WombatNation

If you’re a fan of the English national soccer/football team and you think badgers are cute, you simply must not resist clicking on this link. Go ahead, I won’t tell anyone you watched it.

Jim Larson, co-chair of the W3C Voice Browser Working Group, recently posted on the www-voice mailing list that work is well underway on VoiceXML 3. He wrote:

The purpose of V3 is to provide powerful dialog capabilities that can be used to build advanced speech applications, and to provide these capabilities in a form that can be easily and cleanly integrated with other W3C markup languages.

That’s very good to hear. The SALT specification clearly provides better integration with HTML. It’s good to see that some of the better aspects of SALT will make it into an official standard.

Larson also wrote:

V3 will offer platform vendors the choice between VoiceXML 2.x or dialog markup languages that they define themselves. Cross platform support is ensured through an interoperable means to bind markup components to definitions built upon a set of primitive objects that support speech recognition, prompts, DTMF, telephony, voice verification, recording and playback. Below the object layer is an implementation layer consisting of platform functions, capabilities and technologies available either locally to the platform itself or remotely via access to services elsewhere.

I think I’ll need to know a bit more about this proposal before passing judgment on it.

One rarely advertised aspect of VoiceXML development tools and platforms is that the tools rarely generate portable, static VXML. In almost every case, the tools generate some combination of static XML and/or properties files along with servlets, JSPs, and/or Java classes that dynamically generate the VoiceXML. So, even though the end result is relatively standard VXML mark-up, the VXML is typically not generated until run time. As a result, the applications you develop with these tools really aren’t that portable. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but most of the exceptions are tools that are useful for only the most trivial of speech apps.

About a week ago, I decided I would finally abandon Earthlink as my ISP. When I got DSL many years ago through an ISP that Earthlink later acquired, I was getting about 500 kbps per second for $50/month. As of last week, I was still getting about 500 kbps per second for $50/month. After reading about several plans from DSLExtreme via SBC and other plans direct from SBC that were either much cheaper or much faster, I decided enough was enough. I use my ISP email address for only a few mailing lists, so the barrier to changing ISPs was pretty low. Since my house is just over 5,000 feet from the SBC central office that provides us with phone service, I was pretty confident I could get faster speeds than 500 kbps through the phone lines.

Then on Friday, I got an email from Earthlink telling me that within three days my download speed would be boosted to up to 3 Mbps. All I needed to do was turn off my DSL modem for twenty seconds and reboot it, and the upgrade would take effect. Tonight I did just that, and boom, I’m getting numbers ranging from 1.4 Mbps to 2.6 Mbps from the speed meter at 2wire.com. The speed comes out at a little over 1.9 Mbps pretty consistently.

This totally rocks. It’s like going from dial-up to DSL all over again.

Although I might have called Earthlink before switching, I kind of doubt that I would have. When I checked prices at their website recently, I first had to use their form to check DSL availability for my house. The response was “High Speed Unavailable…but Accelerated Dial-up access is available in your area”, despite the fact that I had submitted the form through an Earthlink/Covad DSL connection from my house. They really need to fix that.

Ever since I posted about Skype and my desire for Skyper Limited to release a Linux client, I have averaged about six hits a day from people searching on some search engine for some variant of “skype+linux” and clicking through to my site. Sorry I didn’t have much insight to offer back then.

However, Skyper has finally released a beta version of a Skype client for Linux.

If you install Skype on Fedora Core 1, be sure to download the Qt 3.1 version and use –nodeps argument for rpm. For example,

rpm -ivh --nodeps skype-0.90.0.4.qt3.1-1.i386.rpm

So, now I’m back on Skype after a long absence. My Skype ID is wombatnation.

I got my Plantronics DSP 500 headset working on Fedora (more on that later), so hopefully the sound quality will be acceptable. I’ve heard that the sound quality with the Windows Skype client has improved quite a bit since the last time I tried it.

