The Debian/Ubuntu Games Team is organizing another meeting. If you’re into developing and/or packaging of games, or just generally curious about games in Debian/Ubuntu, you should join!

It will be held next Saturday, the 26th of November, in the #debian-games channel on irc.debian.org (also know as irc.oftc.net) at 10:00 UTC. More information is available on the wiki page Games/Meetings/2011-11-26.

The agenda starts off with the usual round of introductions, so if you’re new to the Team, say hi! Then we’ll be going through the action items from the last meeting, including work on the Debian Games LiveCD, and what’s up with the /usr/games/ path anyways?

Next we’ll be moving onto how the Games Team is faring in terms of members: are new recruits finding it comfortable, should we advertise more?

Next up it’s the squeeky penguin: Wheezy is somewhere in the not-completely-distant future, how does that affect the Games Team, should we be scuffling to get specific tasks done?

Then onto the recurring question of Sponsoring, and how to improve it, should we be utilising DebExpo more? What about our favourite PET?

Lastly, PlayDeb is doing some really neat stuff, would it make sense for our team to push some changes to PlayDeb? Would it make sense for PlayDeb to push changes to Debian Games?

Hopes are for a good discussion, and a merry time, hope to see you all there!

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On behalf of the Activity Log Manager team and the Zeitgeist Project, I am happy to announce the first release of Activity Log Manager (0.8.0), a user interface for managing Zeitgeist blacklists, deleting recent events as well as temporarily pausing the logging.

Grab it while it's hot. Note that you'll need Zeitgeist 0.8.0 (or later) for it to work. If you're an Ubuntu user you can get packages from our PPA; I've also uploaded it to Debian.

I'd also like to use this chance to thank Collabora for sponsoring my (and Seif's) work on Zeitgeist!

Related posts:

1. Zeitgeist 0.5.1 released! On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, I am pleased...
2. Zeitgeist 0.7.1 “Made in Aarhus” released! On behalf of the Zeitgeist team I am proud to...
3. GNOME Activity Journal, and installing it on Ubuntu As already announced by Seif, the first development release of...

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is a service which logs the users's activities and events, anywhere from files opened to websites visited and conversations, and makes this information readily available for other applications to use. It is also able to establish relationships between items based on similarity and usage patterns.

The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not provide a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journalling applications and deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download (zeitgeist-0.7.1.tar.gz)

About Zeitgeist: zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: wiki.zeitgeist-project.com

See also Zeitgeist Datahub, GNOME Activity Journal and the repository for additional Zeitgeist data-sources. You may as well like Sezen.

News since 0.7.0

Engine:

 - Expose property information in the D-Bus introspection output.
 - Mention column names explicitly when inserting events, for compatibility
   with the upcoming 0.8 release.

Python API:

 - Expose DataSourceRegistry's enabled status in a callback.
 - Automatically reconnect to Zeitgeist if the connection is lost when using
   methods asynchronously (so far this only happened for synchronous calls).
 - Reinstall all active monitors upon reconnection (LP: #673008, #727226).
 - Fix a (harmless) race condition requesting the bus name (LP: #732015).

Overall:

 - Added new event interpretation types: AcceptEvent, DenyEvent and ExpireEvent.
 - Include NCO in the generated ontologies.
 - Better ./configure check for python-rdflib.
 - Update the manpage to document exit codes.

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release, and since I hadn't blogged about it before, also to everyone who made the Zeitgeist Hackfest in Aarhus possible, including our sponsors:

Related posts:

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2. Activity Log Manager for Zeitgeist released! On behalf of the Activity Log Manager team and the...
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After a quick search I learned that it’s much easier than this: it’s possible to reliably determine the language based on statistic n-gram information. Ignoring the fact that now I officially hate Firefox, Chromium, OpenOffice.org and everyone else there for not implementing this and having me spend the day changing the spell-checker’s language, I was left with the choice on how to use this in eSpeak GUI.

