under which menu item can I find it ?)

Also, what are some good web links (or other resources) that will show me how to optimize Norton Utilities configuration ?

———-
It’s in Disk Tune. Click Advanced–>Directory Sort–>Sort Criteria. There you can select Cluster number as your directory sort criteria. Under Win95, this makes N&B’s Disk Tune the best defragmenter/optimizer, but under Win98, NU’s Speed Disk and Fix-It’s Defrag Plus have features that will make them outperform Disk Tune in spite of this feature (they actually do some strategic fragmentation to increase speed). I suppose you could optimize the disk with one of the others, then try to get Disk Tune to skip the defragmentation part and just optimize the directories, but I think I tried to figure out how to do that and gave up. Alternatively you could optimize with Disk Tune first, then defragment with one of the others and not do anything with the directory entries–assuming you want to save absolutely every microsecond possible. (Be aware that Disk Tune is a very slow program, so we’re talking diminishing returns here to run it, then run one of the others.)

I haven’t seen a better resource for the utilities suites than chapters 3 and 5 of Optimizing Windows; those chapters were the result of about seven years’ experience messing around with disk utilities (starting under DOS, of course). I’ve never seen a Web site on the subject (good or bad); nor much other information outside of the manuals that came with some of the older versions. That was part of the reason why I wrote my own. I tried to explain what to do with whatever suite you happened to have, as well as the reasoning behind it.

Optimizing Windows questions from readers

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Do you still think Netsonic is the best browser cache program ?Is there anything better than Netsonic, to speed up web surfing ?

Is there anything better than EasyMTU/ispeed to optimize one’s modem ?

———-
I haven’t found anything better than either. All of the MTU-type programs do essentially the same thing, the question is how much you want to pay for a utility that flips a couple of bits in the registry. EasyMTU and iSpeed do the job, and they’re free.

As for NetSonic, I haven’t found anything I like better. That program category, like fastloaders, was a great idea that never really caught on and it makes for slim pickings today. —

Subject: What new book(s) are you working on now?

Who will be your publisher, and what is your planned publication date for your upcoming book(s) ?

Is there a way to search all of your views (from #1 to #37) for a
particular topic or string ?

———-
The new book will be from O’Reilly. The topic is Linux, from the point of view of someone familiar with Windows (something that’s desperately needed, as I adamantly disagree with the view some hold that Linux needs to look, breathe, and act just like Windows. Next thing you know someone will be wanting it to crash like Windows too. The solution isn’t 4.3 billion clicky utilities that do one thing and give people RSI from too much mousing when there’s already a time-tested three-letter command with more power than most mortals can possibly imagine to do the job sitting right there–but I digress.) It’s maybe half-finished, so I don’t know yet when it will be finished, published or released. It hasn’t been announced yet, so very little has been decided (including the title). I understand there will be a “small mammal” on the cover. Sorry to be vague; that really is just about all I know.

As for a search engine, I’ve looked into some possibilities and haven’t really liked any of them. I know I’ve been indexed by Google and possibly others, so you could search for “Farquhar” and certain strings. It’s a crude solution. I do have something better up my sleeve but it’s likely to be a few months before I get a chance to implement it, as it will require me to change providers along with a whole bunch of other work.

What are “fastloaders” programs, mentioned in you email below ?

Can you give me the names of a few, and from where can I download them, to test them out ?

———-
I talk about them on page 71 of Optimizing Windows. One came with Norton Utilities and one with Nuts & Bolts; neither is compatible with Win98. (The Norton tool was better.) SuperFasst, from www.webcelerator.com, is compatible with both Win95 and 98. These programs use various tricks to shave a few seconds off program loading times. This was a bigger deal in 1995 than today (modern disks can load Word in 3 seconds, after all–SuperFasst might cut that down to 2-2.5, which isn’t a very noticeable difference). You might find you like it. I found it didn’t make a big enough difference for me to be worth the decreased stability now that fast hard disks are common and dirt cheap.
———-

More Windows speed-ups. I took a look today at www.webcelerator.com. These guys provide Superfasst, which I mentioned in Optimizing Windows. They’ve got a few new utilities to offer now, the most interesting of which creates images of CDs and then emulates a CD-ROM drive. This would be very, very useful for wringing more performance out of games that use a CD-ROM.

