Merry Xmas and Happy holidays

[Kirk Reiser]

Hi Folks:  I just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Xmas and Happy
Holidays.  It has been a busy year and I hope we've made decent
headway on a few of our projects.

Hopefully I will have v0.10 of speakup out in a few days.  It has
partial cursoring support, a new /proc/speakup file structure for
setting speakup options, a number of bug fixes and I can't remember
what all else went in off-hand.  I want to thank Jim Danley for his
development of the /proc/speakup code.  He's done a very nice job.  I
also want to thank all of the cvs speakup testers.  Without them we
would not be anywhere near as far along as we are.  They are always
happy to take time out of their busy daytime activities to make my
life misourible with bug reports and hey Reiser you broke it again.

TuxTalk is sitting at the point where I need to get the synth modules
code working so it can be built as a module and connected into speakup
for testing.  I was hoping to have this working by now but life
happens.  We did manage to rewrite enough of the code to allow
controlling it as a normal hardware synth.  We also started improving
it's pronunciation rules.  We have also put in some basic routines for
handling sentence inflection.  All-in-all Tuxtalk has gone through
quite a bit of rewriting and I think will become a good small software
speech synthesizer by the time we're done.

Socrates has been slow going over the past few months.  The person
that was doing some of the main coding on it during the summer months
has been very busy with school work the last couple of months.  As
soon as he and I can sit down and clean up the code a bit the cvs
version should be ready for playing with.  The to-do list is still
longer than the finished list but I believe it's a good start towards
a large project.

Awesome has stalled recently.  We have some basic widgets working for
mixer controls and a flexible user interface but nothing which I can
say is ready for playing with by any other than serious coders.

Our digital talking-book reader has a working user interface but the
xml/mpeg playing code is not written yet.  If anyone is interested in
working on this project it would be helpful.  I am afraid I have
nowhere near enough time to do all these projects myself.  I usually
assign tasks to summer students to work on but during the school year
students typically have the time to devote to very challenging software
projects.

So I don't think we've done bad over the past year.  Sometimes you
make more progress than you realize until you sit back and review the
current state of all of your efforts.  I hope this summary has been a
little bit interesting and I hope you all have as good of new year as
you've had over the past one.  Once again thank you to all folks that
have helped out and become good friends over the past year.  I
couldn't do it without you and my life would certainly not be as
fulfilled and enjoyable as it has become.

  Kirk