The first option I found was TextCat, which is also the only library I’ve found to be packaged for Debian. However, ignoring the fact that upstream isn’t maintaining it any more (such a library shouldn’t need too much maintainance, after all), the package declares incorrect dependencies (bug filled a month ago, no response yet) and the API is also pretty crappy (it requires a physical file indicating the location of the statistic models).

Unrelated to that, I’ve also found that the Catalan text samples it includes are incorrect, so the same may be true for other languages. I guess it’d make sense to work on a new (and completely Unicode) language samples collection. I’ve thought of using something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights since this way all languages can have the same text, but being more of a legal thing it may be biased by some words being too repetitive.

Looking for other alternatives to the TextCat library I’ve only found the following:

• TextCat (same name, different code): PHP licensed, so incompatible with GPL projects.
• Mguesser (part of mnogosearch-mysql): it’s a standalone executable and not a library.
• SpamAssassin’s TextCat.pm: also a standalone executable, this time written in Perl. Apparently they were using a fork of TextCat (the original library, not the PHP licensed one) before that.

So it looks like I’ll have to start by getting a good collection of text samples I can use to generate the statistic data. Then I have several options on how to actually use it. As I see it, those are my possibilities:

1. Fixing libtextcat‘s packaging and just using that.
2. Taking it over as new upstream maintainer. Not my preferred option as I don’t really feel like maintaining a C library at this point.
3. Trying to convince the maintainer of the new TextCat (with last commit January this year and a more sane API) to re-license it in a GPL-compatible way, packaging that and seeing how that one works (haven’t tried it out yet).
4. Writing my own implementation in Python, maybe based upon this example or TextCat.pm.

Any other ideas, pointers to some library I may have missed or offers to collaborate are very welcome. Please also note that my intention in writing this post is not only to rant about there being no well-maintained ready-to-use library being available, but especially raising awareness on the topic of language identification. I’d love to see this feature all around the desktop, just like (and in combination with) spell-checking, which is already omnipresent.

11 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: language identification, Programari lliure, text categorization

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is an event-logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log, and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity, such as file usage, communications, browsing history, etc.

The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not provide a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journalling applications and deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download (zeitgeist-0.5.1.tar.gz)

About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com
Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.5.0

2010-09-09: Zeitgeist 0.5.1 "Spongebob is not funny"

Engine:

- Don't use the return value of Extension.post_insert_event() when
dispatching the post insert hooks. The post_insert_event() method
has no return value.
- Initialize ZeitgeistEngine after RemoteInterface, so that --replace
does its job before the main engine and extensions start (LP: #614315).
- Added support for queries on the Subject.Storage field of an Event
(LP: #580364).
- Some optimizations in the find_events() method. Also the profiling
data is much more useful.

Python API:

- Check arguments of Event.new_for_values() and Subject.new_for_values()
(LP: #580372).
- Redefined the result of TimeRange.always(), UNIX timestamp "0" is now
the left corner of the interval (LP: #614295).
- Added a new helper module called zeitgeist.mimetypes which basically
provides two functions (LP: #586524):
* get_interpretation_for_mimetype(), which tries to get a suitable
interpretation for a given mime-type.
* get_manifestation_for_uri(), which tries to lookup a manifestation
for the given URI.
- The DataSource model now provides easy access to the information it
holds through properties.

Overall:

- The tool to build our ontology now supports rdflib2 and rdflib3
(LP: #626224).
- Added "make check" and "make doc" commands to the rootlevel Makefile
(LP: #628661)
- Translation updates.
- Updated test suite.
- Documentation updates.

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2. Activity Log Manager for Zeitgeist released! On behalf of the Activity Log Manager team and the...
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For extra fun, I also decided to impose two rules: no reading up on existing algorithms or «weird maths» (I’ll have enough time for this when I study Computer Vision at university), and no «magic» (ie., implementing everything myself and not using existing functions for edge detection or whatever).

