WombatNation

Tuesday, the CSS working group at the W3C releasd a working draft for a CSS3 Speech Module.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is a language for describing the rendering of HTML and XML documents on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. CSS define aural properties that give control over rendering XML to speech. This draft describes the text to speech properties proposed for CSS level 3. These are designed for match the model described in the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML).

Obviously, they’ve got a few typos they need to fix.

The CSS extensions for speech look like a very promising approach for enhancing the capabilities of web browsers for the blind. The speech extensions might also simplify the creation of telephony interfaces for existing web sites, though I’m a bit skeptical about how much of a speech application you could, or even would want to, embed in CSS pages.

The company I work for had an offsite meeting today, followed by an afternoon of fun at Sunol Paintball, and I use the word fun loosely. Actually, it was fun at times. But, now, I have bruises on my right arm and left leg from paintball impacts, a swollen knuckle on my right pinkie finger (a paintball slamming into thinly covered bone hurts), many sore muscles, and a very scraped up knee. Okay, the scraped up knee is mostly my own fault for diving onto a rocky hillside to hide behind a pile of tires. At least I did avoid getting shot.

The worst, though, was when a paintball splattered off the mouth protector below my mask and sent some paint spraying onto my lips. Not only was I spitting out paint, but I was also spitting out blood from where a shard from the paintball apparently cut my lip.

On top of all that fun, I also re-aggravated my bicipital tedinitis. The paintball guns (which, by the way, shoot paintballs at over 200 miles per hour) are fairly heavy, especially when you’re recovering from a shoulder injury. It took a couple hours of ice packs on my shoulder for the pain to go away. That may have colored my experience just a bit.

My cousin’s husband is a part-owner in Tractor Brewing, which has the truly awesome domain name, getplowed.com. Tractor Brewing is a microbrewery (surprise - what, you thought they fermented tractors?) in Los Lunas, NM. A documentary on Tractor Brewing will air this Sunday night, though I’m afraid it’s probably just going to be on local television in New Mexico, specifically, WB19. Check it out if you can.

It’s been awhile since I posted about my credit report travails that were caused by an evildoer opening up nine credit card accounts using my social security number. After that experience, I compiled some useful info about identity theft prevention, as well as how to deal with it if it happens to you.

My mom called me tonight to find out how she can order credit reports. No specific concerns, but she just wanted to check them out to make sure everything is okay. What a wise mother.

While checking out the websites of the big three, I noticed that they all are offering “3-in-1″ credit report packages. I did some comparison shopping, so you don’t have to.

Experian: They’re offering the three-peat for $34.95, but they throw in your Experian credit score for free.

Equifax: Equifax counters with a $29.95 credit report trifecta, but if you want your FICO credit score, you’re gotta come up with $39.95.

Transunion: The darkhorse, Transunion, (I’m not sure why I call them the darkhorse, but I like to think that I support the underdog) delivers the bargain-hungry shopper’s bonanza with a triple credit report offering supplemented with a credit score for the low, low price of only $29.95. And not just your raw credit score, but also “personalized analysis and tips for making your score higher”. I think we have a winner.

My wife and I joined some relatives for dinner tonight in San Francisco at Crustacean, the alleged birthplace of fusion cuisine in the US. Although the garlic noodles don’t exactly qualify as fusion fare, they were quite possibly the best noodles I’ve ever had. I also had the Asian crab cake, which was a very dense, almost ball-shaped cake of Dungeness crab, pork and vermicelli.

Crustacean was good, but our favorite Vietnamese restaurant remains Le Colonial, though I’ve heard that they have had a head chef change since the last time we were there, and that the food isn’t quite as good anymore. Well, I’m sure the interior is still stunning. Le Colonial is definitely worth a visit, even if just for drinks.

After a fellow DreamHoster posted on the DreamHost discussion forums about troubles getting MoinMoin 1.2.3 to work, I decided to upgrade from 1.1 to 1.2.3. Things went relatively smoothly, at least compared to when I installed 1.1. I did discover a mistake in my instructions for installing MoinMoin on a DreamHost website, though. I fixed the mistake and made a couple other tweaks to the instructions to clean them up for Moin Moin 1.2.3.