The downside to these guys is they want to monopolize your browser’s homepage. Change your homepage to something other than theirs, and their programs stop working. That’s a bit obnoxious. It would be nice if they’d offer a payment option. It is nice that they aren’t opting for the adware/spyware route (I think–I haven’t examined any of these tools in well over a year). I thought I’d pass along what I found though.

Busting ads

Dave Farquhar Windows , , ,

Spam. Brightmail caught three pieces of spam for me in the past week. Four got through. It’s disappointing, but maybe they’ll get better with time. And 3 out of 7 is pretty close to Mike Sweeney’s batting average with the bases loaded, and no one complains about that.
Calling it a week. My apologies for Wednesday’s post not making it up until Thursday night. I wrote it, then forgot to upload it. Figures. The things that make me creative also can make me eccentric and scatterbrained sometimes.

I’m out of town for a family event. I’ll be in Kansas City, and while I have relatives with computers there I doubt I’ll be using them. So have a good weekend. I’ll be back Monday, in all likelihood.

Mail.

From: “al wynn”
To:
Sent: Friday, September 08, 2000 1:15 AM
Subject: What is the best COMMERCIAL ad-blocking utility for Windows95 out there (that is better than Proxomitron) ?

Can you tell me what is the best COMMERCIAL ad-blocking program for Windows95 out there (that is better than Proxomitron) ?
h question. The only commercial program that did that that I know of was WRQ’s AtGuard, which is now part of Symantec’s Norton Internet Security 2000. I played around with AtGuard a while last year when I was writing Optimizing Windows, but I didn’t like it any better than Proxomitron or Junkbuster (or the enhanced version). You might also check out AdSubtract, which is based on the Proxomitron engine but is less configurable and does a better job out of the box.

Comeback trail marred by junk browsers

Dave Farquhar Windows

Another browser. You’ve probably heard of Galeon, but have you heard of K-Meleon? Win32 browser, looks like IE, uses the Gecko engine. It’s missing a number of usability features, such as the only reasons I use IE (and the only reasons are the ctrl-enter autocompletion of URLs and the backspace key working as a back button, letting me reduce keystrokes). As soon as K-Meleon improves its arrow key support and adds ctrl-enter, I’ll be apt to change browsers again. Admittedly, I’ve entertained the idea of getting the source and taking a stab at adding the feature myself but I don’t know if I have a C compiler that’ll compile it. Since IE 5.5 makes my Win98 system bluescreen and run slow as a P100, I can’t wait. (Maybe I should run IERadicator to strip out IE entirely, then install IE5 without Active Desktop, but that’s a bit of effort. Hmm.
I’m bitter at IE5.5 because it bluescreened my system last night while I was downloading a rare live version of Aimee Mann’s “Long Shot,” which, while profane, is probably the best song she ever wrote. And wouldn’t you know it, when I came back online, poof, it was gone. But I want to end on a positive note, so I will. K-Meleon lets you create your own keyboard shortcuts. Want F1 to stop? Got it. F2 for your homepage? Got it. Backspace to go back? Got it. And it’s small (2.8 megs) and quick. Definitely a good prospect.

Thanks to the well-wishers. If I responded to each and every one, I’d probably be back where I started, so hopefully this will suffice.

And my inning is up.

Trustworthy consulting

Dave Farquhar Windows

Friday, 6/16/00
NT security consulting. I think there’s a special place in hell for recruiters, slimebags that they are, but I’m starting to wonder if that place isn’t next door to the special place for consultants. I took a consulting gig that basically amounts to setting up an NT domain correctly–how many times does one have to say don’t put a server on DHCP, just give it an IP address? It’ll probably also involve building a Linux box to serve as a firewall, since this is a school that suspects its students have been tapping into the office network from the lab and nuking (or possibly changing) files. Kids today, I’ll tell ya…

Putting the two networks on separate NT domains and TCP/IP subnets should make that difficult, but with a Linux box that doesn’t speak SMB sitting between the two networks, it should be impossible. It’s also tempting to just unbind TCP/IP from the MS client and use NetBEUI as the networking protocol in the office for added security. That way, even if someone did manage to get into the Linux box, they still wouldn’t be able to do anything useful.