First steps

Of course, my first choice for trying this was Python, so I installed PIL and SciPy, and took a photo of the box. With just a function call, they give me access to each pixel’s RGB value, so it’s really easy to have it change all points that aren’t red into black and other funny stuff.

However, iterating through all the pixels in the image was quite slow (in the order of several seconds) so I decided to switch to C and OpenCV, which turned out to be really nice to work with. After a while I had written down the first algorithm I could think of, and it kinda worked (see video at right). I want to thank Michal for the idea of converting the image to the HSV colour space for colour checking.

Noise reduction

After I had a first success, I worked on some new multi-pass code with lots of loops to see if I can get some noise reduction. I started by turning everything which isn’t detected as red into black so that I get a better overview of what’s going on. Then I improved this to let it find non-matching pixels surrounded by red ones (on the top and the left they must be adjacent, but on the right and bottom the nearest red may be some distance away; this works even for groups of pixels since the image is processed from left to right and from top to bottom). Finally, I added some more code to remove any little group of red pixels surrounded by non-matching ones. The effect of this will be seen later.

Illumination

For some reason the detection gets mad if there is artificial light (or maybe it’s just that I haven’t found the right colour values to check for). No light at all (except for that of the computer screens) works better -after reducing the minimum levels of saturation and brightness I was checking for-, but it gives a lot of noise. My first program therefore fails miserably under such conditions.

However, now that I have the noise reduction this is no longer a problem. See by yourself: image at right. (The really bright points are those which didn’t match but have been converted to red since they are surrounded).

Second try at box detection

I could just have put my previous box detection algorithm on top of it, but I decided to make use of the fact that the noise reduction is successfully removing everything except for the box. Thus, instead of searching for red lines likes before I just localize the left-most, right-most, highest and lowest red points.

Using those four points, I calculate the centre of the box (and I could also reliably determine the position of the four corners, if I added some more code to find whether the box is horizontally aligned or not).

Finally I calculate the relative movement of the centre point and this way I can control a pointer (bottom right of the video). Here we go:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8qgiTQfuJE

(And it works as well at night! - Code is here)

6 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: color recognition, computer vision, image recognition, opencv

I haven’t blogged for quite a few weeks, so I guess it’s time I revive my blog, and what better way to do this than writing about how awesome GUADEC was? :)

Saturday 25

I went to the Barcelona airport to take a plane at twelve. The plane started almost two hours later because part of the airport was closed for inspection or something, but I finally arrived at Amsterdam. There I took a train to Den Haag and after half an hour of enjoying the green view through the window I arrived at Central Station.

Ten minutes later I entered the hotel and found Clemens and the others from invented here. We went to RevSpace for a while. There wasn’t much going on (the GNU Hackers meeting was already over), but I think the place is pretty cool. Too bad there seems to be no hackerspace in Barcelona…

After a while we went out for dinner, and sitting at the restaurant we found Vincent. Back at the hotel I had a drink with some Canonical folks, and finally I went to sleep and discovered who my room mate would be: Juanjo.

Monday 26 & Tuesday 27

On Monday I went to the design thinking workshop out of curiosity for what that’d be, and it turned out to be an interesting experience. I’d have preferred if they had chosen another topic, though, since “How might we simplify the handling of digital information?” is something I’ve been working on and thinking about for the past year so I have my mind pretty much made up on this topic.

I met several Google Summer of Code students and the GNOME Shell team, I infiltrated myself into the GSoC dinner and participated in the soccer match Tuesday evening.

Wednesday 28

Wednesday, my first GUADEC starts! Opening talk, Web, Who makes GNOME, State of GNOME Shell, Shell Yes!, GNOME: State of the Union (most funny talk ever), Crypto, Clutter, Clutter.

See the GUADEC blog and Steph’s blog posts for more details.

