Monthly Archives: November 2004

Expressive Speech

By | November 30, 2004

The Baltimore Sun published an excellent, detailed article on expressive speech synthesis [requires free registration] that focuses mostly on work going on at IBM. The resulting speech synthesizer would be not only be able to laugh, cough, pause for a breath, and say uh and um, but would also be able to smoothly switch between… Read More »

XML-Based Programming Languages

By | November 28, 2004

My main experience with XML-based programming languages has been with VoiceXML. One nice advantage of an XML-based language is that the syntax checker is essentially free, assuming the language provides a DTD, or preferably a Schema. Of course, most language compilers and interpreters also come with a syntax checker, so the DTD/Schema advantage is primarily… Read More »

NVIDIA, UT 2004, and FC2

By | November 27, 2004

I previously posted on getting the Unreal Tournament 2004 demo working on Fedora Core 1. The biggest problem was getting the right NVIDIA video card drivers installed. Now that I’ve upgraded to Fedora Core 2 on my desktop, I have given up on the Livna NVIDIA drivers and am now using NVIDIA’s proprietary drivers. The… Read More »

BookPool Discounts O’Reilly

By | November 19, 2004

If you’re a fan of O’Reilly (the book publisher, not the obnoxious lout on Fox who is discounted by nearly everyone), you should check out the big sale on O’Reilly books at BookPool. They have over 500 O’Reilly published computer books on sale for 43% off. Though I already have more books than I could… Read More »

Firefox 1.0

By | November 16, 2004

It has come to my attention through my website reports that some of you are stil using Internet Explorer. Are you mad! Good god, my dear person, won’t someone think of the innocent computers, i.e., mine, that are subject to spam and hacking zombie attacks caused by people who use IE and have their computer’s… Read More »

Fedora Core 2 Upgrade

By | November 13, 2004

It seems like only a few months ago (August 22nd, to be exact) that I upgraded my Linux install from Fedora Core 1 to Core 2. Now, Fedora Core 3 is already out. For now, I’m going to leave FC2 on the desktop PC, but I will put FC 3 on my new laptop. Anyway,… Read More »

Wicked Cool Boots

By | November 6, 2004

Perhaps due to the influence of having lived in Texas for ten years, I was overcome about five years ago by the need to buy some cool-looking cowboy boots. Unfortunately, they weren’t the pair you see on this page. While I had thought my boots were pretty cool, my next door neighbor has since tipped… Read More »

Fighting Spam Comments on WordPress

By | November 3, 2004

After many months of getting no more then a handful of spam comments per day on this blog, last week I started getting 50-100 spam comments a day. While almost all of them were caught by WordPress and put into the comment moderation queue, I was wasting a lot of time each day deleting them… Read More »