WombatNation

Not realizing there was a surfeit of newline characters in a largish mysqldump file I was analyzing, I tried to open it in TextMate. After a few minutes of listening to the hard drive in my Mac thrash away, I had to kill TextMate. One obvious solution was to split it into multiple lines, but obviously I couldn’t use TextMate for that.

Fortunately, the Unix utility sed is a great tool for problems like this. My file had the character string “\n” between all the parts that were reasonable to split into separate lines. The following command did the trick:

$ cat source.txt | sed 's:\\n:\
:g' > dest.txt

First, I used the cat utility to pipe the contents of source.txt into sed. Then, I used the substitute command to replace \n (the extra backslash is needed to escape the special treatment of backslashes) with a carriage return. The \ at the end of the first line escapes the literal new line character that causes the shell to go to the next line. The g tells sed to make this substitute globally throughout the file. I then redirected the output into dest.txt.

Sweet, sweet, Unix.

Just finished watching Germany play Turkey in one of the semifinal matches of the Euro 2008 tournament. I enjoyed a smooth, malty Jubelfestbier from Bamberg during the match in support of Germany, though I’ve been very impressed by the Turkish team, and am sorry to see them go. They made some amazing comebacks, but time ran out on them tonight.

There have been some incredibly exciting matches in this year’s tournament. From the complete domination of the Dutch over Italy and France, Turkey’s astonishing last minute heroics against the Czech Republic and Croatia, to the skillful attacking from both sides in Germany versus Portugal, it’s been a great tournament for a neutral spectator.

In today’s match, Germany’s Philip Lahm was burned time after time on defense, especially on the Turk’s second goal. On the other hand, the referee should have awarded the Germans a penalty kick when a Turkish defender clattered into Lahm just inside the penalty box. Instead, he didn’t even call a foul. But at the end, Lahm became the hero by scoring a brilliant goal in the last minute of regular time.

I would normally pick Spain to easily defeat Russia in the other semifinal (after all, they already beat them 4-1 in group play), but the Russians have pulled themselves together and are playing great soccer. This is by far the best Russian team I’ve ever seen, but I still think the Spaniards are the best team and have the best chance to win it all.

The San Jose Earthquakes played their first regular season home MLS match (though at the Oakland Coliseum) last Saturday since the team got moved to Houston by the low lifes at AEG. Sadly, they lost 1-0 to the Chicago Fire, though the Earthquakes far outplayed the Fire. Chicago is a pretty good team, but they looked pretty bad on Saturday.

Blanco was especially awful. He played really well last year and earlier this year for Chicago, but he was about the worst player on the field. He tried two nifty backheels. Too bad they went directly to Earthquakes players. He also did his famous bunnyhop in the corner at San Jose’s end of the field where he grabs the ball with the inside of both feet, jumps forward flipping the ball clear of the defenders and takes off with the ball. Only this time, both Earthquakes players who were defending him easily beat him to the ball and took off while Blanco was left standing there to watch. He’s still a great player and I’m sure he’ll get better as the season goes on, thogh he definitely has to work on his fitness. He was never a threat in the open field.

The Earthquakes played very well and nearly scored several goals, with shots going off the crossbar and the post. They also defended well, giving up the only goal against the run of play when an unfortunate deflection caught the midfield out on the attack. Salinas had a great look at goal but somehow managed to lift the ball over the goal from only a few feet out. The keeper was on the ground and he tried a little too hard to lift it over him.

Tomorrow MLS Commissioner Don Garber will officially announce that the San Jose Earthquakes will return to Major League Soccer in 2008. The Bay Area lost the Quakes two years ago when hapless, disinterested owners AEG moved the team to Houston, where they became the Houston Dynamo. Fortunately, a dedicated group of fans lobbied to preserve the team name and records. The Earthquakes were MLS champions in 2001 and 2003, and the name was used even earlier by a NASL team on which Guus Hiddink and England star George Best once played.

