The listeners of
yesterday s episode of
Venty s
Hackerfunk radio show on
Radio
LoRa already know and heard it: We made
identi.ca talk. And we did it
with help of other microbloggers. (The podcast version of this
Hackerfunk episode will be online in a few days, too. Will link it
here and either Venty or me will post it on identi.ca, too, as soon as
it s published.)
A few weeks ago we thought about how we could show
microblogging on
the radio. With identi.ca s
Jabber (
XMPP) interface we have real time
access, and so the idea was born to pipe all incoming dents into a
speech synthesis system.
Then we tried to figure out which tools would be appropriate. Quite
fast, people on identi.ca as well as on the
LUGS IRC (e.g.
bones0)
pointed us to
festival and
espeak. We found no support for German in festival,
so we went for espeak although festival would have had the
advantage of the existence of a
festival
plugin for the popular multiprotocol messenger
Pidgin.
Next step was more difficult than expected: How to make a tail -f of
XMPP incoming messages? Something like
rsstail, just for
XMPP.
Although using the IM to
IRC gateway
Bitlbee (as I use it myself) and
using tail -f (or better
inotail -f ) on the
IRC client s log file
(
ii
comes to my mind for such purposes) would have been an option, nobody
had the idea at that time.
And since
@deepspawn conjured xmpptail in less than two hours we happily
took it.
xmpptail (tar.gz) is written in
Python and uses
Twisted Words (
Debian package
python-twisted-words) as
XMPP libraries.
I had to patch xmpptail slightly for unbuffered I/O, Unicode support
and for removing things we don t want to hear on the radio as follows,
but it worked more or less out of the box.
--- xmmptail.py 2009-02-25 20:47:48.000000000 +0100
+++ xmpptail.py 2009-03-07 18:48:57.000000000 +0100
@@ -1,4 +1,4 @@
-#!/usr/bin/python
+#!/usr/bin/python -u
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
# author: Carlos A. Perilla
# This file is part of Jance bot.
@@ -65,7 +65,8 @@
body = unicode(e.__str__())
break
- print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+# print("%s: %s" % (from_id,body))
+ print("%s" % (body.encode('utf-8')))
def authfailedEvent(xmlstream):
@@ -80,9 +81,9 @@
dprint('Got something: %s -> %s' % (el.name, str(el.attributes)))
if __name__ == '__main__':
- print "Starting"
+ #print "Starting"
execfile('tailconf')
- print USER_HANDLE
+ #print USER_HANDLE
me = USER_HANDLE + "/xmpptail"
myJid = jid.JID(me)
server = USER_HANDLE[USER_HANDLE.find('@')+1:]
So after configuring xmpptail to use the hackerfunk Jabber account, we
successfully ran the following script during the radio show:
./xmpptail.py while read LINE; do
if [ "$LINE" = "empty" ]; then
continue;
fi;
echo $LINE
echo $LINE tee -a xmpp-espeak.log espeak --stdin -v de;
done
At the end of the show,
@rebugger found this
howto
which describes very detailed how to get festival working together
with the non-free ( non-free as in
DFSG)
MBROLA project which offers
also the appropriate files for German. But because of how much work
this would be to get it running, I currently prefer to stay with
espeak for German speech synthesis .
Next step would be to use
mnoGosearch s mguesser
to detect the language of a dent and run espeak (or whatever
text-to-speech system is appropriate for the guessed language) with
the appropiate options for that language, because otherwise many
dents sound really funny. ;-)
Update, 15:02:
Venty gave the whole system the
name Identibla .
This week I'm at PyCon in Chicago, helping to train and supervise
the A/V team in recording the tutorials and talks. We have a lot of
inexperienced volunteers but they're learning quickly. Carl Karsten
(in charge of A/V) and Ryan Verner (another outsider with long
experience from LCA) are organising things. Ryan, Dave Noble and I
provide technical assistance to the rest of the team.
I'm also working
on my first Django app, which will be used for reviewing files. This
is essentially a clone of the excellent work done by Gunnar Wolf and
Damian Viano in Pentabarf. PyCon doesn't have a centralised
database so this is a standalone application. Ryan is now applying
styles to my horribly bare HTML, and I have a short list of bugs to
fix before we ask the video team to start reviewing.
The tutorials started yesterday and talks wil start tomorrow in
different rooms, so we have to set up all the equipment again and
reconfigure for multiple cameras. Hopefully by Saturday things
will be running smoothly and I can spend some time in the city. It
would be a shame to come all this way and stay by the airport for
the entire time!
There is a particular issue about which I am incapable of expressing my opinion. I do have an opinion about it, and I have developed it quite a bit in my own head over the years. However, if I try to voice it, something in me tells me not to.
There is another issue about which I am capable of expressing my opinion, but I choose not to. It is a highly controversial topic, and it is very likely that if I expressed my opinion about it, it would be interpreted as being another opinion, which I do not hold.
I do not know whether to call that Wittgenstein s curse or not.
Since this January, I ve been doing upstream work for Liferea. This is a great oportunity to learn C and to contribute more to an upstream project! And the atmosphere around Liferea is great. Today I ve published my 
I've been a bit surprised by the strong positive response to my 
Some guy from New Zealand 
It's time to drive some buzz this way ;-) Although this post will only be a pointer towards the Spanish post I made on 
What a happy day on the wedding anniversary of our civil marriage we got a great gift. Our 
I was listening to 
The monthly board meeting of