A long day

It's a bit narrative, but...it's my blog, dammit.

Kept busy Saturday, crawling out at 7, and after breakfast, built a linux voice-to-text box utilizing the "Festival" package set. Can't say I'm really happy with it, but since I was making software designed for the KDE desktop to work on a Gnome desktop (quickly, where the various generations of Windows have ONE user interface that is "just Win" for that generation - Linux has DOZENS of possible user interfaces, the way things look/feel/act/interact and KDE and Gnome are the two big kids on the Linux User Interface block), I'm not sure it's a fair comparison to what I've been playing with building a similar Windows box.

Suffice to say it made ME cranky, and I'm not having to tramp through diminished motor skills to try and make it work. If I had diminished strength and skills in my hands, it would make me truly crazy. The fonts were not adjustable, you couldn't change the speed or pitch of the voice engine significantly, and importing additonal voices was...challenging. Most annoying was that you couldn't just type what you were trying to say and hit enter and have a voice erupt. You had to mouse up to the top of the screen and click on a teeny tiny "play" button.

Not good when your hands are shaky to begin with. We're sending the Linux text>voice concept back to the stable until I can dedicate the time to switch a box from Ubuntu to Kubuntu (Gnome vs. KDE) and run the software on the desktop it's intended to run on.

At the same time, I spent a fair portion of the Saturday cleaning up an old Windows 2000 PC and setting it up as Dad's talker box. Since there's software on there I'd like to keep, I can't just nuke the hard drive and start from scratch, and as a result it slows things down.

Amids all this , visited Dad, got the magazines as done as Mom will let me (years of accumulation, to the point of fire hazard and other issues), got a walkway cleared through the basement disaster area, and will start on the RAID box if I get all enthused again. A long day, over all, but productive.