At BarCampMadison3, Scott Fradkin led a discussion about this topic. I sat in on it, as did Bob Waldron (and at least one other person, though I didn’t get his name.) We talked over the idea, and Scott got “elected” to explore it more and try to do something for the upcoming BarCampMilwaukee5.

Here is the audio from the session. (There’s a part in the middle of this audio file where the fire alarm went off. We had to leave the building for 10 minutes during that time. I cut that out because it was most unpleasant. If the topic seems to veer in one direction quickly, that is probably why.)

You can also download an MP3 file if you’d like. (And for our freedom loving friends, enjoy an Ogg file.)

(Related: See the mention of BarCampMilwaukee2 and “Popsicle Sticks 2.0″ in this post.)

Also, if you want to get all of the audio automagically downloaded podcasting style, subscribe to the feed. I’ll add in more BarCamp stuff as I get it all edited and published.

How do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”?

cruiskeen @raster related to “a little bi pregnant” →

cjibo @raster 50.1% meaning the rest is crap code →

gregtarnoff @raster They started using open source code, until they got to a point where using it meant they couldn’t make money off it. →

genehack @raster I read that as “we have no idea what we’re saying but think this advances our agenda” →

mattress @raster You can alter the parts that are superficial →

tomhenrich Partly super-uber-top-triple-secret. RT @raster: how do you decipher the phrase “mostly open source”? →

I know I’ve spent time in the past arguing what constitutes “open source” and I probably won’t do that here again. At least not right now. I mean, I figure if you make your code available under an open source license, then it’s open source. There’s a whole series of follow-up questions such as: Are you a good steward of the code? Do you manage the community? Do you accept code from others and roll it back into the project? Those could all be considered parts of being a good “open source citizen” but really, the code, available under an open source license, is what probably makes something open source.

(In other news, the tweet quotes included with this post are something I’m working on to make it easier to reference tweets back on my own blog. I’ve wanted a tool similar to this for years now and haven’t seen one that does what I want. I’m sick of just using screen shots and typing things into the alt tag. There’s got to be a better way, or I’ll try to make one.)

download the large one

(consider it cc:by)

a toaster
sits alone
atop a counter
where nothing goes
…
oh toaster
you look so lonely
won’t you warm up
this waffle…
just for me?

Open you System Preferences and go to Keyboard and select the Keyboard Shortcuts pane. Click on Services and scroll down to Text until you see Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track and check that box.

Now open TextEdit and select some text and control-click (or right click depending on your computer input device) and you’ll see a contextual menu item for Add to iTunes as a Spoken Track. Select it.

Now jump over to iTunes and you’ll see the track. It’ll be called Text to Speech.

In iTunes you can highlight your track and select the File menu and then Show in Finder (or just hit command-R) and the Finder will open the folder containing your file. It’s an MPEG-4 Audio file (also known as an AAC file) with an m4a extension.

ITunes can obviously convert the file to an MP3 for you, but if you want another format (like OGG) you can use Audacity. You should be able to do whatever you need to do with it from there, (And that whatever you need to do with it bit was the deciding factor for this specific project.)

I was really hoping to use an existing test-to-speech API on the web to automatically generate the audio. Google has an unofficial Text-To-Speech API (go on, try it.) Seeing as it’s “unofficial” and didn’t work in the way I wanted to use it, and there is an awesome group where people ask about APIs and ToS and no one answers, I skipped it.

AT&T also has a great text to speech demo online, which clearly spells out how you can’t use it, which is quite helpful. (Basically you can’t use it for anything public or commercial, which sucks, but I’m glad they come right out and say it.)

There are other options (almost all commercial) including services like iSpeech, which I may look into. There may be some open source text to speech options, but as to how good they are, or how easy they are to get up and running, that is yet to be seen… or heard, as it were.

(Note: I’ve got a follow-up post coming about Mac OS X Text to Speech via the command line.. stay tuned!)

I swear I won’t use the word “evil” or “conspiracy” in this post, but…

This seems weird to me. I used Google to search for “Apple, Inc.” and I got a search result for “www.apple.com” with the title showing “Apple Computer, Inc.”

Now, as you know, “Apple Computer, Inc.” recently changed it’s name to “Apple Inc.” so I wasn’t sure why Google showed it as “Apple Computer, Inc.” I then went to www.apple.com and the title of the page is just “Apple” not even “Apple Inc.”

So that begs the question… What’s up? If they indexed the page the same as they index every other site on the web, why does it not match? Is Apple feeding a different result to the Googlebot? (A quick test with Perl’s LWP::UserAgent says probably not.) So really… what’s going on? I’d like to know…

I know I’m in a small minority, but I actually like having things under my control. My web site, and even my comments… and if they fail, well, they fail. Everything fails at some point, but I guess I feel more comfortable knowing that when things fail there is at least some chance I can do something to fix it. Reboot the database server, reboot the web server.. something. When a cloud(ish) service fails, I just feel totally helpless. Like some kitten in a silly photo.

And while it’s fun to look at silly photos of kittens if you’re not the kitten, it may not be as much fun if you are the kitten.

(And yes, I am aware of the irony in this post, life is an ironic thing, or so I’m told.)