It has been a long time coming, but the Java library for RSS and Atom utilities called ROME has finally made it to version 1.0 (changelog). Thanks to all of the contributers and the hard work on the dev team for making it possible!  

New to ROME? For a quick tutorial on how to get started, check out my piece on XML.com : “ROME in a Day: Parse and Publish Feeds in Java“.

Fox News has an “Automatic Transcription” feature for its videos.  The disclaimer of “may not be 100% accurate” is understated by 95%.  Here’s the presidential oath of Barak Obama, the way their transcription software heard it:

“I. — Barack Hussein Obama I solemnly swear Barack Hussein Obama do solemnly swear. That I will execute the office of president of the United States faithfully — execute … Get off faithfully the president the office of president and — I just — the United States — wheels. — the best of — ability and will miss my children. Preserve protect and defend the constitution of the United States. Preserve protect and defend the constitution of the United States so help you got so homey — congratulations mr.”

"I will miss my children."

Woops.  To be fair, there were two people talking at the same time, which is a nightmare for voice recognition software.  

But you’ve got to love phrases like “Get off faithfully the president”,  ”will miss my children”, and “so help you got so homey.”   Maybe Fox News should hire out the transcription software as a writer for Saturday Night Live… it’s funnier than most of the people they’ve hired.

Ever wanted to defragment a certain file or collection of files on your Windows PC, without defragging the entire hard drive? Here’s why and how you can do it:

Don’t Bring Me Down

I recently noticed that one of my oft-used Windows applications was getting slower and slower. After checking the usual suspects in Task Manager (Windows Search, Norton AV, you know who you are), I also checked to see if my hard drive needed to be defragmented. At first glance, the answer was no: the defrag tool reported “You do not need to defragment this volume”. I looked at the volume report, however and saw that many of the worst-fragmented files were used by my oh-so-slow application.

Any time an application needs to read or write to heavily-fragmented files, it has to go on a treasure hunt all over the hard drive platter. Since disk I/O is an expensive operation, defragging those files can boost application performance considerably. It might also save you from some nasty crashes.

The problem is that there is no guarantee which files the Windows Defrag Tool will touch. You can defrag the whole disk only to find out it skipped your files anyway. Yeah, that happened to me. Twice more than I care to admit. Mr Gates, I’d like my 2 hours back.

So I did a treasure hunt of my own, and found a fast and free tool designed to solve this very problem…

Contig To The Rescue

Contig v1.54 is a free command-line tool that works on Windows NT, XP, 2000, and Vista. It will analyze and defragment a file or a set of files matching a wildcard. Contig is fast, tiny at 55KB, easy to use, and can even be killed in the middle of processing without corrupting your drive. Here’s how to start single-file defragging in 5 minutes, or your next pizza is free: [Read more →]