Speech processing is an important technology for enhanced computing because it provides a natural and intuitive interface for the user. This chapter explains the Microsoft Speech Application SDK, shows you how to create, debug, and tune a speech application, and how to set up a telephony server.

Motorola AltiVec can dramatically improve the performance of many tasks, even tasks that you might initially think are too linear to get much advantage from parallelizing. This article looks at some real-world code that processors might spend a serious amount of time running, and shows how to tweak it to get extra performance.

This document explains the use of threads in Symbian OS. When using threads, synchronization and mutual exclusion must be considered in order to get thread interactions safe.

The future is mobile. That much we know for sure. But it seems that the operating system world in this market is being rapidly taken over by --again-- Microsoft. The new smart phones are are using WinCE, Symbian or Palm. Linux has barely 1% of this new, smartphone market.

Some Sun Engineers have started blogging about how Sun does performance work on Solaris during development. They mention that they felt they should start talking about it after Linus Torvalds said more regular performance testing of Linux would be usefull. The posts are here and here.

Learn how to develop USB drivers using this sample chapter (PDF).

Mozilla has just released version 0.8.3 of its Camino browser for Mac OS X, which uses the Gecko browsing engine with a Cocoa user interface. Release notes here.

Protothreads are an extremely lightweight, stackless type of threads written in portable C code. Protothreads provide blocked waiting and sequential code execution on top of event-driven systems, without the overhead of full multithreading or per-thread stacks. They are designed for severely memory constrained systems, has a very low RAM overhead, and can be used with or without an underlying OS. New in version 1.1 is the PT_YIELD() operation that allows a protothread to yield the CPU.

When it comes to importing generic XML into OpenOffice, the user is on his own. This article offers a quick XSLT tool for this purpose and demonstrates the Calc import of records-oriented XML. In addition to learning a practical trick for working with Calc, you might also learn a few handy XSLT techniques for using dynamic criteria to transform XML.

One of the highlights of Joe Barr's trip to Salt lake City last month for BrainShare 2005 was the opportunity to interview Miguel de Icaza, a mercurial star of the free software movement who has been responsible for hugely successful projects and also founded his own company with Nat Friedman that was later acquired by Novell.

A new programming language has been sighted, it goes by the affectionate name "nessie" and it claims to be the loch ness monster of programming languages.

At Mike Zintel's blog there is some fresh information about the past, present and future of the .NET Compact Framework and additionally some benchmarks on its speed.

After the disbanding of Acorn, an idea aired many times was the dream of getting RISC OS apps to run natively under Linux or other Unix-based operating systems. Peter Naulls contemplates the possibilities. Also, a large software corporation is exploring the possibility of using RISC OS in mobile appliances, a source has revealed. Yesterday, Drobe received videos and photos of the OS in action on mobile phone hardware, showing RISC OS booting up and running applications.

I read a lot of reviews comparing GNU/Linux and Microsoft Windows, and inevitably the topic of installing software comes up. Most reviews indicate that installing software in Windows is much easier than that of the desktop GNU/Linux world. I decided to do my own comparison based on my desktop usage to see the difference. The following are my results. Those of you that come from the Windows world may be a tad bit surprised at the ease in which software can be installed.