Lew Wolff and John Fisher, business partners who also own the Oakland A’s, bought the rights to start a new San Jose Earthquakes team. After a lot of negotiations, they are now finally able to exercise their option to have the team start playing next year. Wolff has become a big supporter of soccer, and I think he and Fischer will be great owners.

The team will likely play their 2008 matches in two or three different stadiums, while the ownership team continues to work on plans for a new stadium. The descriptions that I have heard of the stadium design sound awesome. Of course, just about anything would be awesome compared to their former home, San Jose State’s Spartan Stadium. At least the beer selection at Spartan was awesome, but that’s about the only thing about the facility that was great.

Here’s some of the early news coverage:

• San Francisco Chronicle
• San Jose Mercury News
• Sports Illustrated

More info is available at the Soccer Silicon Valley website. SSV is throwing a celebration party Thursday night at the Britannia Arms Dow ntown in San Jose. I’d love to go, but I’ll be watching Sonic Youth perform Daydream Nation that night in Berkeley.

Update 7/18/07: We put down our deposit on season tickets today. Go Quakes!

Earlier tonight the US beat Uruguay 2-1 in extra time in an exciting second round match at the Under 20 Men’s World Cup. It would have been a lot more exciting if the Uruguayan team had focused on quality of play instead of alternating between diving throughout the match to draw fouls (and sadly receiving them) and trying to seriously injure US players.

After the game, one of the Uruguayan players comically complained to an interviewer that, roughly translated, “As always, it was stolen from us,” implying that the referees treated them unfairly. What was truly unfair is that Uruguay didn’t finish the match with only eight players on the field. While the referee did make a few bad calls that favored the US, he made far more bad calls that favored Uruguay. Vicious fouls by Uruguayans were regularly left unpunished. An Uruguayan blatantly kicked Adu’s legs out from under him in the penalty box while Adu had the ball, which should have led to a penalty kick, but the ref called nothing. Altidore had to leave the match with a calf injury after Caceres slid violently into the back of his legs. Caceres was furious that a foul was called, when he should have just been happy not to have been ejected with a straight red.

Worst of all was the classless display by the Uruguayan team after the match. While Michael Bradley, who had scored a beautiful game winning goal, was celebrating with his teammates, Cardaccio ran up to Bradley, spit in his face, tried to slap him, then turned and ran away like the gutless coward he proved himself to be. Then more Uruguayan players came over and tried to start fights. Finally, in the tunnel leading away from the field, an Uruguayan allegedly punched one of the volunteers.

Cardaccio had earlier distinguished himself by scoring an own goal (although, if he hadn’t lunged forward with his foot to barely reach Szetala’s shot/cross that was already headed on goal, Akpan would have slammed it home for the US). Cardaccio later head butted Szetela, yanked the front of his shirt, threw an elbow at his head, and then swung an open hand back into Szetela’s ear. The referee called nothing. Although the hits weren’t that hard, they still deserved a red card, as he intentionally swung at Szetela. Also, when the ref went to show a yellow card to another player, Cardaccio grabbed his hand and dragged it down. It’s hard to believe the ref didn’t give him a card, as well. Oh yeah, I forgot, the refs stole the game from Uruguay. Yeah, right. He finally received a long deserved yellow card in the 118th minute. I can only hope that FIFA reviews the tapes and gives Cardaccio an extremely long ban.

The thing is, there were significant stretches of the game where the Uruguayan team showed a lot of skill and outplayed an unusually out-of-sorts US team. While the US played much, much worse in this game than in their thrashing of Poland and convincing win over Brazil, the Uruguayans showed they really could play well. Too bad they don’t focus on that. I feel very sorry for the Uruguayan fans, who don’t deserve a team that behaves so poorly.

SoccerPhone is a speech application I wrote about five years ago so I could get live updates on Major League Soccer scores whenever I was away from an Internet connection. I wrote the application in VoiceXML, JavaScript, and Python. Since SoccerPhone gathers the live data by scraping information from the HTML scoreboard page on the MLS website, I often have to update my code when the MLS website changes each year. Fortunately, this year’s change was fairly minor.

