Using XML, PHP and Festival to Produce a “Radio” Play
You play the play with two files: an XML data file that contains the play itself and a producer script in PHP. The XML data contains the cast list, the title and credits, a list of files to use for effects, and each character’s lines (the dialogue). The producer renders the play to an audio device according to the instructions in the XML data, which makes it easy to create a different play or edit the current one and play it with the same producer.
IBM Developerworks::Produce 60-second radio theatre with XML, PHP and Festival.
This is pretty crazy. An XML version of a script is feed to the Festival TTS engine resulting in a an audio file of the play. Some interesting ideas come to mind like automated newscasts, not to mention the revival of the radio drama as a techno art form.
Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials
Now there are 195 volunteers across the country working on federal and state level inventory projects, as it is now a full-fledged activity of the American Association of Law Libraries. This project marries very nicely with AALL’s continued leadership and advocacy on topics ranging from permanent public access to authentication to official status of online legal materials. Much of this work draws and builds upon the fine work of the AALL Electronic Legal Information Access and Citation Committee.
National Inventory of Legal Materials – Bits and Pieces « Legal Research Plus.
Article provides updates on what is going on with the NILM. There is a round table discussion of NILM scheduled for 6/25/10 at CALIcon.
Apple Unveils Redesigned, Energy Efficient Mac Mini With Improved Graphics
Apple Inc. said it will begin selling a “completely redesigned” version of its Mac Mini computer, adding the basic desktop model to the list of products it has upgraded or unveiled this year.
The design includes the addition of an HDMI video port and easier access to memory for upgrades. See more at the Mac Mini homepage.
Dave Winer’s Scripting.com Rewrite Looking To Remake Blogging, Again
Scripting2 is a rewrite of my blogging software. Its roots go back to the NewsPage suite developed in 1995. With this rewrite it no longer has code from before May 2010. I’ve learned a lot about web programming, esp in the Frontier environment, in the last 15 years. It’s great to have an up-to-date codebase.
via Scripting News: My Scripting2 to-do.
Dave Winer is rewriting the code behind scripting.com, bringing it into the 21st century. He is planning on bringing back some the great features like “Edit This Page” that set Frontier, Manilla, and Radio apart as early blogging platforms. Most certainly something to keep an eye on.
links for 2010-06-10
-
Question Field module can be used to create evaluations, questionnaires, surveys, and anything else you might want for gathering information from users. The module works much like Webform, but uses CCK to create it's fields.
Think of the content type as a template for a questionnaire (survey, evaluations, questionnaires, quiz,..) that defines the type of answers that can be collected (text, image, video), and the node as the questionnaire created from the template.
links for 2010-06-09
-
Allow to add steps to any node create/edit/add form.
CCK fields and groups can be assigned to any step.
Form is submitted only at last step (not like multistep module do).
Navigation button at the top of form show current, submitted and unsubmitted steps with different styles so user can see what he did and what he should do to finish.
And the main difference to multistep module – forms values are stored in $form_state['storage'] (not in database) so we do it in Drupal way!
links for 2010-06-07
-
This module provides a simple integration of the Google Wave Embed API by creating a node type "google wave".
Just grab the id of the wave you want to publish on your drupal site, create a new google wave node and enter the id there. Afterwards click save and you're done.
links for 2010-06-03
-
389 Directory Server (formerly Fedora Directory Server) is a full-featured LDAPv3 compliant server. In addition to the standard LDAPv3 operations, it supports multi-master replication, fully online configuration and administration, chaining, virtual attributes, access control directives in the data, Virtual List View, server-side sorting, SASL, TLS/SSL, and many other features. The transactional Berkeley DB 4.2 is used as its data store and a full plug-in API allows developers to extend the the functionality of the server in many ways, and many of the core features of the server are already implemented using this API. The server is very mature, having started out as Netscape Directory Server.