Mark’s Thought Overflow Bucket

Hi there, CBL here!

As the lurker in the lab at Marknmel.com, I’d like to discuss what this lizard has done with a Motorola VT2442.

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Over the weekend I downloaded/configured a few voice engines for my asterisk system. There are three popular engines:

• Festival (open source)
• Flite (open source – derived from Festival)
• Cepstral – (commerical)

They are all high quality and quite good.  The Cepstral engine seems to be the best of all three however.  To test this I downloaded the Allison 8K (voip) voice.  The Allison voice will seem quite familiar to most Asterisk users since it’s a digital synthesized Allison Smith.  Allison kindly provides the system sounds for the asterisk source distribution.

Once the Cepstral engine was working, I was able to have (a somewhat annoyed) Allison speak to me.  If the “voice” is not registered, you will get a “Please register me or a go to www.cepstral.com blah blah message”.  This is ok though – since the licence cost is about $30  per voice, per connection – it’s pretty inexpensive.

Now that I have that working – I will venture into the Asterisk AGI (Application Gateway Interface).

I stumbled on this link that highlights the features of 39 different softphones.  You may find them handy.

From time to time, we at Marknmel.com will have a guest reporter, the Cardboard Lizard. (left)

He will be posting details that I don’t feel that I should post.  These reasons are many and varied but it may be technical disclosure or political, or just plain dumb IT stuff that would bore most people to tears. You will know a Cardboard Lizard article, as he will post his picture, much like this article.

I think the Cardboard Lizard’s last position at $WORK was to be part of an advertising campaign by one of the Canadian mobile phone companies.  Now he lives and hangs out at the lab at Marknmel.com, mostly offering lazy excuses like – “Sory – I didn’t back up your work because I was napping” or “Since the disk was full, I just deleted your files – They weren’t important were they?”

Look for upcoming articles from him on:

• Building a reusable jtag connector
• Implementing a MAX232 for TTL level serial communication
• Looking inside a Motorola VT2442 VOIP Router
• Creative excuses for data loss
• Virtual Desktops around the home – for fun, not profit.

I had the chance to visit Riverbanks Zoo in Columbia SC last weekend.  It’s just right size with a nice mix of exhibits.  When I travel for business I take my trusty old Canon Powershot A70.  I would much rather have my SLR, but the A70 is a bit of a favorite, and since I am familiar with the quirks, it makes a pretty fun camera to shoot.

I went around to the alligator exhibit.  In that part of the world, a ‘gator is hardly exotic, but to a Canadian – lets just say I don’t see many up here.

While observing the alligator two things came to mind:

Alligator and a Croc

1. Where did he get the Croc from?
2. Where is the small child that belongs to that footwear?

Strange….

I am an average PACS implementations guy visiting an average practice in an average town in the South.

I arrived back at my hotel in a bit of a stupor.  It’s always hard traveling.  It’s even worse when a customer is really on your back.  It’s really only the former here.  The folks here have been pretty nice. I’m just a bit tired, and missing my family at home.

I’m dozing a bit, and noticed it getting late enough that perhaps I should wake up for a while or I’ll never sleep. I propped myself up in bed a bit and I thought my eyes were playing a bit of a trick on me .  This little sucker went screaming across the room.

"That phone is for me, I'll get it..."

Ok, I helped him get up onto the phone, but I thought the hotel address in the background was a nice touch.

If I turned over this sucker at the front desk, would have got a free breakfast.  I tried to get free breakfast for the duration of my stay, but that didn’t work out for me. (Sorry Brian…)

I figure I’ll just share….

mmmm, ham!

Email is a very personal kinda thing around marknmel.com.  I really dislike it when people invade my personal space.  In this context it is a virtual space but space that belongs to me nonetheless.

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I replaced my single CPU mythbuntu server with an older-but-nice dual-xeon workstation here over the weekend.

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This post has every potential to be a high ranking google post…

A while back, I went down to the computer store (Tiger Direct) and bought a couple of tuners for my new mythtv setup.

Mythtv is a little rough around the edges, but you can smooth out the wrinkles pretty easy.

So anyway – back to the tuners and such.

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This is the about page.  Nothing interesting here…