1. Call 1-877-33-VOCAL (877-338-6225)
2. When asked for your PIN, enter or say 5425 (5425 = KICK)
3. When asked for your userid, enter or say 6575425 (6575425 = MLSKICK)
4. After you hear me say “Welcome to SoccerPhone”, you can say an MLS
   team name, such as “Houston Dynamo”, or say “all teams”.

Since SoccerPhone lets you request this week’s match results for a team by saying the team’s name, I also have to update the GRXML grammars when new teams are added. While I could dynamically generate grammars from the team names that the app extracts from the MLS website, it’s not that big of a deal to manually maintain the grammars. Also, manually coding them allows me to tune the gramars for better recognition rates.

If you’ve call the app before, you’ll be disappointed to hear that I am using the same lame voice talent, i.e., me. On the good side, though, I re-recorded a bunch of the prompts using Audacity. I also eliminated a little more of the TTS by adding additional recordings. I really should take advantage of the great recording studio we have at Voxify, but then I would feel obligated to use a real voice talent.

I haven’t updated the code at the SoccerPhone SourceForge project site, yet. But I will get to that soon. I got sidetracked by looking into converting the CVS repository to Subversion.

We now have our tickets for the 3 first round matches in which the US national team will play at World Cup 2006 in Germany this summer. Woohoo!!

We leave for Europe near the end of May, two weeks before the games begin. Our current itinerary has us heading first to Vienna, next to Budapest, on to Bratislava, and then to Prague before meeting up with two of our friends in Berlin.

After a couple of days in Berlin, we travel to Duisburg for the first US match in Gelsenkirchen. The US will face the Czech Republic in that match. Currently, the Czech Republic is ranked number 2 in the world by FIFA and the US is ranked number 4. We’ve come a long way in the last ten years. FIFA rankings can be pretty suspect, but there is no doubt that in the last four or five years the US has become one of the world’s major soccer powers. Odds are very slim for the US winning the tournament, though. Given that the US ended up in the toughest group (the group of death) or possibly the second toughest group, it will be a very difficult challenge just to make it out of group play.

The US-Czech match should be one of the best matches of the first round. In addition, the stadium is absolutely gorgeous; one of the nicest in all of Europe. We watched a recorded Fox Soccer World special tonight on Gelsenkirchen and the Arena AufSchalke, the home stadium of Schalke 04. The roof over the field is retractable. Much more impressive, though, is the field. The grass field can be moved in and out of the stadium. In addition to allowing more even exposure of the grass to the sun between games, it allows the stadium to be used for other events without damaging the field.

Next, we go to Bruges and Ghent in Belgium for a few days. While the beer in Germany is quite good, the beer in Belgium is even better to my taste, not to mention the Flemish fries. I consumed a draft Maredsous 8 at a pub in Oakland with my dinner tonight as part of on going regimen to get myself in the right frame of mind for this trip.

Then we drift back to Heidelberg for the game in Kaiserslautern against Italy. Since I’ve read that 1/4 to 1/3 of the residents of K-Town are US Americans at a military base there, we’re hoping the US will have good support. Of course, there are a few tens of millions of Italians not that far away, too. Italy is ranked 14th by FIFA, but they are still the popular favorite in our group and are always a tough competitor at the World Cup final.

From there, we travel to Bamberg to stay with a former boss of my wife. He now teaches English Studies (I think) at Bayreuth University. From our base camp there we will travel to nearby Nuremberg to cheer for the Yanks as they take on Ghana. Even though Ghana is ranked only 50th, they are considered to be a very good squad, and possibly even the best of all the African teams.

After two days in Munich, we catch a train back to Frankfurt to fly home. Even though we are stopping for 3 days at a time in most cities, I’m sure it is going to feel like an extremely crazy, whirlwind pace. There will be so much partying going on over there at all times, I just hope we can sneak in a little sleep. I already feel tired just writing this.

