Archive of month: 2009

Text to Speech – Festival (cross platform) and MacSpeechX (Python on Mac)

I wanted to play with text to speech, I’ve been looking for a cross-platform open-source solution that sounds reasonable.  I’m really impressed with the festival project, the web demo lets you enter your own text. Update – I’m including this post in my plans for an Artificial Intelligence Handbook. Festival is cross-platform but compiling it […]
14 years ago

ConceptNetDaily Twitter Bot

I’ve just launched my second Twitter bot – @ConceptNetDaily takes a random concept from the A.I. site ConceptNet and posts it to Twitter with a link back to the site. A tweet looks like: “When humans own horses, humans groom and ride horses.” http://tinyurl.com/ydvf7vg The TinyURL expands out to an address like: http://openmind.media.mit.edu/en/assertion/143313/ The aim […]
14 years ago

Eucalyptus Clustering – follow-up

A month back I tried to build an Ubuntu-based Eucalyptus cloud/cluster environment for a client for a parallel processing research project.  The project was thwarted by an overly aggressive corporate firewall and my lack of understanding of low-level network config-fu. I’ve revisited the project using the same machines but with an external public internet connection […]
14 years ago

Sharing the Mac OS X clipboard with X11 apps

I’m using WingIDE on my MacBook and I couldn’t get copy/paste to work between WingIDE (running in X11) and native apps.  This meant copying URLs and code snippets was impossible…hugely frustrating! There is a simple fix, as outlined here just run the Property List Editor, open the specifed .plist, tick the 5 checkboxes, save, restart […]
14 years ago

£5 App Music-Themed Xmas Special

On Wednesday night we ran our music-themed £5 App Xmas Special (fivepoundapp.com). It was fab!  John and I had a fab time organising things and watching the night run so down-to-earthly – it seems that many others did too.  I particularly like: “I bloomin’ love £5 app! The event that’s happy to be itself, and […]
14 years ago

A quick look at four chatbots

This is a quick review of four chatbot that are easily found on the web.  I’ll take a look at the granddaddy ELIZA (wikip), A.L.I.C.E. (wikip) which uses AIML, Fake Kirk (with speech synthesis and a face) and O2’s Ask Lucy. The goal of these chats was to see how each of the bots broke […]
14 years ago

Printable local data sheet for visitors?

Here’s a simple idea to help visitors to a new area.  Maybe it’s been done before and someone can leave a comment about it? The problem – when you visit a place you don’t know you have no idea what you need to see, where to get a map, which pubs and cafes are nice, […]
14 years ago

How I’m writing The Screencasting Handbook

Many people have asked why I’m writing a book without a publisher.  The story has interested a bunch of people so I’ll outline the basics here. Update: there’s a related article by Marc-André Cournoyer covering how he wrote his “Create your own programming language” eBook. I started writing The Screencasting Handbook in the middle of […]
14 years ago

Building a high performance cluster with Ubuntu 9.10 and Eucalyptus

I’ve spent the last day (almost) installing Eucalyptus on Ubuntu 9.10 to create a mini ‘high performance computing’ environment.  We’re testing the concept and could build 100+ machines if the prototype works as expected. This is a running log of my notes, for this post I only have a partial setup. Note – I have […]
14 years ago

£5 App Christmas Special – Weds 2nd December

John and I are very pleased to announce our upcoming music-themed £5 App Christmas Special on Wednesday 2nd December, 8-11pm at Hector’s House in collaboration with the lovely Playgroup guys.  Please do the usual – sign-up on Upcoming so we know how much beer to brew for you all.  If you don’t know what this […]
14 years ago