speech-recognition is an interesting application

So I am writing this entry using Dragon NaturallySpeaking, it is a pretty good program, it naturally has its quirks, but like it.
For those of you who don't know what speech-recognition is, I'm currently talking into a microphone connected to my computer. Everything you're reading is not being typed by hand, but is being spoken by my voice and interpreted into the computer by this software.

So yeah, it's pretty handy.

At any rate, I have some other things to get to, so I will be back later.

Meet the new kid...

My new computer. Plus junk on my desk.

You can't really tell in this picture, but there are neons in the case, one(blue) vertically along the back of the computer, and one(red) running horizontally along the top.

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A (rather blurry) look inside the new case, you can see the lit fans pretty well in this one. :-)

Specs on the machine:
AMD Athlon 64 3200+ overclocked to 2.03GHZ
1GB Corsair RAM
Dual 120GB hard drives (one came in the computer, I added a second.)
Radeon 9600 with 128MB of DDR on-board
8x DVD+/-RW (Dual Layer)
52x CD-ROM

I guess those are the basics, if you have other questions, ask the.
Also: I'll sell it to you if you make a decent offer, so feel free to do so.

I'm still alive!

… or something like that.

Wow! It’s been a long time since I updated here. I AM alive.. I’ve just been very busy with a lot of stuff for the last month.

Since I last updated I have been doing a lot of work at my new job plus finishing up the summer semester at the community college, yeah, I’ve been busy.

When not working or studying, I can generally be found somewhere around town with some friends and a Frisbee. Try it, guaranteed fun time had by all. :-)

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I’ve tried to take some pictures of the (damaged) Powerbook, but because of the shiny/reflective titanium surface, lighting that doesn’t go totally whack when you take a picture is hard to get. I will keep trying, but my first attempts haven’t gone so well.

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Mrs A: Read your comment on my mom’s site, I’ll email you directly as soon as I’ve completed this. :-)

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Ok, to segue back into school-related stuff. (Non-geeks can tune out now, if you wish.) I’ve had to/had the opportunity to (depends on how you look at it, I suppose.) write some (I think) pretty cool code recently.

I took a class this summer on Visual Basic .NET, there were 8 assignments total for the semester, plus mid-term and final. The first 6 assignments were pretty simple, just read the corresponding chapter(s) in the book and do some basic coding, not mindless, still mentally stimulating, but not too challenging. Well, the last two assignments changed that, completely. He introduced code requirements that were totally outside anything in the course material thus far, I was left floundering trying to guess how to perform some necessary functions to complete the code.

Thankfully, he(my instructor) called a meeting on campus and explained some concepts needed for the two assignments, this helped a lot, and I coded up both of them in an afternoon.

I think I’m going to insert some screenshots of the programs and explain what they do, I don’t know how interesting this will be to any of you, but here goes:

The first, DollarAmount, takes a word that the user inputs and calculates the dollar amount of that word, the dollar amount is calculated by taking A=1, B=2, C=3… Z=26 and adding the value of the letters together.

(Pardon the poor screenshot quality, silly JPEGs.)

 

Private Sub btnCalc_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnCalc.Click

' setup the necessary variables...

Dim strWord As String = txtWord.Text ' send the value of our TextBox to a string

Dim intCounter As Integer = 1 ' initiate a counter for our loop count

Dim intValue As Integer ' initiate a variable to hold the 'value' of the user's word

' the real 'meat' of the code, does the actual work...

For intCounter = 1 To Len(strWord) ' loop for each letter in the word..

intValue += Asc(UCase(Mid(strWord, intCounter, 1))) - 64 ' add up intValue

Next ' loop...

lblAmount.Text = intValue ' set the text of our output label to the value of the word

End Sub ' btCalc_Click

 

(Pardon the poor indentation, the code I turned in was correct, this blog-post editor isn’t very good.)

(Anyone here know why when that loop repeats, it automatically increments intCounter +1? I can’t figure out why VB .NET does… *shrug* Microsoft is weird.)

The concept behind this application seemed impossible, at first. Well, not impossible, but like I would have to write dozens or hundreds of lines of code, with many, many nested If statements. Not fun. However, a nifty trick about ASCII text was brought to my attention. That ‘nifty trick’ is this… a capital ‘a’ is given the value 65 on the ASCII table, capital ‘b’ is 66, and so forth, on to capital ‘z’ is 90, so, what happens if you subtract 64 everytime? A=1, B=2… Z=26. :-D

So, in one line of code, I could write a function that would get the ASCII value of the uppercase version of the given letter, subtract 64, and *bing* I was in business.

Sorry if I didn’t make all of this very clear, I’m just randomly spouting what’s on my mind. (Yeah, bad idea, I know, sorry!)

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The second application: FileIO – works with input and output to/from files.

I’m not going to post up the code for this one, but I will include some screenshots and explain how it functions. This assignment built on the DollarAmount application with some added functionality and a different focus, as you shall see.

Load up the application and click ‘Click Me’, (I write for function, not aesthetics, sorry.) this File Open dialog presents itself:

(Click for larger view.)

 

Click on ‘Open’ and the application parses the file and throws back all kinds of entertaining output:

On the right side we have a box that lists all “Dollar Words” the value of these words has been determined to be ‘one dollar’ (By using the formula demonstrated in the code in DollarAmount)

This application also ouputs how many words it read, how many ‘dollar words’ were found, the average value of all the words, the longest word found (Yes, it’s running OUT of that textbox..), the value of said longest word, and the text and value of the shortest word found. (This last function is obviously kind of broken, because any single letter is going to be a very short word. This is not a bug however, the code is working as designed, if someone passed a file without short words, it would still list the shortest word amongst them.)

At any rate, I got an ‘A’ in the class. :-)

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Ok, I think that may be about it for this (long overdue) update. Have a good night all.