Come to think of it, with TCP/IP unbound from the MS client, do they even need a firewall? Maybe those extraneous protocols that shipped with Windows are useful for something after all… NetBEUI’s awfully chatty, too chatty for large networks, but this is a small network.

I speak harshly of consultants because my predecessor documented absolutely nothing that he did. I mean, I understand the temptation to make a client dependent on you, but if you do a good job and then hand over total documentation of their network, why on earth would any sane client go to another consultant afterward? Methinks they’d trust you to the death.

Then again, maybe I still have a naive, idealistic view of human nature…

Look out, George Brett… Can’t resist. The company picnic was today, and I played softball. Led off and played catcher (yes, I was the odd catcher batting leadoff, and the odd leadoff batter who can’t run). I went 1-for-2. Thought I stroked a single to right my first at-bat, but it curved foul, and I fanned on the next pitch. Next at-bat, with a runner on and two out, I stroked a single to right. The runner advanced to third on the play; I was thrown out trying to take second on a close play.

I thought swinging the bat would be a good test on my wrists, and it was. They held up. Hitting everything to right field indicates low bat speed, but that’s to be expected I think. I was a bit surprised I could swing the bat at all, let alone do anything productive with it. Now if I’d only stayed at first, because the batter after me led off the next inning with a long homer to center, which would have been a three-run shot if I’d been more conservative.

A lean, mean word processor for Windows

Dave Farquhar Windows

Tired of document bloat? I gave AbiWord another look because I thought it might be useful for a quick side project a friend of mine suggested (it requires quick-and-dirty creation of PDFs, I know how to make PDFs out of XML documents, and AbiWord is XML-based). It’s still not quite ready for my everyday use (I can create documents that crash it on reload), but I expect it to get there pretty quickly. One feature that impressed me is the ability to save its documents in GZIP-compressed form. While BZ2 is more effective, for text documents the size AbiWord will be creating, the difference is probably negligible, and GZIP is more widespread anyway. I created a document containing a couple of fairly long paragraphs and a lot of formatting and saved it. Then I saved it in compressed form. It was about 33% the size of the original. Nice. It opened flawlessly.
I’m also impressed with its CPU usage. I got the Win32 version, brought up Task Manager and watched AbiWord’s CPU usage as I typed. Even with spell checking on the fly turned on, CPU usage stayed below 2 percent. This is a dual Celeron-366 system, so on slower systems it’ll probably be higher, but just for comparison, I tried the same test with NoteTab. It typically ran between 2 and 5 percent. So, we’re talking a real word processor for the price of a text editor. Nice.

Optimizing Windows climbs the charts in Canada

Dave Farquhar Windows ,

Optimizing Windows is popular in Canada. I happened to check this morning, and noticed that Amazon lists Optimizing Windows as their second-best selling book in Canada. It must be riding the wave from Sandy McMurray’s recent glowing review. The title that’s outselling mine is a self-help book about sex. There’s a joke there somewhere.
So, thanks again to those of you who’ve bought it, especially those of you who happen to live in Canada–now I’ve got something to talk about at work.

One of my friends tried to set me up with the line, “I know what’s really popular in Canada…” I didn’t take the bait. Popular in Canada…? Well, one of the guys at work was griping about his econoflush toilet the other day as I fixed his Mac (there’s a joke in there somewhere too), and talking about how it’s still legal to make the old-fashioned megaflush toilets for export, so they export them to Canada, then people drive up to Windsor, Ontario, buy them, and carry them back across the border. This is incredibly fuel-efficient, by the way–aren’t environmentalists clever? He was lamenting that he hadn’t done that the last time he was in Detroit. So I said, “What, toilets made in the USA?” That got me a funny look.

[Optimizing Windows did reach #1 a few weeks later, giving me five minutes of fame. It fared reasonably well in Britain as well. It never did sell well in the States.]