iNODE

Earlier this week I attended the Project Bamboo workshop at Princeton and thought I’d share a discovery I made while trying to complete the pre-workshop reading assignments attendees received:

1. Please read the proposal in its entirety. The proposal can be found at:

http://projectbamboo.org/files/docs/bamboo_proposal.pdf

2. Please read the Identifying Scholarly Practices handout. This handout can be found at:

http://projectbamboo.org/files/3/Identifying_Scholarly_Practices.pdf

All through the week leading up to the workshop I figured I’d surely get around to reading those documents but I never did. The night before I was to leave, I realized it just wasn’t going to happen.  Then I had a thought: why not run the text of these documents through my Mac’s “Text to Speech” service, capture the output and later listen to it as a podcast during the dead time of my  3+ hour drive up to New Jersey?

I launched WireTap Studio (to capture the sound) then opened the proposal PDF in Preview, highlighted the text of the document, selected “Services -> Speech -> Start Speaking Text” under Preview’s application menu and hit the record button.  I stopped after 30 seconds and imported the mp3 into iTunes. Sounded terrible—lots of ambient noise and sort of muddy sound quality. Oh yeah, I was just picking up the tinny sound of the Macbook’s speakers with the low-quality built-in mic, no wonder it sounded so bad.

Next tried to use WireTap Studio to intercept the audio stream (could also do this with Audio Hijack Pro) and found that I couldn’t seem to interrupt (and grab) the Speech services audio. It wasn’t associated with the application and no matter what I selected as input, it didn’t get the speech audio. I assume it can be done but I wasn’t having any success. Time to Google…

Doh! Turns out there’s a unix command baked right in to OSX (since 10.3) that not only does exactly what I was trying to do, it does is much faster than the real-time capture I was experimenting with. Meet “say”

say [-v voice] [-o out.aiff] [-f file]

So, I opened the PDF in Preview, used Command-A to select all the text, pasted it into a text file using BBEdit, chopped out the parts I didn’t care about then saved it to the desktop. Then in a terminal window, issued this command:

say -v Alex -o ~/desktop/bamboo.aiff -f ~/desktop/bamboo.txt

Alex is the “new and improved” voice in OS X 10.5 (Leopard). He has much better inflection and sounds much more human and much less Cylon. If you really get into this (or need a voice that deals with a language other than US English), you can purchase additional voices from Cepstral (http://www.cepstral.com). The voices are roughly $30 each.

In a little less than 3 minutes wall time, ’say’ produced the bamboo.aiff file that was easily imported into iTunes (2 hours, 5 minutes of audio). Here’s a representative sample of how Alex sounded with the material:

…information technologists to collectively tackle the question: How can we enhance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services? This proposal represents an 18-month planning and community design program, the Bamboo Planning Project, where through a series of conversations and workshops, we will map out the scholarly practices and common technology challenges across and among disciplines, and discover where a coordinated, cross-disciplinary development effort can best foster academic innovation. Input into the Bamboo process…

Digital Library Developer

We’ve posted a job advertisement for a Digital Library Developer and I encourage you to apply if you have an interest in building the sort of tools today’s library could really use but tomorrow’s digital library will absolutely require.

You’ll find the full posting (and online application form) at http://jobs.gmu.edu (position number FA730z).

Here’s the heart of the announcement:

George Mason University, University Libraries seeks a Digital Library Developer to join our innovative Digital Programs and Systems division as we build new ways to deliver library content and services.

Duties include: Anticipating and investigating trends in digital library technology so we can respond quickly to new opportunities. Provide primary support for new initiatives in resource discovery, digital preservation, knowledge management, and scholarly communication. This position reports to the Associate University Librarian for Digital Programs and Systems.

Read more »

It seems there’s some sort of new web development framework released every week or two but the other day I found one that shows a lot of promise: Sproutcore.

Odd name but an interesting concept. At the most recent WWDC (Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference), Sproutcore was revealed as the “engine” behind many of the new services on Apple’s .Mac replacement (MobileMe). Many are suggesting the real purpose is an open-source, plugin-free alternative to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s SilverLight. If you’re interested in how something like Sproutcore fits in with cloud computing, Google, Flash, and the future, you should read the “Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore” post on Roughly Drafted from June 14th.

From the Sproutcore site:

What is SproutCore?

SproutCore is a framework for building applications in JavaScript with remarkably little amounts of code. It can help you build full “thick” client applications in the web browser that can create and modify data, often completely independent of your web server, communicating with your server via Ajax only when they need to save or load data.

I spent an hour or so working through the “hello world” demo and it’s cool. You do development coding in Ruby with an interactive server process that simplifies the code-test-debug-code cycle. When done, there’s a standalone SproutCore utility that converts everything into static Javascript and CSS files—ready for deployment under Apache or whatever.  Here’s my ‘production’ version of the demo:

hello_world

I tested the look on both Windows (Firefox and IE7) and Mac (Firefox 3) and for this simple demo, at least, rendering was identical across platforms.  I think this is going to be a framework to watch.  It’s open source, doesn’t rely on plugins, is reasonably platform neutral (I’ve seen implementations on Ubuntu and Windows boxes) and relies on basic internet standards (Javascript and CSS).

http://www.sproutcore.com