RJ Auburn - One Step Beyond

Today the W3C published a new working draft of VoiceXML 2.1. This draft addresses a number of the comments that have been received to data and a fair amount of clarifications. Sadly there is not a detailed public change document or list but what can you do? ;-)

One of the major changes to this draft that I ended up pushing very hard for is an overhaul of the 2.1 <data> element security model. The new version now allows developers to set both allow and deny access control instructions and modifies the behavior of what to do when there is no access control instruction. Before it would always deny access if you did not have the ACL specified. The new version makes this dependent on the execution environment. The reason that you need to have this dependent on the environment is that the correct default setting really depends on where you are running the browser and what sort of data feeds you are accessing. These changes to the model make it much more like the Java or IE security models and will allow for much easer access to existing data feeds in deployment models where this makes sense.

So I finally replaced my old Sony Ericsson T68i with a T637. My old phone had been randomly shutting itself off in the middle of calls and people had been complaining that they could not hear me.

The new phone is much nicer in many ways. It’s a much faster phone and the UI is a big step up. I am sad to lose the 900Mhz band for travel but I am not sure how big of a deal that is really going to be.

I was able to get this phone for only $50 as I had insurance on my old line so it was not a bad deal. I had really wanted a Treo but I could not bring myself to spend that much on a GSM phone that does not have bluetooth and EDGE support. Maybe next year…

Gordon Meyer just blogged about a Computer Telephony application for the mac called Phone Valet from Parliant. I have not had a chance to play with this yet but it looks like it might be a fun toy. Now if only it supported VoiceXML!

So today I got news that my youngest brother (Josh) just got accepted into the San Francisco Ballet’s new trainee program! Josh just spent the summer in their summer program and had been waiting to find out if he was going to be accepted into the school year round. The trainee program is a special program where they take a few of the very promising students and have them train with the actual ballet company.

Competition during the summer was high to get one of these slots and he did not really thing he was going to be able to make it as he is only 17 and this will be his first year at a professional level school but as it turns out the artistic directors with the company were very impressed and he was put at the top of list!

I have to say that I am very proud of my brother. It’s exciting to see him succeeding at something he has spent so many years working towards. Of course he still have many years of hard work ahead of him but he’s loves what he is doing and thats the important part.

Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) has made it another step along the way to becoming a full W3C recommendation. Today it was published as a Proposed Recommendation and is now up to vote by the W3C advisory board. With any luck it should hit full recommendation status in the next few weeks!

ComputerTelephony.org recently launched a new blog titled SpeechBlog that is going to be covering the telephony and speech space. Sadly there are not that many blogs covering the speech space yet but with any luck as the market is growing we should start to see a few more sources of conversation on the web.

This past week I finally got a chance to play around with a digital SRL camera. My father in law owns both a Canon Digital Rebel and a Nikon D70 and he has been letting me play around with the Rebel all week. The Rebel is by far much nicer then my Canon S40 that I have been using the last two years. Amazingly the Rebel costs the same as my S40 did just two years ago, back then the digital SLR’s were in the $5k range if I remember correctly.

The big thing that you notice is that when you press the shutter button it actually takes the picture without any delay. On my S40 there is always a delay that causes me to miss a lot of shots because it fires a bit late. With this camera it just works.

I suspect I will need to look into getting one of these soon. Of course I will then need to do some research on photography as having that nice a camera and not knowing how to use all the options would be a crime. ;-) Right now I only understand the basics but I suspect that would not take long to remedy!