Once the venue closed I went with Will and Steph to the Canonical party and eventually we arrived there.

Thursday 29

After just five hours of needed sleep I had Seif on the phone waking me up. He and Thorsten had just arrived, and we started working on the slides for our talk. I went to the Haagse Hogeschool and assisted to part of Emmanuele’s “So you think you can release?” talk. Then, after Youness joined us, we finished this: Zeitgeist Slides – GUADEC 2010, and finally it was time for our presentation where we talked about the state of Zeitgeist and introduced Teamgeist.

I attended several other talks (JavaScript, How a Free Desktop can help -and hinder- Free Speech, GNOME 3 and Your Application and Malware threats to a Linux Desktop by Thorsten Sick), and finally there was a GNOME Shell dinner at an Indian place. After that we all went to the Collabora Beach Party until they started closing up.

See also: GUADEC blog, Steph’s blog.

Friday 30

Adrien familiarized us with his work making it easy to making GNOME more connected by accessing online information through Tracker, there was more talk about how we need to embrace the web (using web technologies for easier development and also integrating online data into our applications was a very recurring topic all along GUADEC), Fabrice Mous keynote gave me another example of how governments suck at throwing money around, there was a talk on the future of Cairo and finally Danilo talked about Launchpad.

GUADEC closed with the announcement that the next Desktop Summit will be in Berlin (cool, maybe I’ll get to see the c-base then?) and after helping clean up the kilometric mess of network cables (btw, kudos to everyone who helped organizing GUADEC – you guys rock!) I headed to the RevSpace again for the afterparty for ice cream and many games of pinball! On the way back to the hotel Benjamin explained me his secret plans for breaking GNOME.

Again, more here and here.

Satuday 31

Slept until late, hanged around in the hotel lobby for some hours with some other guys (I also passed by RevSpace to see if I could find anyone there, no luck) and finally I took the train back to Amsterdam, ate something there, and for a change I had to wait one hour for the plane to arrive. I’m back in normal life now, but the next GUADEC is only one year away :).

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On behalf of the Zeitgeist Project team, I am pleased to announce the immediate availability of Zeitgeist 0.3.3. It introduces an improved relationship algorithm, new sorting types for queries, a data-source registry (providing the possibility of easily disabling individual loggers) and several bug fixes and other enhancements.

What is Zeitgeist?

Zeitgeist is an event-logging framework for desktop and mobile devices. Applications can push events into the log, and anyone can query the log via the rich query API. The logged events are semantically categorized and can come from any sort of activity, such as file usage, communications, browsing history, etc. The Zeitgeist engine is a user-level service and does not provide a GUI. It is intended to support dedicated journalling applications and deep integration with other desktop components.

Where?

Downloads: https://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/+download (zeitgeist-0.3.3.tar.gz)

About Zeitgeist: http://zeitgeist-project.com

Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Zeitgeist

News since 0.3.2

Engine:

- Added MostPopularActor, LeastPopularActor, MostRecentActor and
LeastRecentActor as possible ReturnTypes for FindEvents and
FindEventsId (LP: #493903).
- Let {Find,Get,Insert}* hooks know the bus name of the caller, when
executed over D-Bus.
- Add an extension implementing a data-source registry (allowing to disable
data-sources from a centralized place and see their description).
- Overhauled FindRelatedUris for better results and improved performance.
- Changed FindEvents, FindEventIds and FindRelatedUris to not treat zeros in
the given TimeRange specially; "(0, 0)" can no longer be used (LP: #490242).
- Fixed a crash in the GtkRecentlyUsed data-source parsing malfored .desktop
files (LP: #526357), and added support for more file mimetypes (LP: #510761).
- Fixed a crash in the GtkRecentlyUsed data-source trying to read broken
symlinks disguised as .desktop files (LP: #523761).
- Fixed a crash in the GtkRecentlyUsed data-source which happened when there
was no display friendly version of a URI (LP: #531793).
- Renamed --no-passive-loggers option to --no-datahub. Output printed by
zeitgeist-datahub is no longer visible in zeitgeist-daemon's output.
- Added --log-level option to change the output verbosity.
- DeleteEvents now correctly removes any unreferenced values (URIs, actors,
etc.) and not only the events themselves (LP: #491646).
- Fixed insertion of events with a payload (LP: #557708).
- Fixed an exception in DeleteEvents.
- Fixed event deletions not always getting committed (LP: #566184).
- Ignore deletion requests for non-existant events.