In case you’re confused by all this, let me explain that MoinMoin is a Python-based Wiki Wiki web implementation. See, didn’t that make everything clear?

The largest of my two cats, Alexi, has always been a big fan of human food. His absolute favorite food is boiled corn, but he is more than happy to dine on bread, roasted chicken, ham, or rice. While he will eat most any type of bread, he is especially partial to sourdough baguettes from Grace Baking. He likes bread so much, he will chew through a paper or plastic wrapper to get at it. He once chewed through two plastic bags to get at some pita bread.

Here’s Alexi as a kitten (he’s now a nearly 19 pound mini-puma, more big than fat) when we first discovered that he had a corn tooth. Just after I took the photo, he finished dragging the ear of corn to the floor, where he proceeded to stand on it with one paw to keep it from running away, while he used his teeth to rip the remaining kernels from the ear so he could eat them.

Last night was a new adventure, though. I had picked up some pork chow mein from a local Vietnamese restaurant. Alexi often wanders over to my plate to check out what I’m eating, just in case I have one of the aforementioned taste treats. If he spots one of his favorites, then he darts his head at the plate and tries to pick off a snack.

My guard was down. I mean, what kind of cat likes pork chow mein, especially after eating a big meal of cat food.

In a fraction of a second, he bolted forward, grabbed the end of a crispy noodle with his mouth, and dragged it off to the floor to eat like he had just pounced on some prey in the forest. A couple seconds later, he was back to hovering around my plate, looking for one of the weaker noodles that had strayed from the pack and would make for another easy capture and slaughter.

Polite computers win users’ hearts and minds [New Scientist]

A study by Jeng-Yi Tzeng at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan suggests that computer users would be more tolerant of software programs if the programs were more apologetic, or at the very least, less likely to always blame the user. This is especially relevant to speech recognition applications.

In our speech applications at work, we build in error messages like “I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand you.” This is obviously a lot friendlier than “Stop mumbling” or “Take the marbles out of your mouth”, not that any speech vendor would build an app like that. Of course, the recognition process inherent in speech applications is more prone to misunderstandings than the control driven UI of your typical desktop or web application, so it’s necessary to be more forgiving and to openly acknowledge the inability of the system to really understand natural language.

One unfortunate downside (for the designer, anyway) of a really well designed speech application, is that users sometimes develop overly high expectations. If the recorded prompts are natural sounding and stitched together well, callers often seem to forget they aren’t speaking to a human. During one phone call that one of our apps handled, the app could’t match what the caller said to an active grammar, so the app responded with something like “I’m sorry, but I didn’t understand you.” She then replied, “That’s all right, dear.”

One aspect that really distinguishes the quality of a speech app is the ability to identify that a comment like hers, while very sweet, was irrelevant to the task of prompting her for information. Many speech apps I’ve interacted with would have confused her response with a new response to the original prompt, thus setting off another round of telling her that it didn’t understand what she was saying. That ends up making the caller feel like she is talking to someone who is rude and isn’t paying attention to her.

WeaKnees says that our factory drive failed their diagnostics. Although I was hoping it was the new drive, which would have been under warranty, I was already fearing it was the factory drive. If it was just the second drive, I would have expected that programs recorded on the original drive would have been fine. But, all the recordings were bad. Also, the errors were really unpredictable. When we replayed the same recording, the video and audio stuttering would usually occur in different places each time.

So, we’re looking at a $79 charge to have them reformat the second drive to work as a standalone. That will leave us with 120 hours of recording space, instead of 157 hours. The other option would be to replace the factory drive with another new drive, but I don’t think we’ll do that. First, we’ll likely buy an HD TiVo in the not too distant future. Also, now that I have the mounting bracket and fan for a second drive, I can easily handle getting another drive and formatting it myself. The tools for formatting drives for a TiVo are quite good.

If you’re going to be around Berkeley this Friday night and are into the blogging scene, you should sign up for the blogger dinner at Pyramid Brewery. The event is part of BlogOn 2004, which will be held at Cal later this week.

In case you’re going to be there, I’ll be the person looking like the person on this page. Sometime when I’m not working on my website at around 1 am, I’ll add more to that page.