Fun with US Airways

By | December 26, 2004

I’m back from vacation, but am unfortunately one of the people who has suffered due to the current troubles at US Airways. My outbound flight from San Francisco to Orlando (I went on a cruise, not to the Disney greater metropolitan theme park) was operated by United, codeshared with US Air. Unfortunately for me, the… Read More: Fun with US Airways »

Installing Python on Shared Server

By | December 14, 2004

Note to Self for Future The following steps are for installing Python 2.4 on a shared server. After ssh’ing to the server: $ wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.4/Python-2.4.tgz $ cd Python-2.4 $ ./configure –prefix=$HOME/lib $ make && make install $ ln -s $HOME/lib/bin/python $HOME/bin/python/bin/python Credits: Thanks to Uche Ogbuji for publishing IRC transcript excerpts that reminded of the… Read More: Installing Python on Shared Server »

Thanksgiving Surprise

By | December 13, 2004

Nicholas decided to be the Thanksgiving surprise. However, he easily outweighed the twelve pound turkey we had purchased, so it was pretty easy to tell that a switch had been made. That and all the black fur poking through the holes in the box.

Free Credit Reports

By | December 2, 2004

If you live in the Western United States, as of today you can get a free credit report from each of TransUnion, Experian, and Equifax. You can do this once per year. Check out AnnualCreditReport.com to see when you get your chance if you don’t live out west. Update 12/9: I corrected the above URLs.… Read More: Free Credit Reports »

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: Expressive Speech »

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: XML-Based Programming Languages »

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: NVIDIA, UT 2004, and FC2 »