Python API:
- Made the Interpretation and Manifestation classes iterable.
- Added symbol lookup by URI, in the form of dictionary access.
- Fixed the display name for Interpretation.SOURCECODE.
- Fixed find_events_for_values and find_event_ids_for_values (LP: #510804).
- Added a get_extension() method to ZeitgeistDBusInterface, to get convenient
access to D-Bus interfaces provided by engine extensions.

Overall:
- More fixes and code enhancements.
- Manpage updates.
- Translation updates.

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I like listening to music while I’m programming. However, I have lots of music on my computer and I don’t really like all of it (or find it appropriate as background music for when I’m programming).

I guess I could spend a few evenings going through my music collection, deleting anything I don’t like (which isn’t always such an easy decision), creating a playlist or whatever. This isn’t a permanent solution, though, since with the time my collection will continue growing, I may get sick of hearing some songs, my taste may change, etc. Also, I prefer spending my time programming, reading or doing anything else more interesting than sorting my music collection.

Unrelated to the problem itself, let me also mention that I use different media players. Currently I’m mostly using Banshee, but I’ve been intermittently toggling between it and Rhythmbox those last months, and also used a command-line player for some time. I’m saying this because I expect a optimal solution to be media player-independent. The bigger problem of each media player having its own database is also something I’d like to see addressed, maybe with some technology like Tracker, but that is another topic.

The status quo

My current way to approach this problem is basically setting my media player to choose songs randomly, and using the big “Next >>|” button on my keyboard whenever it chooses some song which annoys me.

(Banshee’s playback list interface has an option to automatically fill itself sorting songs by popularity, but it doesn’t seem to work good at all here; I also recall Amarok having some automatic playlist generation options, but I’m not using any KDE applications anymore and in any case this is outside the scope of an application-neutral solution).

The solution

It has recently occurred to me that a neat solution for this would be to gather information from a generic event log and to translate that into a numerical punctuation for each song. I think you may already guess where I’m heading, but if not: Zeitgeist!

With the appropriate data-sources installed, Zeitgeist holds information on which songs started playing automatically (because they are on a playlist or because you have your media player set to random), which were started manually, and in both cases which you listened to completely and which ones you skipped (and how long you resisted listening to them). It shouldn’t be too difficult to write a script which will periodically request this information from Zeitgeist and give songs positive points for every time you listened to them completely (extra if you chose them yourself manually) and negative points to the ones you skipped (but giving less negative points if you resisted half of the song than if you skipped it right after you recognized it).

With this punctuation information, music players can avoid playing songs you don’t like and give you only those you like or new ones for which there isn’t any information yet (if it followed the punctuation strictly this would end with the same songs being played all the time and new songs with punctuation around 0 being ignored). The importance of the play/skip actions would decay over time (it’s more important to consider whether you listened to the song yesterday than if you did six months ago), etc., etc.

If we wanted to create something really fancy we could even look at generating different ratings for separate circumstances, eg. in case you like listening to a different sort of music during the morning than during the evening, or to differentiate between what you like to hear while you are coding and while the computer is idle (maybe because you are doing paper homework and only using the computer to get some background music). The information for all this is there in Zeitgeist, so it’s only a matter of writing a good algorithm.

