In the last 24 hours Ben Bernanke says he can see the light at the end of the economic tunnel and Austin-based Vignette is the newest acquisition of Canadian content management experts Open Text.
Two things to notice here. First, we’re in for at least several months more of what, according to Bernanke, will amount to further consolidation and acquisition before current conditions of market uncertainty draw to an end. Second, when current market conditions of uncertainty draw to an end, it will be precisely those companies that, like Open Text, have not only weathered the storm, but have grown and added new functionality that stand the most to gain.
If you’re an applications developer this means [...]

“Well, the problem is that SOAP is hard.”
It’s early 2007 and I’m dead in the middle of a conversation with a friend at PayPal.
“We were certain that developers accessing the eBay product data would want everything in SOAP and it just made sense to do it that way. It wasn’t right, though. Turns out, SOAP is hard.”
This is neither the first nor the last time I’d find myself submerged in the ‘what-counts-as-too-hard for data access?’ conversation, or the ‘so-who-are-our-users-REALLY?’ conversation that’s never too far behind. Every year sees the addition of yet more developers working in yet more languages inside of even more frameworks than ever before. And the unspoken corollary [...]

Whereas part I and part II of this series have explored vocal inflection in English — and what makes it so hard for machines to get right — this final post in our series on vocal inflection explores tone in a radically different way.
Linguists describe Chinese, Vietnamese and a great many other southeast Asian and also west African languages as tonal. This use of “tonal” contrasts with our use of “intonation” and “inflection” in our exploration of text-to-speech. Whereas we explored the emotive and discourse meanings behind “up” (pronounced with a rising tone), “up” (pronounced with a falling tone), and “up” (pronounced with a compound falling-then-rising tone) in English, speakers of tone languages use tones [...]

In part I of this post we looked at the three most basic tones in English and we checked out the performance of the text-to-speech, or TTS, robot at AT&T Labs named “Mike”. We discovered that English does in fact have tones. And we discovered that tones are hard to get right in text-to-speech.
In this post we look at a different example of vocal inflection in English. And we see how tones interact with sentences. Listen to examples #1a and b, below.
Example #1a (falling then rising): “You downloaded the newest vèrsion, didn’t you?”
Example #1b (falling then falling again): “You downloaded the newest version, didn’t you?”
(The examples here follow the presentation of local meanings of rising [...]

Communications-enabled business processes (CEBP) take many forms. Think school- and jobsite-closing messages broadcast simultaneously and automatically to many phones at once some morning when there’s bad weather and you get the idea.
When we at Jaduka collaborate with clients on a new CEBP improvement project, the question of text-to-speech, or TTS, frequently comes up. Not all CEBP improvement projects need TTS. But some can benefit from careful TTS somewhere. Our general advice is to be smart about TTS — make sure you need it and then use it sparingly. And we find that we sometimes have to go back over this point because executives tend to want TTS even when they don’t need it. Think Flash [...]

Telecom junkies use the term “IVR” to refer to the “press 1 to speak to a representative …” phone systems we all have to deal with when we dial in to talk to tech support or the airlines or our bank. The letters in the acronym stand for interactive voice response system. We’ve spent a lot of time over the years helping clients tweak their IVRs for better end-user experience.
Before we go further a secret must be imparted. Your users hate your IVR. You spend time and money getting your IVR up and running. But, alas. Your users hate your IVR. (There are good structural reasons for why your users hate your IVR, btw; more [...]

So you’ve got codebases in Python, PHP, C and Java and an engineering culture that places a real premium on being able to throw everybody into a room and keep projects with lots of parts and lots of design decisions moving. But you’ve got engineers in Austin, Dallas and Phoenix, development partners in NY and SF, and at least one vendor in Dubai. How to have your rapid dev cycles and eat them too?
One of the best answers we’ve been able to conjure up for our own projects has been the notion of the standing project bridge. Conferencing wonks use the term bridge as a synonym for conference call. And we’ve coined the phrase project [...]

The single best collaboration tool for developers? Unix screen. Try asking which screen at your Linux or Mac OS X commandline and you’re almost sure to find the utility preinstalled. Then check out the article by Phil Hollenbeck at linux.com or the post by Ayman Hourieh to get started.
UNIX hacks know screen as the program that keeps your ssh session logged in on a box even if you disconnect at the office, drive home, and reconnect. What’s less widely known are the magic :multiuser on and - S options that turn screen into the perfect extreme programming tool. Start screen the right way at your offices in Austin and then your buddies in Dallas, Phoenix [...]