fakalin pointed me to this product from MSR. I was actually sort of aware of this during my stint at MSR, via overheard hallway conversations, but didn’t know it was going to be released as a product.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/redmond/projects/songsmith/

So I downloaded it to see what’s up. It has been called the reverse Karaoke program. It has only been released a month and it appears there are already a handful of parodies of well known songs. There is one that turned a rap by Eminem into bluegrass (stupid vulgar song, but anyway):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ScVTBg2vxk
(Read the article)

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Now that I have gotten seriously addicted to Tablet PC (the faux paper templates in Windows Journal alone were enough to get me hooked), I’ve been pondering about some limitations of the platform. One is authentication. One of things you are not happy to do with a mouse — which the pen is, sort of — is inputting random strings that have become of modern-day passwords.

So I understood the point of the fingerprint reader option on this build. Swipe and you can bypass having to type passwords in tablet mode when the keyboard is hidden. But I didn’t get the option, and I believe there are other alternatives.

There are many modes of biometric authentication, fingerprint, face recognition, handwriting, voice, etc., and getting nearly perfect reliability in each case is a difficult problem when used alone. State of the art is just not good enough. But combined into a multifactored authentication protocol, it may just work. Here is something that should work today with existing hardware:

That should do the trick for a quick keyboard-less authentication. Why hasn’t anybody written software to do this?

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My laptop hard drive died a painful death last week. Thanks to a friend (PGD) who agreed to be my ghostwriter for the initial draft, the process of my shuffling through the ruins is documented. This documentation is long, so it will be split into parts. The parts are assigned to the correct dates when the things described happened. Therefore, the sort order of the parts and the sort order of the dates do not necessarily match.

Part 0.

The story begins:

A 40GB laptop hard drive using NTFS became corrupted. The laptop could not boot off its normal disk, so was booted by CD into a Linux environment to recover the data. The idea was to quickly save a raw image of the NTFS drive onto another disk, and to use recovery tools on the image… It turned out this was much easier said than done.

On to Part 1.

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