Mostly about my amusement

Day: April 7, 2007 (page 1 of 1)

Google 411

Google 411Google’s Voice Local Search is an experimental service where you can dial their 411 information number 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) and look up businesses by voice.

I just used it and got connected to a local restaurant.

I was on speaker phone, there was a lot background noise, and the voice prompter understood what I was saying. It’s your typical voice recognition setup, just the back end is data collected by Google. The prompter was easy to understand and reacted correctly when I would interrupt it to cut to the chase. It read to me the business I selected and connected me to the restaurant.

Of course I gave the phone to Lily for making reservations. It’s not like I want to speak to a real person…

Google Labs logo lifted from their website.

Ubuntu and Steam

So far so good. I have tried the following with my Ubuntu installation:

  1. Tried to get Compiz running on my laptop
  2. Updated Ubuntu 6.10 Edgy to 7.04 Fiesty Fawn
  3. Get Steam working on my laptop running Ubuntu

Compiz works badly. I think it’s the xserver I am using. I’ve un-installed it already; my laptop probably just lacks the horse power to drive the effects.

Ubuntu 7.04 will likely be better. But I fat fingered something and ended up putting back on 6.10 Edgy.

Steam works so far. In the past I purchased Transgaming’s Cedega cause I really like what they’re doing. But this time I’ve installed wine using

sudo apt-get install wine

Steam now installs via a .msi file. So to get it installed I downloaded SteamInstall.msi from http://www.steampowered.com/ and Googled to locate tahoma.ttf font file.

I moved the tahoma.ttf file to ~/.wine/drive_c/windows/fonts/ and ran

msiexec /a SteamInstall.msi

The mouse worked but I could not get the keyboard focused on the installer. Everything I typed ended up in the terminal I used to run wine. I ended up running winecfg and unchecking the “Allow window manager to control the windows” which was enough to get it installed.

Later on I put that option back and ran wine again with this on the command line:

WINEDEBUG="fixme-all" wine "C:Program FilesSteamsteam.exe"

This was lifted from a Ubuntuforums.org page. BTW I just pasted the snippet from the web page into the WordPress TinyMCE window. All formatting was taken care of, very cool. All I did was use the Code tab to adjust the width of the box.

The installation of a Steam game created a link on my desktop complete with icon. Later on I just double-clicked that link and the Steam app is installing my copy of Condition Zero.

The only problem I have is that the Steam window stays on top all the time. I will see if I can get that fixed.