France
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Happy New Year!
First of all, I realise that this is going to be imported into Facebook, and this isn’t the kind of thing that normally gets posted as a Facebook note (it’s far too bloggy), so apologies to everyone on Facebook who reads this and is probably bored senseless… btw, I’m also a huge geek, if you didn’t already realise, you will do by the end of this.
I love France. Not the country, the people nor the language, I just love being here. When I’m here, everything seems to stand still and I have time to do things that I probably wouldn’t at home or in York, due to the fact I always take on too many things, either commiting myself to social activities (mainly involving alcohol), having to attend lectures and practicals or with Argos.
My time here has been mainly spent (in this order), working on Tetse and IPA (which I’ll discuss in more detail later), playing Wii, and doing mock papers and revision. I’ve done a worringly low amount of revision, but I’m doing okay (well, apart from on DOI) when I do mock and past papers, so I’m not worrying about it too much. I’ll spend the entire weekend when I go back to York (apart from the 6 hours I’ll be working at Argos) revising, and then during the week when I’m not doing exams revising for upcoming exams, so I’m pretty sure I’ll have the bulk of it sorted when it actually comes to sitting them. Yeah, I’m leaving it a bit late, but meh…
New Years Eve was a bit of an anti-climax. I spent most of the evening watching The IT Crowd and South Park with my brother and Jonathan, then played some silly horse racing game with the parents in the lounge, celebrated New Years at midnight local time (11pm GMT – we don’t actually get French TV, I think we’re too remote and we don’t have a TV aerial on the roof either, so we watched BBC News 24 which covered it live from Berlin), played some Wii, watched BBC One (yay for satellite) for the UK New Year (including the pretty impressive firework display) and then played some more Wii until about 4am (which is when people actually started texting me back! Or at least I started receiving texts, or they received the ones I sent about 3 hours earlier, or whatever. Stupid phone networks being overcrowded or whatever)
Playing the Wii is still fun :) The novelty hasn’t worn off yet, and I’m starting to get the hang of baseball (I can at least hit the ball now), which is good. Useful information for anyone with an Inventel Livebox router (which Orange/Wanadoo give out in the UK and France) trying to connect things to it – don’t use the security settings that is detected – the router supports both WEP and WPA-PSK simultaneously, and for some reason, WPA-PSK doesn’t work on my Wii or my brothers PSP, so manually change it to WEP and it should work.
Now, I’ve spent most of my time (basically) completing TeTSE, and the more complicated bit, writing a proof of concept UI for it, which I’ve imaginatively entitled ‘IPA’.
TeTSE is a Text-to-speech engine, and is basically a class that will splice together individual sounds from the IPA into a string that should (hopefully) make sense. I’ve coded the engine, but I need the sounds for the individual characters of the IPA, so it can actually build the sounds.
The proof of concept for the class is something which I’ve cunningly called “IPA”, which is basically a form that allows you to construct strings of IPA characters and then play them. I’m pretty proud of it:
The next thing I’m going to do with I’ve got TeTSE working is a more realistic example of how the class can be used – which will basically be to put phrases together that already have IPA transcriptions in the software into a complete saying, and I’m going to do it using train announcements as an example (yeah, I’m really sad, but I think it’s kind of cool), so for example it’d say “The next train to arrive at platform A is the B C service to D, calling at E and D”, where A is a number, B is a time, C is a train operator, D is the terminus and E is a list consisting of other train stations.
Not really got much else to say, other than the new Incubus album rocks!