The implementation

I’ve already explained most of how this should work in the previous section, but here’s a bit of an overview of what’s needed for this:

• Data-sources inserting the music reproduction information. We already have a data-source for Rhythmbox implemented as an extension, but Banshee and any other players are missing.
• The actual algorithm, probably implemented as a periodically run script leaving the aggregated information at some accessible place, although this may vary depending on the degree of fanciness you choose.
• The interface, ie. plugins for Rhythmbox and other media players which take that information and use it to provide an option for semi-randomly choosing music excluding stuff you don’t like.

If I’ve got you interested on this, I’m willing to mentor someone on this, so get in touch! Feel free to jump into #zeitgeist on irc.freenode.net or drop me a mail.

19 comments
© Siegfried-Angel Gevatter Pujals, 2010. | Permalink | License | Post tags: music, zeitgeist

Some weeks ago I implemented a new feature in Zeitgeist and I figured I’d drop some lines about it. I’m talking about a data-source registry.

You may be wondering, «what the hell is that even, a data-source?». So Zeitgeist is a database, a global event log, but it doesn’t do any magic indexing or monitoring by itself;  the information it logs needs to come from somewhere – be it applications sending it to Zeitgeist themselves, daemons, plugins for applications, etc. Any such entity is called a «data-source».

Having a register of all data-sources interacting with Zeitgeist provides some benefits, like for example:

Prototype of a data-source management user-interface

• Having a list of them. Lists are nice :).
• Being able to disable data-sources from a centralized place instead of requiring each to write its own preferences dialogue.
• Being able to set up a blacklist rule considering which data-source the information comes from as a condition (not implemented yet).

More details

When they register, data-sources will need to provide the following information: an unique ID, a name (may be localized), a description (may be localized) and optionally a template specifying what sort of events it logs. Additionally, the last timestamp the data-source was seen by Zeitgeist, whether it is running right now and whether it is enabled will also be available.

It is important to note that registration is not compulsory; while it is highly encouraged for data-sources to use it, is it still possible to anonymously insert information into Zeitgeist (for example from a shell script). The event template is also only informational, and will not be enforced by Zeitgeist at this time.

Avoiding duplicates from GTK Recently Used

You may know that zeitgeist-datahub provides basic support for applications which have no direct Zeitgeist support but do use GTK’s RecentManager, which is not as detailed as we would like, but it is better than nothing. However, until now we had a problem: when applications had support for both, GTK’s Recently Used and Zeitgeist (be it native or as an extension), it was possible for duplicate events to be inserted or other sorts of conflicts between both data-sources. Now that we have the information from the registry available, we’ve been able to solve this modifying our Recently Used data-source to ignore any events concerning applications which already have another data-source logging the same types of events.
 

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By the way, if you're coming too and are interested in Zeitgeist, don't forget to poke me (or Seif)!

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While several sources have already propagated the good news, what doesn’t seem to be so widely known is how easy it is to get the Activity Journal running on Ubuntu. Because it is!

Installation on Ubuntu Karmic or Lucid

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:zeitgeist/ppa
sudo aptitude update
sudo aptitude install gnome-activity-journal

Now go to Applications -> Utility -> Activity Journal and enjoy the sweetness!

Installation on other systems

Our Personal Package Archive also has packages for Ubuntu Jaunty which you can add the usual way (by adding it to System -> Administration -> Software Sources or editing your sources.list), and the same packages as for Ubuntu work for Debian Sid (to which Zeitgeist 0.3.2 and the GNOME Activity Journal will be uploaded shortly).

There may be packages for other distributions available; if you can’t find any for yours, you can do the installation by hand:

[For Zeitgeist] – Build dependencies: intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/zeitgeist/0.3/0.3.2/+download/zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf zeitgeist-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd zeitgeist-0.3.2
$ ./configure
$ make
# make install

[For the GNOME Activity Journal] – Build dependencies: Python (2.5+), Python-DistUtils-Extra, intltool

$ wget http://launchpad.net/gnome-activity-journal/0.3/0.3.2/+download/gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2.tar.gz
$ cd gnome-activity-journal-0.3.2
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

But, what is the GNOME Activity Journal?