The US became the first team from the CONCACAF region to qualify for the 2006 World Cup in Germany by cruising to an easy 2-0 win over Mexico this Saturday in Columbus, Ohio. Mexico rarely threatened and took only one dangerous shot in the entire game. Keller dove to his right to block the shot, making it look like a routine save. His shot stopping ability is amazing. While the US and Mexico both struggled in the first half, the US turned it on in the second half and powered to the victory.

Mexico’s coach Lavolpe is a really sore loser. Whenever Mexico loses, he’s always full of excuses and complaints. This time after yet another loss in the US (they haven’t scored a goal here since 1999), he said “They [the US] play like my sister, my aunt, and my grandmother.” Wow, Manuel, I didn’t realize that three women from your family could so soundly defeat the entire Mexican national team. Next time, I recommend replacing the some of the guys on your team with women and maybe you will have half a chance of scoring.

Steve Ralston scored the first goal for the US by putting in a rebound after Oguchi Onyewu soared high over the Mexican defense to head a ball off the post. Just a few minutes later, the US carved up the unsettled Mexican defense as an unmarked Claudio Reyna made a sharp pass to an unmarked DaMarcus Beasley who then blasted the ball over the goalkeeper. The US then kept the pressure on Mexico the rest of the way and handily closed out the game for the win.

Tomorrow, Ajax America will announce that they are considering investing in either the San Jose Earthquakes or the Kansas City Wizards of Major League Soccer here in the US. Ajax is interested only in a supporting investment position, so both teams are still looking for lead investors. Having Ajax as part owners of the Earthquakes would be particularly sweet for me, as Ajax has been my favorite non-US club team for many years. I’ve even seen them play in Amsterdam Arena against NAC Breda.

The most likely alternative for the Earthquakes is to be sold to Televisa (owners of Mexican powerhouse Club America) and moved to Houston next year. That plan has a lot of problems, though, because they still haven’t found a stadium where they could definitely play. Though the preferred location, even if just temporary, would be the Astrodome, a different investment group has first dibs and is already negotiating to turn the decrepit, old Astrodome into a retail complex. The next best solution is the University of Houston stadium, but that would require a lot of investment to be suitable. Even then, they would have to play on artificial turf.

Hopefully, the Earthquakes current owners, AEG, will do the right thing and sell the team to the local investment team that Soccer Silicon Valley has been working with and to Ajax America.

[via Soccer Silicon Valley email newsletter]

Here’s a photo of the Ajax vs. NAC Breda match I attended a few years ago. Ajax are in red and white. John O’ Brien, an American who now plays for ADO Den Haag, started in midfield for Ajax. Earnie Stewart, an American with a Dutch mother, started for NAC.

It’s been ages since I’ve written about Soccerphone, or even about anything at all. The last few weeks have just been too hectic. But, I did find time this weekend to make a few updates to Soccerphone, which is an automated speech application I built a few years ago so I could receive live Major League Soccer scores by phone.

One update of questionable merit was to use audio recordings made by me to replace some of the prompts that are currently being synthesized by a text-to-speech engine. Not only is the use of myself as a voice talent a rather dodgy decision, but also, there is still quite a bit of TTS. I’m not sure the recording effort really improved the quality of the app that much, if at all. It was fun to do the recordings, though.

Speaking of TTS, I switched from a female voice to one of the male voices that BeVocal supports. I’m now using Reed, which is a Nuance Vocalizer voice. Not only does the app sound better due to no longer switching back and forth between genders, but the TTS engine used to synthesize the Reed voice does a much better job of pronouncing names than the TTS engine used to synthesize the Jennifer voice.

I also finally got around to adding Chivas USA and Real Salt Lake to the grammar, so you can now say them at the Team Name prompt. I added FC Dallas to the grammar, but also left in their old name, the Dallas Burn.

Another minor update was to add a dummy recognition block just before the backend query. Without this, the confirmation prompt from the previous dialog wasn’t being played until the HTTP fetch completed. Since it sometimes takes more than five seconds to get the response back, the confirmation had sounded sort of odd when it was played so late.