Looks like Siri Proxy Is Dead & Bit of an Update

So where have I been?

There's been quite a bit of chaos going around recently. For a couple reasons, in no particular order:

The family has been heavily wrapped up with moving house as I'm not able to navigate stairs safely anymore. As always, moving house is always stressful and annoying. But what is really unfair about it, all the work is falling on the shoulders of my wife.

Discovered a nice apartment that would work for us and be rather accessible right from the start. Nonetheless, we will be sad to be leaving this home and neighborhood. We love it, and our neighbors.

Please join me when I say "I hate moving"

I lost a considerable amount of use of arms hands since our last post. Making everything, difficult. This is necessitated an increase in volume of people coming through the house to help me out, leaving a very limited amount of time to get to the computer. When I do, those two or three hours are often taken up with correspondence, reading or World of Warcraft hearthstone…

Ah crap... more wasted time with watercraft

It's nice that I found a video game I can play again, but damn you World of Warcraft! I thought I was free of your corruptive influence. Damn you back to the depths of hell!

The lack of use of my hands has also greatly limiting my creative problem solving for day--to-day issues as I can't really use any of the solutions anyway. This means I'm going back to more work in front of the computer, which has been slow for the above-mentioned reasons ;-)

On the flip side, my rehab facility has given me access to a Windows surface tablet with a Tobii eye tracker. That has been quite interesting and we are laying the groundwork for when I will need one.

The death of siri proxy

About a month ago at WWDC Apple announced the release of IOS 8 and at about the same time appears to have patched their guzzoni service on which Siri proxy
relied. My Siri proxy stopped working, I tried on and off for about three weeks to get back up and running with no luck. It's dead.

Such a shame, it was awesome while it lasted. However, IOS8 is promising to open up the SDK for Siri with home kit so that may be used for various home automation's solutions.
(Crosses fingers)

So I upgraded my phone to IOS7 and started to look at alternatives.

Obviously, there is nothing as good out there right now but I needed a way to verbally, remotely lock and unlock my door. The easiest solution was to use my always on raspberry pi to check my Gmail account for messages from a specific center with the specific catchphrases.

With a bit of research I managed to write a Ruby script. I Chose Ruby because of the convenience of regex matching and the familiarity I got writing scripts for my Siri proxy.

The script is not fancy at all. But it does get the job done. It works with the following logic.

1. Every 30 seconds checked my Gmail account
2. is there an unread message from a specific e-mail address
3. if yes, does this message contained trigger phrases?
4. If yes, do specified action.

If you like to give it a try, you can find the Ruby script here my Gmail checker

You will however have to install the Gmail gem http://rubygems.org/gems/ruby-gmail

The way this script is presently written, it runs just fine on raspberry pi. but not on Windows. However, it should not take much to get it running on the Windows machine. I just did not figure out the syntax to send the string to Wget.exe on Windows. For your convenience, I included it in the zip.

Unreal Script Lessons… From days past

Something Completely Off Topic…

My life before ALS.
Unreal scripting & game programming.

The other day I was thinking about my life before ALS and for some reason I started thinking about my old teaching job. I've not mention it before but I used to teaching introductory game programming. Specifically mod authoring for Unreal Tournament 2003 using the built-in unreal scripting language. In these classes we would teach students how to take what was a first-person shooter and turn it into, well any other form of game solely through the scripting interface.

While these lessons are now dated, especially since unreal engine 3 has come out the structure of the script has changed. The fundamentals of the scripting language have not. For example if you want to modify one of the weapons functions or the player controller it might be in a different place in the script, but the principles of the language to make the changes are the same.

So in light of my situation in dealing with ALS, I've decided to share all of these lessons with the world. I just copied my old folder straight up to my Google drive account. So there is probably some traffic for you to sift through. But all of the lessons are there, free for you to use as you will. The only thing I would appreciate is if you use them in a public sense, please put a note in your script somewhere as to where you found the reference.

I hope they're still useful, and that you enjoy them as much as I enjoyed teaching them back in the day.

• old webpage main interface.
  Probably a bunch of broken links, but you should be able to still access the lessons.
• lessons 01 – 24 root folder
• lessons 25 – 55 root folder
• root folder to everything ;-)

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Introduction to C++ programming course

in my last semester teaching, before I landed a job in the games industry I was also asked to do a standing course for introductory programming for nonprogrammers. The goal of this course was to give a whirlwind introduction to C++ programming so that the students would have a basic familiarity with how to code.

If memory serves, these lessons were all written using Visual Studio 6.0. Shouldn't be a problem to port this all over to newer compilers.

