I know this is old news by now, but while browsing some of my older posts, I remembered this news I read a while back in the New-York Times: Google Adds Searching by Voice to iphone. In April 2007, I had posted about the fact that it looked like Google was stepping in the voice industry because they had come out with a new product called Goog411.
Now with the introduction of search by voice on the iphone, Google is literally, and figuratively, making people talk in the Speech industry. Don’t get too excited though, Google’s “new invention
” isn’t new at all. In fact, Nuance has been doing exactly this for two or three years already with a product called Nuance Voice Control. It’s an incredibly useful application that lets you make phone calls, search the web, dictate emails and view web pages on your mobile by using your voice instead of typing.
So, basically, the only one thing innovative about the speech capabilities of the iphone is that you can initiate the speech detection by simply tilting the iphone in a certain way. The same way the iphone will use the movement detection sensor, Google calls it the accelerometer, to change the image of your album cover when you tilt the phone horizontally. Anyways, as I said earlier, I’m interested to see where Google will take their speech recognition endeavors next. After all, the mobile industry is only growing (Estimated to 3.6 billion subscribers in 2008), and speech is the most natural input to a mobile phone.
I’ve often found myself in the situation where I need to quickly fix the file mode from ASCII to Binary in CVS. Here are quick instructions:
cvs admin -kb BinaryFile.xls
cvs update -A BinaryFile.xls
cvs commit -m "make it binary" BinaryFile.xls
I’ve been playing around with bash for the past two years now, and found some of these keyboard shortcuts to be very useful. I’ve tried to put the ones I use the most often on here. For other cool bash shortcuts and tricks, visit
- CTRL + R: Reverse search through history for a previously used command;
- CTRL + A: Moves your cursor to the beginning of the current line;
- CTRL + E: Moves your cursor to the end of the current line;
- ALT + F: Moves your cursor forward one word on the current line;
- ALT + B: Moves your cursor backward one word on the current line;
- CTRL + W: Deletes the word before the cursor;
- ESC + D: Deletes the word after the cursor;
- CTRL + U: Clears the line before the cursor position. If you are at the end of the line, clears the entire line;
- CTRL + K: Clears the line after the cursor;
- CTRL + C: Kills the current running process;
- CTRL + Z: Suspends the current job and runs it as a background process;
- TAB: Auto-complete files and folder names;
For the sake of completeness, I’ve added these other shortcuts that I saw on another website. However, I find that I do not use those on a regular basis. In reality, there are plenty more bash keyboard shortcuts around, but I just never bothered trying them out yet… For a much more extensive list of shortcuts (way too extensive for my tastes), visit web hosting uk’s blog post on the subject.
- CTRL + L: Clears the Screen (I use the “clear” command);
- CTRL + H: Same as backspace;
- CTRL + D: Exit the current shell (I type “exit” in Putty);
- CTRL + T: Swaps the last two characters before the cursor;
- ESC + T: Swaps the last two words before the cursor;
- CTRL + XX: Moves between end-of-line and current cursor position;
- CTRL + Y: Recovers previous deletion (Not file deletion!);
