Head over to http://michaelkimsal.com/twitspeak/ to listen to my recent twitter stream. I’ve got it listing my friends’ messages, but mine get in there too apparently. I know people have done some integration between voice and twitter, but I’ve not seen anyone doing this yet. Having done it, I see why 
Text to speech technology just doesn’t cut it right now. Have fun with it anyway – the code to make it happen is posted for your enjoyment.
Archive for the ‘Blogging’ category
Listen to my twitter messages
March 4th, 2008Audible commenting v2
March 2nd, 2008This is an example of the audiblab system for recording and embedding your voice messages.
Visit audiblab.com to try it out yourself…
Audible comment system
March 1st, 2008I’ve been wanting something like this for a long time, if for no other reason than to prove I can do it. I looked a bit at mychingo.com, but they force java applets on you, and I’ve never had good luck with audio and java on linux. Also, it’s a separate hosted service and I like to be in control of the bits, at least at the beginning so I know what’s going on. Lastly, the mychingo service seems to be on hold, and it costs money. I might pay a few bucks a month if I knew it was going to continue.
Anyway, this is still all just alpha, and I might take it off, but for now, have fun playing with it. Send feedback – audio or text – to let me know what you think of this.
There’s a 30 second limit, which should be fine for most people, and it requires a decent upstream connection as the recorder streams the data up at about 11k per second. Not sure if that’s bits or bytes, but you need to be connected anyway. However, if you’re reading the blog you’re likely connected at least some of the time 
What I’ve been up to lately
February 28th, 2008These deserves more than a twitter…
1. I just got my copy of Scott Davis’ “Groovy Recipes” book – I’ll be posting a review as soon as a I can. First impression is about a 8.5 out of 10.
2. Just came across this -> http://froth-and-java.blogspot.com/2007/06/html-screen-scraping-with-groovy.html <- didn’t know about tagsoup parser (seems very handy) and want to try some twitter scraping when it’s up for more than 5 minutes
3. Been doing a bit of flex/audio code for an idea I’m working on. I’m more impressed with it (flex) now than I was a year ago.
4. I have a collaborator for my book – hopefully we’ll have that wrapped up in the next few weeks and off to the publisher.
5. Doing some contract PHP dev work, adding new features to a poorly documented mish mash of PHP code. There were multiple attempts at abstracting business logic and presentation, but they’re not consistent and, imo, mostly wrong. Abstracting at a bad level is almost as bad as not abstracting at all. I’m throwing away about half the code, and have about half that thrown away functionality reimplemented in new objects with unit tests (about 50 so far). I should have another 20-30 tests written tomorrow which will round out the basic functionality, and I should be able to have most of the front-end redone to use the new classes before a Monday afternoon meeting. I couldn’t do this without getting to the point of saying ‘enough – I can not work with this code in its current state anymore’. After that it was easy. Mind you, I don’t have time to rebuild the entire thing (wish I did) but it’s coming along nicely.
Grails for PHP developers part 5 is up
February 16th, 2008I’ve put up the latest installment in my “Grails for PHP developers”. Rather than delve too much more in to Grails head on, I’m taking this installment (and at least the next one) to delve more in to the Groovy language itself. Groovy offers similarities to PHP, but also many differences which can trip you up if you’re not careful. I’ll try to lay those out as best I can in the next couple of installments.
If you have a suggestion for the series – things you’d like to see covered, for example – drop me a line!
TSA blog contributors influence policy
February 8th, 2008The TSA recently (a week or so ago) put up a blog soliciting input on its operations. Within hours, there were hundreds of posts, mostly accusing the agency of either being incompetent or malicious, or of using the blog as a PR smokescreen. While all may be true accusations, the TSA responded today that they’ve made a change to policy based on feedback from blog contributors. Apparently the recent policy requirement to remove *all* electronics (mp3 players, cables, etc.) from carry-on baggage during screening is not official policy. The TSA has stated this procedure is being eliminated, and that it was just some field offices which created the procedure more or less on their own.
