Category: Software and Programming

Categories
Software and Programming

Adobe Acrobat as a spellchecker

Shoshanah Forbes posts a neat tip about using Adobe Acrobat (with OpenOffice) for verbal proofreading of long documents – Use OpenOffice to create a “tagged PDF” version of the document, and then use the free Adobe Acrobat Reader’s Read Out Loud option (in Acrobat Reader 7, that’s in the View menu) to listen to the document – misspelled words will be easy to notice by the way they are mispronounced.

It sounds a bit like a Speak&Spell, but it does sentences quite well (with the pauses of the punctuation), and has a much, much better vocabulary. Not as fun as the voice-activated Mac (Computer! Start FireFox!), but amusing in its way. And now, apparently, even useful.

Categories
Software and Programming

Stupid programming languages

Greg Costikyan lists some examples of completely impractical programming languages, like Intercal, brainfuck, Unlambda, Funge-98, Haskell and Malbolge.

Blink. Haskell?

Categories
Oddities Software and Programming

Hard for people to accept AI coded in JavaScript

Bruce Sterling found this timeline to the Singularity written by someone promoting open source AI. Sterling: The awesomest part of this cosmic prediction is the notion that open-source guys can deliver on time.. That timeline page has the line Contra-Singularity aspects : Hard for people to accept AI coded in JavaScript, which I found funny. They also have a link to this open source AI model thing. The whole web site / net looks like spamblogger mimicking a mentally-defective AI with English as a second language (first one must be Forth). I guess that’s appropriate.

Categories
Blather Roleplaying Software and Programming

Four things

Dave Winer said something about the web being indistinguishable from Journalism. Certainly it’s been looking to me for the longest time as a sort of infinite magazine rack, and I see that just like those endless inner pages of the lifestyle section of the daily papers, the Internet – and the blogging bit in particular – shows a great fondness for lists.

Like, here’s a list of top ten bits of programming advice to NOT follow, and here’s a big list of over 300 freeware utilities, organized by the problems they solve.
A list that would be right at home in the lifestyle section is Five things likely to make you happier in the short term, which I found to be very true and even cheering. Get Out of Your GMing Comfort Zone, which I ran across on the same day, really felt like a continuation of that – better living advices for GMs. Or maybe this is just spending too much time with Israel, for whom every advice on improving your lifestyle is really about improving your GMing.

Of course, while taking a walk (like I did on Saturday or writing a review (like I did on Monday) is indeed a great way to feel better in the short term, it wears off.

Categories
Blather Software and Programming

That PDF printer that doesn’t suck

Yesterday we arrived at Bo for game, only to find that his entire family had descended upon his aerie, and his mother and sister had taken over his computer to produce some intricate catalog for a collection of exotic antiques collected painstakingly from the darkest corners of war-torn Africa, in that desktop publishing solution of champions, Microsoft Word.
Much anxiety permeated the room, as we waited for them to go away so we could get about our business and play, while they struggled with the logistics of what they were doing, and Bo writhed in the anguish of having someone else sitting at his computer.
Then I suggested that Bo save their catalog as PDF to help them, but Bo didn’t have an available thingie for that; Israel said “OpenOffice“, Bo’s sister talked on the phone to her husband who suggested Acrobat, and I recalled I had a splendid PDF printer driver, that was available somewhere on SourceForge. Searching SourceForge was worse then useless, googling turned up a lot of commercial shills and ghostscript-dependant (seperate download) POSs. If only I could recall the exact name – was it called PDF Writer? PDF Printer?

No, damn it, it’s PDFCreator. It’s a fine piece of software that should be on every l33t personpower user‘s PC. But even computers can’t think straight in such clouds of anxiety.