Would be very neat indeed. Voice is a tricky thing though. Not sure about sphinx..One of my ex-professors was a digital signal guy at Westinghouse for many many years. I could ask him about voice recognition stuff. He was helping a group of undergrads with a project at one time..something about people singing into their computer, and having it show the notes and pitch they were singing show up on the screen in real-time. They did it all in java, using some opensource FFT libs. pretty cool stuff actually.

I did a project with a prof. back in the day using encoding of messages into recorded voice... it worked almost in real time, but the dsp board we used was too crappy for the amount of calcs and transforms required - so it was delayed about 2 seconds... get a recorded audio track... talk into microphone while playing audio track... voice is encoded into the stream, picked up by a computer and a program ran through it to remove the audio (we had to "parse" that one first)... it was pretty cool... anyway, if you want to do voice recognition yourself, you need to look at fuzzy logic (yes, that's real) and things like that... basically an "M" sound has a different shape from other sounds, but voices have different tones and pitches and inflections and accents... you need to match the waveforms in the same way your mind knows a car when it sees one, even if it has never seen one before (4 wheels... vaguely *this* shape... steering wheel... etc)

Why not just host your own blog? I am using wordpress, and it seems to work fine for me..

less work and I don't want to go try and find a good free host... my connection isn't good enough to host off my home machines... it's just less work... in an ideal world, i'd throw dated text docs in a folder and let apache handle the directory listing - I'll call it "retroblog"

I suppose you've met migorz on IRC though.

Yeah, I had him on my jabber list for a while too... not intentionally though.

...

I also feel bad about Matthias-Christian and pacman-i18n. Almost enough to do something about it. Things always move slowly in Arch, even though we all try to pull our own weight. We really do need more devs to handle smaller things. Who wants to be my lackey? ;o)

Does it pay? :-D (I read your interview...)

I'll pay you 10 times what I make!

Maybe I could do some smaller things... as long as its interesting. I

Well, I have a bunch of things that need looking at. The things I'd pawn off on a lackey are bugs and package updates though. Until you proved yourself, at least ;)

had to quit the documentation because I don't find it interesting... I don't know what I would find interesting though. Hmmm, do you want a 3D Ensmer frontend to pacman?

I mean, its technically not *just* a GUI frontend. ;)

Well, sure it is, it's just a GUI in Ensmer instead of a GUI in X. Jason -- If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.

I18n isn't that hard. One of my projects is an Arabic concordancer. A concordancer is a simple tool that loads a large text file, say the complete works of Shakespeare, and then allows the user to search for a word or phrase. The concordance is then the target word in its context. It is used by linguists to understand how words behave, and especially lexographers when defining new words, etc.

The problem is, the ones that exist don't cope with Arabic correctly (due to its right-to-left nature). I have a number of Arabic colleagues who need such a tool, so I've been obliging. Anyway, I can't read or speak Arabic, but creating such a tool, and adding i18n functionality has been really simple (in Java at least). Basically, all strings that would appear in your interface are stored in an external text file of "key = value" pairs. You have a separate file per language supported (these files are known as ResourceBundles and share the same name except they have a unique locale suffix) where the keys are the same, but the values are language specific. You need to load the Bundle in each class that needs these labels, but Java will load the appropriate language bundle depending on the current locale.

'Tis really easy. Anyway, despite this mass exodus of the forums, I hope that the Java experts will keep reading the Programming board, as I have some more Swing questions in the pipeline :P

arooaroo

Understood that i18n isn't that hard, but that's not what Dusty's talking about. He's talking about voice recognition. Is it just as easy to implement voice recognition for English as it is for Arabic? If you implement one do you automatically get the other? Jason -- If you understand, things are just as they are. If you do not understand, things are just as they are.