Solipsism Gradient

Progress. Had two very nice days driving northwards in Portugal. Cascais, Sintra, Mafra and Óbidos on the first one and we slept in Leiria. Then very early today we went to Fátima where we managed to get in ahead – and leave – of the first major wave of pilgrims in for the Pentecost holidays.

We then drove northwards through Coimbra and Porto and are now ensconced in Valença, just off the Spanish border. Unfortunately the weather decided to go bad and we mostly just drove, getting some snapshots during brief pauses in the rain.

Tomorrow it’s about 100Km to Santiago de Compostela and then we’ll leave in the afternoon to do a more leisurely drive back down.

Arrived well in Lisbon, Portugal, and already did some tourism. Hotel Internet access is a little unstable though. More anon…

We’re packing for an extended trip to Europe. As usual, this will be a working vacation – I’m taking my MacBook Air along and hope to get some things done underway.

From coming Sunday, May 18, to May 26 we’ll be in Portugal – not only Lisboa but the interior as well. May 26 to June 15 we’ll be in Germany, visiting friends and relatives; it’s a long list but hopefully we’ll have time for everybody. June 15 to 27 we’ll be on a bus roundtrip to Poland, starting out from Berlin. June 28 to July 20 we’ll be on a cruise ship, visiting Norway and Iceland, with short stops at Northern Scotland and some of the Baltic capitals.

I’ll have very limited Internet access during the cruise but otherwise I hope to be able check email and post news and pictures almost daily.

Fast status update.

A couple of recent documentation and sample code releases by Apple have finally offered me the opportunity to implement a significant portion of everybody’s wishlist for Quay. In particular, I now have code running that does an exact imitation of the Tiger clicking behavior – open on left-click, pop up menu on right-click – with the option of inverting it. Early tests of allowing dragging files onto the Quay icons also are positive. Several other frequent requests from users are also being implemented, and I have some significant new functionality waiting in the wings, so to speak.

So what’s the downside, and when will it come out?

The past week has seen a sudden peak in non-related problems that had to be solved offline; also my ADSL connection has been hit by some instability. I haven’t been able to log onto AIM with any reliability, and I’ve even had to resort to dial-up now and then. No idea when this will normalize; if it’s due to the seriously unstable weather, it could go on for months.

In addition, I’ve had to return to do work, whenever at all possible, on my Objective-C 2.0 book which is now behind schedule. I’m grateful to my Gentle Editor for not emitting any too-drastical threats, but I agree with him that I need to seriously catch up. In addition to all these considerations we’re way overdue for a trip; there’s been no opportunity for any significant travel this year, and now we’ll be finally off this coming Sunday.

It’s going to be a short working vacation though: a week-long Amazon Cruise on the Iberostar. And I’ll be taking my old iBook G3 to work on the book… as usual I expect to make excellent progress. We’ve been to the Amazon twice before, so we won’t feel obliged to do all the excursions.

Coming back to Quay. The new schemes implied yet another significant recoding effort. Most everything has changed, including installation procedures. So I’ll be extra-careful with testing after I return, and I hope to have the new version ready around Christmas.

During my trip I’ll probably be offline most of the time, too – (it’s the Amazon, remember?) – so please be patient if you e-mail me.

We’re back from a 10-day vacation in São Paulo and surroundings. Good to get away, better to get back. I was offline most of the time and am still catching up on news and e-mail.

Had less time to work underway than I anticipated but I made progress on the Leopard version of RBSplitView – including the Interface Builder plugin – and had some new ideas about other things too.

The new iMacs look very nice. Wonder if the lower prices will be reflected here, though.

The iPhone update makes me almost sure Apple isn’t using the TrustZone at all. Deliberately, of course. Makes one wonder what is behind that…

…more as I catch up.

I’ve always been extremely skeptical about speech recognition. Like machine translation, it’s always been one of those technologies that for some reason is the “coming great thing” for a certain group of tech pundits, while not getting any closer (or even steadily receding) when you look at actual implementations. Here’s a particularly hilarious example. More here.

Understanding spoken language is a problem even for people. I listened carefully and, frankly, didn’t quite catch several sentences spoken by the operator in that first video. Even though he tries to avoid running words together as he would probably do when speaking to another person, he’s prone to leaving vowels out (“c’rrect”, “d’let'”, “cap’t’l”). Personally I’m able to misunderstand people in several languages, which actually adds to the problem – before decoding the words, I have to identify the language. Great fun on trips.

Somewhat unexpectedly we got a couple of the last tickets to Cirque du Soleil‘s last show in Brazil – namely, Saltimbanco, a show which we’ve seen on DVD, but never before in person. As we’re big fans of the company – in fact, nearly all of the few DVDs we own are the Cirque’s – we didn’t hesitate in booking the package when we were told it was available.

We leave in a few minutes on a bus to Rio de Janeiro. The package includes an overnight stay in a hotel, a few meals and a post-show barbecue – then it’s back home during Sunday night. We’re really looking forward to this. Normal life resumes on Monday; I’ll probably be offline until then.

This time, I’ve come back with 99% of my photos already organized. Which is good, since I took about 1500 on this trip; those new 2GB SD cards come in very handy. As you can see on the left, I’ve already uploaded several of the new pictures (and half a dozen from the August trip to San Francisco). And a few dozen more are already in the queue; I plan to upload 8 pictures every day over this week and the next.