It is really great to see Raphael Nunes persist with his GSOC project from two years ago. Speech recognition is an often overlooked assistive technology on GNOME. His GSOC project, GNOME-Voice-Control, is a good proof of concept to what is possible with available speech recognition technologies like Sphinx. Unlike last night’s personal demo, the demo during the presentation worked, and received applause.

There is a lot more work to be done, but Raphael has a lot of enthusiasm and ideas. Now that he has more time on his hands, I hope we get to see more and more compeling features, and perhaps, maybe, have software that would provide full speech control of the desktop.

Overall, I am very pleased with the accessibility-related talks we had this year. I counted so far Sandy‘s UIA talk, API‘s Cally talk, and Raphael’s speech talk. There might have even been a few that I missed. This is an improvement from the last GUADEC I was at, when I was the only one with an accessibility-related presentation.

Early Thursday morning I get on a plane, and start the long and winding journey to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Two weeks ago I could not not imagine boarding another plane, luckily I have recovered from my previous travel fatigue, and I am excited to go! This would not have been possible without the generous sponsorship from the GNOME foundation. It has to be the greatest community around. I also look forward to meeting the second greatest community – KDE. It will also be nice to meet new friends and get re-acquainted with old ones.

I used to love sahlab from a mix when I was in Israel. Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to make it until recently. If you are going to be in Istanbul this summer, you will probably get the real stuff. Oh, how I envy you.

• Half a liter of milk.
• 3 tbs. of corn starch.
• 2 tbs. sugar.
• 1 tbs. orange flower or rose water.

Pour milk in saucepan, leaving about a third of a cup out. Use the remaining milk to emulsify the corn starch. Boil the milk in the saucepan with the lid on. When the milk comes to a boil, add the emulsified corn starch, sugar and flower water. Continue stirring on a medium flame until the milk thickens.

Pour in to cups and garnish with crushed nuts and cinamon.

The flavor that I am familiar with comes from “mey zahar”, orange flower water, I was surprised to find this stuff in QFC in the cocktail mixer section.

I spent some time today going over some details for a Passover Seder that I am helping to organize. I needed to know how much wine is in a standard Manischewitz bottle.

The internet is mainly safe for children, as long as you keep them away from porn and information about Manischewitz.

I hope schools have updated their blaklisted sites on their web proxies.

Mike came out with another monthly mix. He gave it to me last Friday. This time the theme is “the many shades of love”. It’s pretty heavy on the R&B, but also a nicely rounded playlist.

You could listen to it here.

• Nina Simone – Since I Fell For You
• Talib Kweli/JayZ – Officially Missing You
• Jill Barber – Hard Line
• Bottleneck – Late Night Early Mornings
• Marvin Gaye – Yesterday
• The Avett Brothers – Shame
• Maroon 5 – This Love (Kanye Remix)
• Bother Ali – Forrest Whitaker
• Thao – You’ve Really Got A Holed On Me
• Grizzley Bear – Knife
• Grizzly Bear – Knife (Girl Talk Remix)
• The Roots & Erykah Badu – You Got Me
• Ghostland Observatory – Move With Your Lover
• The Gossip – Your Mangled Heart
• The Postal Service – Be Still My Heart
• Cat Power – Where Is My Love
• Julie Delpy – A Waltz For A Night
• Ms. Dynamite – Now You Want My Love
• Nina Simone – Black Is The Color Of My True Love’s Hair (Jaffa Remix)
• Andre 3000 – Happy Valentine’s Day

Last night I went to a Vanadu dinner, or a Vannadinner. I know what you are all thinking, “Vanadu? Is that a van full of commuters who go to work at Microsoft every day together and talk on the way about nothing in particular?”, the answer is yes. Not such a long time ago I used to work in Redmond too. The absolute best part about this period was the commute in Vanadu. So Vince let me know about an upcoming Vanadu social gathering, I was so excited to talk about nothing in particular again. It turned out that I didn’t really get to idle with the folks I knew since Vanadu has moved on since I left, and found other regulars, but the conversations were just as unimportant as usual, so I was not disappointed.

The Vanadinner took place in at Artemis which just opened this fall. The owners, Boris and Oscar, are ex Microsoft employees. And FOVs (Friend Of Vanadu). So it was nice to have it there. It’s also two blocks from my home. From people were saying the food is lovely, it is a lot of meat and seafood, so I didn’t really have anything special, but I bet with time they will discover the hidden demographic of vegetarian foodies. But I found solace in their excellent hot totties.

We just released Accerciser 1.1.5 today.

The learning curve for making your application accessible has just been made shallower. A long while ago Peter Parente created a plugin for Accerciser that would allow different kinds of validation for target applications, the most common use case is for developers to quickly find potential gaps in their program’s accessibility. It has been sitting in bugzilla for a long time. This has been a requested feature for a while, and I am super glad we could offer it.

Extensible extension

This validation plugin is actually extensible in itself with useful test schemas, for now we have only one schema called “Basic” which has a random collection of tests. We hope to expand this to different use cases, for example a schema for Orca developers that would help to quickly discover screen reader a11y issues with different applications.