Toluu

Advocate's Studio

Musings on the Law, Research, Writing and Technology

So Long, WordPress.com, It’s Been RealDecember 14 2009

For well over a year now, I have relied upon and have greatly loved my quaint, little home here at advocatesstudio.wordpress.com. It has been much like living in a gated community of condominiums, each with its own little terrace or deck and monthly maintenance (free!) taken care of by the benevolent management group. It has been a stable, safe ride, for which I will ever be grateful.

But is time to move on, with or without the loaded six-string on my back.

Over the weekend, as part of my major on-line overhaul, I moved my young blog over to its own home, with its own yard to play in. I decked it out with some nice landscaping, plenty of yard toys and nice furnishings inside. With the “help” (ulp!) of my new host, I am taking on the maintenance responsibilities in exchange for the flexibility of home ownership. I am hoping it is a positive trade-off.

In any event, Advocate’s Studio’s new home is at the aptly-named advocatesstudio.com. To reflect my undying love for cool, flashy gadgets like my iPhone, the new theme is iPhone-like, and the new mobile theme is even more iPhone-like. I am, of course, first and foremost, a geek. Plea

Do You Twitter? There’s An App For That.December 10 2009

When it comes to apps, apparently the iPhone has nothing on Twitter. From the humble inception two years ago of a single Twitter app, Twitterverse tools have since multiplied 50,000-fold. Fifty-thousand! The Next Web reports on comments to this effect by Ryan Sarver, Twitter’s Director of Platform, at the ongoing Le Web Conference. Sarver confirmed Twitter’s commitment to application development by, among other points, advising that Twitter would be opening its firehose and that it would be launching a developer’s platform. So, expect more Twitter tools from third parties. Aggregation and rating sites like oneforty, which seek to organize the plethora of existing Twitter applications, are bound to become more popular.

I availed myself of a few Twitter tools yesterday. I spend some quality time finally personalizing and activating my Twitter background. Using my vector graphics program, a free on-line Twitter background editor and a Firefox add-on that lets me drop active links onto my Twitter background (

The Dragon On Your iPhoneDecember 8 2009

Way back in the day, I always thought it extremely cool when the crew of the Enterprise used to speak out load to the ship’s computer and Majel Barrett’s soothing voice would respond accordingly.

Fast forward to today – I am often found cursing my iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard and the stupidly stubborn suggestions that it insists I really meant to write. Add to that the fact that there are many times I wish I could access a function on my phone without having to huddle over the screen and hunt and peck.

Enter the Dragon. Nuance Software’s Dragon Naturally Speaking has long been the name associated with dictation software for your desktop or laptop. From its humble beginnings, Dragon has evolved to become quite a powerful tool, capable of all sorts of functionality from email, to wordprocessing to search and beyond.

Nuance has now released an iPhone application called Dragon Dictation to bring some of that verbal pizzaz to the iPhone. The 3GS has limited voice functionality already built in, accessed by pressing and holding the home button. However, Dragon brings this functionality one step cooler by employing speech recognition technology to power emails and text messages and even the phone�

A Big Day for Google. Big. Day.December 7 2009

Image via CrunchBase

For those interested in search, today was a little of the Christmas-come-early variety. Google announced a group of new features that may well change how humans interact with news on the Web and on their mobile phones.

Starting with the star of the show, Google unveiled its long anticipated real-time search. Following partnerships with Facebook, MySpace, Friendfeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, and Twitter, the new Google results page will show the traditional popular items along with the latest breaking items from the real-time Web. This will allow searchers to view both the most popular items as well as tweets, blog posts, and news items as they are published. Check out the sample screen

Consulting Wikipedia Voids ConvictionDecember 7 2009

Image via Wikipedia

Outside research doesn’t help a juror’s cause in Maryland: in a quest for understanding, a juror consulted Wikipedia about two medical terms that may have swayed the juror’s decision to convict a homeless man of murder. Consequently, the Maryland Court of Appeals overturned the conviction and life sentence. The case, Allan Jake Clark v. State of Maryland, was reported in yesterday’s issue of the Maryland Daily Record. According to reporter Steven Lash,

the juror’s Wikipedia search denie