When I bought my Treo 600, I definitely planned to use it as a mobile phone, Palm OS PDA, digital camera, and MP3 player, but I didn’t imagine I might be using it as a USB drive, too. Softick Card Export II allows you to mount the SD card in the Treo as if it were a USB drive. While you could always pop the card out, put it in an SD card reader, and connect the card reader to a USB port, it certainly is a lot easier to just connect the Treo using the USB sync cable you already have.

Right now, they claim support only for Windows 200/XP/Me, but they are working on OS X and Linux support. You don’t have to install any software on the desktop machine, but their software needs to know how to talk to the USB drivers for each OS. Hopefully, it won’t take them too long to sort out any minor differences in how the app needs to respond when talking to a Linux or OS X box. The beta version of Card Export II currently costs $15.

One of the most popular things on my website is my two-part pictorial essay describing and depicting in glorious detail the magical wonders of the Incinolet incinerating toilet at my cabin. However, I had left a major gap in the story. Sure, I included lots of photos from a charming Incinolet marketing brochure. Sure, I included lots of photos of the actual incinerator toilet at my cabin. But, did I provide my inquisitive readers with a photo of the toilet in action?

No, I did not, and for that transgression I deeply apologize and plead for your forgiveness. Without further ado, flame on!

And, yes, that is a genuine, authentic, antique (maybe) chamber pot next to the throne of fire.

Hail to the Royals – Blenheims epitomize summer’s best – Early summer heralds the coming of the best little apricot on the market – San Francisco Chronicle, June 16, 2004

Just three days after I post about the incredibly delicious Blenheim apricots I harvested off the tree in my backyard, the San Francisco Chronicle runs a huge article on the unfortunate decreasing availability of Blenheims in fresh fruit markets. The Blenheim is smaller and not as brightly colored as most other apricots, and it bruises much more easily. But, the taste is so much better. However, if a person looking for apricots doesn’t know about the taste difference, it’s unlikely she or he is going to pick the smaller and less attractive, but more expensive, Blenheim.

In our backyard we have an ancient Blenheim apricot tree. As you can see in the photos, it’s amazing that the tree doesn’t simply fall over. The base of the trunk is almost completely gone. Although I do have a redwood planter propped up against part of the tree, I can remove the planter without affecting the angle of the tree. I leave it there as backup support so we can maybe get an extra year or two out of the tree.

Not only has this very old tree remained standing, but it also still produces a great bounty of delicious apricots every three years. Our tree seems to go through a three year cycle of almost no fruit, a moderate amount of fruit, and then lots of fruit. Until I tasted the fruit of this tree, I thought apricots were terrible.

The harvest time for Blenheims is incredibly short. Unfortunately, the birds, squirrels, and bugs will gladly start eating the fruit while it is still quite green. As soon as the green tinge is gone or mostly gone, I have to harvest the fruit as quickly as possible, or the animals will take them all within just a few days. I was lucky this year to get most of the fruit. Harvesting the apricots is made even more difficult because the fruit has a very thin skin and is easily bruised.

A 50 point bonus goes to the first person to identify the reference in the title of this post.

A couple years ago I decided I wanted to learn how to program in Python while building a couple web-based speech applications, e.g., SoccerPhone. Since I decided to build the dynamic part of the applications as CGI scripts, I needed to find a webhost. After a long search, I lucked upon DreamHost.

Over the last couple years, DreamHost has several times upgraded the hosting plan that I am on at no cost to me. I think my original plan just over two years ago was 500 MB (or maybe even less) of disk space, 10 GB of bandwidth, 3 fully hosted domains, and 15 sub-domains. I now have 2.5 GB of disk space, 64 GB of bandwidth, 15 fully hosted domains, and 75 sub-domains. That beats the hell out of Moore’s Law.

On top of that, they also just announced a 20% discount if you pay for two years in advance. If I sound like a happy customer, that’s because I am.

If you use Gallery for your online photo album, be sure to upgrade your install to Gallery 1.4.3-pl2, which was released June 1. Fortunately, upgrading Gallery is very simple if you haven’t modified the base PHP files.

After you transfer the appropriate install file to your web server, follow the standard Gallery upgrade instructions. Be sure to read the comment at the bottom of the page about navigating up one directory before trying to backup your current gallery directory.