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What is “mostly open source”?

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2010-09-02

I read a description of a piece of software and someone used the phrase “mostly open source” which I found interesting… So I asked the following question via Twitter…

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.)

Tags opensource, twitter

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The Lonely Toaster

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2010-09-02

The Lonely Toaster

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?

Tags art, drawing, poem, toaster, wacom

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Mac OS X Text to Speech

Post author By Pete Prodoehl
Post date 2010-09-02

I recently worked on a project that required making audio files out of text files, which is something I’ve done before, but haven’t done regularly since 2000 or so when I was making cassette tapes of web pages. There’s a simple way to do this using Mac OS X.

Keyboard System Preferences

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.

TextEdit

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.

iTunes

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

M4A audio file

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!)

Tags api, audio, google, osx, speech, text

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I Googled Apple

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…

Tags apple, google, search