noise noise noise

"the hardest part about writing a novel," simons says, "is the first draft. before the first draft all you have is the idea of a novel." that's how i feel about this blog. i've barely had time to complete the normal tasks of life and that leaves little time to write. so many things have been happening but until i start a first draft i only have the idea of a blog.

t just read Watching Alpha Geeks by Tim O'Reilly where he talks about a "young FreeNet developer" who piped IRC through Festival so he could listen to it while coding. that grabbed my interest to see if t could do it on Mac OS X.

Festival and Speech Tools compiled without much problem. i had an issue trying to figure out how to actually get the speech to output from the audio because OS X doesn't have /dev/audio (Festival's default). i finally realized that i could just set the output to mplayer.

i compiled ircII and did my first run through irc. using the information at irchelp.org.

now i just have to write a perl script that will feed the output of what people say to Festival.

well for everyone who doesn't care about these sort of things i should have more interesting posts soon. for everyone who wants more information i plan on making a tutorial on the whole process. it's really straight-forward if you have any experience compiling any software.