Expectedly this caused a number of replies along the lines of “don’t you know what’s going on in the field?” I had this reaction myself, and I just experienced this requirement to remove all electronics from carry-on luggage. This was in San Francisco just last week. Having flown through there in December, and not having to remove gear then, I figured this was a new procedure. I don’t necessarily *mind* the request – well, yes I do, but I’d rather not have the procedures at all – but *not* having any sort of written and posted guidelines about these changes was what really bugged me. Now I find out it wasn’t official policy. However, what *is* official policy is that you have to comply with all TSA officials’ demands, so in some sense it doesn’t really matter what the head office says – if random TSA employee #49152 in Dallas demands that everyone empty their bags, there better be empty bags or else.
I’d like to see a couple of changes to how the TSA handles its interactions with passengers:
- Uniform posted signs indicating what’s expected of passengers. The signs should be clearly visible and standard at all TSA posts. The signs should also have the TSA’s blog address to remind the TSA workers that passengers can report violations immediately.
- A web-based customer feedback system, like a software bug tracker. Let all issues be visible and searchable by the public, filterable by location. The TSA should use this as another measure of the efficiency of the TSA employees in the field. While I applaud the blog effort, it’s not a standard uniform way of collecting and tracking information about complaints/experiences.
What do you think?
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Ted Neward on Grails/Rails
February 3rd, 2008Ted Neward does a good job of dissecting a post from Stu @ Relevance on ‘How to pick a platform’. I won’t repeat everything said in those posts – they each do a better job of representing their positions than I could. I would take exception to Ted’s comment towards the end of his post:
My advice to Jane: pick a consulting firm that doesn’t have preconceived dogma about which web framework… or language, or any other toolset… to use.
I’m not so sure about this. Firms tend to have preconceived notions about platforms because they’ve invested time in learning and becoming masters of them. I wouldn’t necessarily want a firm with no .NET experience steering me towards a .NET platform for a project because ‘objective data’ lead them that way. There has to be a bias involved in those sorts of decisions.
The trick, as I see it, is to understand that the firm has a bias going in to the relationship. This assumes that you, the consumer of the service, have some particular IT needs that need to be aligned with (if you’re a Java shop, you’ll look at Java options first before looking farther afield).
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The power of reddit
December 23rd, 2007I was amazed at how much traffic my recent blog post on PHP was getting. After going through my logs some, I noticed much of the traffic – over 80% – was coming from reddit.com. This one post has garnered more than 3000 visitors, and that’s only by 5pm today. I wouldn’t be surprised if it gets over 4000 visitors today, given the pace I’ve seen already. So, in short, wow. I’ve generally not bothered submitting my posts to reddit, digg or other services. Perhaps that should be part of my standard operating procedure for blog posts I want to promote. Are there any wordpress plugins to do that sort of thing for you automatically?
Latest podcast up
November 26th, 2007I put up a new webdevradio podcast last week, day after Thanksgiving (or was it the day before? I forget now). Anyway, I’ve turned on the comments – apparently there was a bug that was stopping it from working – and am inviting more feedback and audio comments from listeners. The podcast is short this time (15 minutes) but I specifically invite comments on two topics. I get a lot of questions on these two, so I opened up the floor instead of just spouting off.
1. For someone just getting in to web development, what should they study/focus on? LAMP? Java? .NET? Rails? Flash? What would you recommend and why?
2. What are some good resources for learning advanced PHP, and more specifically good PHP OO practices?
There’ve been a few good responses already at http://www.webdevradio.com, but more are always appreciated, either text or audio (just upload an mp3 file!)
Thanks!
SocialCarolina.org launched
November 20th, 2007Some area tech guys put together SocialCarolina.org, a site which maps what’s going on across the various social networks in the RTP/RDCH area. At least, that’s what I think it does, and if it’s not doing that, it should In any event, it’s a slick looking site with some definite potential. Check it out!
