Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips
Wikipedia now allows you to gather articles into a book. You can download the book as a PDF or actually have a printer make you a hardcopy of you book.
For several years now, Wikipedia has allowed printing articles. The printed pages looked good and were easy to read. Recently, Wikipedia has added a [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
Google has an OCR program that works with Google Docs.
I found a new feature in Google Docs this morning. Google now has an online optical character recognition (OCR) service. This is some type of experiment or Beta test or something. You go to a strange URL: http://googlecodesamples.com/docs/php/ocr.php .
When you first go to that page, [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
New display apps are coming to the iPad. I am now using Flipboard (for Facebook and Twitter display) and Discover (for Wikipedia display). They both work well are are worth using.
Several months into the iPad, and better applications come along. Two of the recent ones that I am using basically take information that [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
I finally have a handwriting program on the iPad - WritePad from PhatWare. It works fine, but isn’t integrated into all the iPad apps.
Several months into the iPad and I finally have a handwriting program. I am using WritePad from PhatWare. It works just fine. I find that I can write by finger [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
We don’t accept every new gadget that comes from the mind of an engineer. New uses need to be demonstrated for new technologies to take hold. Either that or new generations come along with different values.
New technology comes every day. We immediately accept it into our lives without a thought of its long-term [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
The Technology Imperative states that if a new technology exists, we need it. Logic and business school lessons don’t matter.
It happened again this week. I was visiting someone at their office in another building. The man I was visiting was slouched over in his chair with a face that asked, “Why did I [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
We do things that we know won’t work. I don’t understand why.
We do things that we know won’t work. Some examples:
The Polygraph: This machine (the lie-detector machine) doesn’t work. People have beat it for decades. That is why polygraph results are not admissible in court. Still, lots of government and business organizations use [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
People should use the systems they build. If they don’t who will? A new concept in the military - Optionally Piloted Vehicles - once again raises the issue of using your own systems.
“Eat your own dog food.” This is an old saying in computer terms - are computers old enough to have old [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
Several weeks into the iPad has me still searching for that one great application.
Now I’ve had the iPad for several weeks. Some observations:
3G or not to be - My model doesn’t have 3G, just WiFi. This is fine for what I want to do, but I recommend a model with 3G. It seems [...]

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by Dwayne Phillips
A recent peek into the world of grad students in engineering and related fields reveals a group of people with a strong desire to work for the benefit of others.
I have been working with grad students on writing. This took many months to arrange, but for the past couple of weeks I have [...]

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