The GNOME Activity Journal is a tool for easily browsing and finding files, contacts and other resources on your computer. Using Zeitgeist, it keeps a chronological journal of your activity and supports tagging and bookmarking (using the new Tracker 0.7) and establishing relationships between resources.

While this first release only supports basic browsing of file activities, the underlying infrastructure can do much more and you can expect the missing functionality to become available in future releases.

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The main changes are fixing a crash bug and… internationalization support. So, if you like this project but you’re not a coder, now you’ve got a way to contribute: translating it into your language (come on, it only has a few strings! :)).

The new version is already in my PPA: espeak-gui_0.2-0ubuntu1~ppa1_all.deb. A tarball is also available, and the installation instructions are the following:

$ wget -c http://launchpad.net/espeak-gui/trunk/0.2/+download/espeak-gui-0.2.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf espeak-gui-0.2.tar.gz; cd espeak-gui-0.2
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

In case you didn’t already have the previous version, you’ll also need to install the python-espeak module, for which there are also .deb’s (i386, amd64) or the manual installation option like explained in my previous post:

$ bzr get lp:python-espeak
$ cd python-espeak
$ python setup.py build
$ sudo python setup.py install

Here are the contents of the NEWS file:

2010-01-02: Version 0.2
-----------------------

 - Fixed a crash happening when there was no voice language set in
   gconf (LP: 502253). [Reported by Rugby471]
 - Added a "Plain text" filter to the Open/Save dialogues.
 - Added internationalization support.
 - Added a manpage and a gconf schemas file.
 - A couple little user interface improvements.

Translations: Catalan.

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Why, when, who?

The project started almost a year ago when, out of curiosity on what writing Python bindings for C/C++ libraries is like, I started python-espeak, bindings for the espeak speech synthesizer (which, by the way, comes installed by default on Ubuntu and many other distributions).

It turned out that writing bindings isn’t as funny as I thought so they haven’t advanced much since then, but the basic functionality was there and I felt the need for some application using those bindings, so that’s how I started espeak-gui.

Some months later, in true Free Software spirit, someone else -interested in an application like this for personal usage- found my code on Launchpad and got in touch with me, providing me with quite some nice patches. Thank you, Joe Burmeister! However, I didn’t do any more work on it, as I’ve been busy with other projects (eg. Zeitgeist), and development stalled there.

Now, another half a year later, I’ve finally got back to this and decided it’s time I push it out into the wild. So, after cleaning it up a bit more and implementing some new feature, here you have espeak-gui!

(The bindings aren’t really encouraged for widespread usage at this point and I’ll probably end up rewriting them using SWIG or something else; however, if you’re interested in using them please get in touch with me).

Where do I get it?

If you’re using Ubuntu or Debian, you can find a packages for python-espeak and espeak-gui in my PPA.

For users of other distributions, you can install them manually after installing the needed dependencies (most importantly, libespeak-dev).

For the Python bindings for espeak:

$ bzr get lp:python-espeak
$ cd python-espeak
$ python setup.py build
# python setup.py install

And for the GUI:

$ wget -c http://launchpad.net/espeak-gui/trunk/0.1/+download/espeak-gui-0.1.tar.gz
$ tar -xzvf espeak-gui-0.1.tar.gz
$ cd espeak-gui-0.1
# python setup.py install

[Update: A new version is out, see espeak-gui 0.2 for details.]

I have several ideas on how to continue improving it and I think I’ll slowly continue doing so (or maybe not so slowly if I get positive feedback on this :)). Also, patches are always welcome!

Using it

Once installed, you’ll find espeak-gui under Applications -> Sound and Video (maybe Accessibility would be a better place?), or you can run it from the command line like this:

espeak [ <file 1> <file 2> ... ]

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