These lessons are not quite as complete as the unreal scripting lessons as they were done more on the fly on the whiteboard so there are no  PowerPoint walk-throughs. Nonetheless are some notes with explanations and a few very basic coding samples to help people get started.

• root folder to everything ;-)

DragonDictate voice-recognition

The computer for me is a bit of a lifeline, I spent most of my career working with it and very much enjoyed spending time entertaining myself surfing the web and playing video games. It's been a great escape for me. As my hands have been steadily getting worse for some time now I have found myself less and less able to manage the keyboard and mouse. I have lost most of the dexterity which tends to cause me to push random keys and my shoulders tire out very quickly.

This is caused me to go looking for alternative ways in which I could interface with my computer to maintain a degree of independence. fortunately I don't seem to be exhibiting much in the way of the bulbar symptoms and my the voice is still quite strong, so I started looking at voice recognition software. I first started by looking at the Windows 7 speech recognition which is built in to the operating system (even the home version I believe). The price was right (free) and it worked really quite well, but he did seem to have some consistent comprehension issues for me which I found particularly frustrating. I'll discuss more of the Windows 7 speech recognition in another blog…

I started looking at Nuance Dragon dictate software, which the home version is a reasonably priced but does have limitations to its functionality. Personally I bought the premium version which better suited my needs. There are a few things in particular but the premium version that makes it worthwhile.

• voice macros: you can create your own custom voice commands. This is a very handy feature, however it is limited to pasting formatted text. If you want to go for the full power version, you need professional… Which is $500… Ouch.
• upgrade support: when you upgrade to newer versions of Dragon, your profiles will go with you. The home version does not support this.
• headset included: whoopee... It is however a Plantronics which is very good quality. But I don't use it, I have a Logitech that I bought some time ago for about $30. More comfortable and still works just fine.
• Dragon remote microphone: this is kind of a cool little feature that allows you to use your iPhone as a dictation device. I've only used it once as I prefer the headset. Worked just fine.

The general integration of Dragon into the Windows environment is really quite good and you can access most functionality just by reading what says on tab. This is particularly true for any of the MS office products. Windows 7 did have one command which I kind of preferred called "show numbers" which would put in number over top of all of the buttons accessible on the screen. To access the command you simply said the appropriate number. Dragon doesn't quite have this, but everything is still quite accessible and I find it superior comprehension to the Windows speech recognition far more valuable.

me: "Galea" on server Executus

Perhaps one of my favorite features about the Dragon software is that you can order a software bundle which further extends Dragon's integration into other software's. personally I ordered the gaming speech pack as I still like to find an escape into the World of Warcraft. The software pack is called voxenable and exposes all of the common commands of the game to Dragon. Even some of the basic movement commands in many cases. There are many games that are covered, I've only tried warcraft and portal2 and it does work quite well, there is however a little bit of latency in execution of the command.

However in the case of World of Warcraft,   Nuance Dragon dictate and voxenable allowed me to continue to play the game and socialize with people online. It works really quite well for chat and covering your basic needs. I don't recommend it for PVP, and I've not really tried it on raids (personal choice).

Tip:   don't go buy a version in the local store, or order it directly online. Call the sales representative directly.   They gave me nearly a 50% discount just because I called them!

Over all I'm very satisfied with my purchase of Dragon, I use it just for just about everything on the computer now. As a matter of fact, nearly this entire blog is created using Dragon. It does however take a little bit to get used to using, I find it's nothing major but you do have to train Dragon to recognize your voice and you do have to learn to speak little bit more slowly. I tend to speak rather quickly at times, and well Dragon is usually very good about keeping up with me it does tend to make more mistakes when I do.

Dragon also learns your voice and speech pattern every time you make a correction or run the Accuracy Center, which I find to be very useful as no doubt my voice changes a little bit from day-to-day and will of course change of time. Dragon will adapt to this. I speak with a fairly typically Canadian accent and I've heard some stories about people having stronger accents than my own having some difficulties getting started with Dragon. That said, when you first create your profile there is a very large selection of "accents" you can choose from. This should help get you started…

Pro: very good voice recognition functionality as well integrated into the operating system.  voxenable   option is a huge plus in my book.
Also available for Mac!
Con:it does take a little bit to get used to, and if you've already started using the Windows 7 speech functionality it's a little tricky to break some of the old habits and commands
Cost: US$75 and up.
I paid about US$150 for the premium with the gamer speech pack and the training DVD. The best advertised value online right now is for the home version with gamer speech pack