BLOGGISH this is how one of my coding marathon sessions works (recreated from memory and scribbled notes on yellow paper). -released /myVoices last week trying to get some attention and find work. it was fully legitimate .NET myServices (webServices) and voiceXml (wireless). a merging of 2 of the latest and greatest, full source code, cell phone recording, diagrams, explanations ... the works. got some great responses for technical merit, but since im writing this, it is obvious no leads for work -only 1 response from /myVoices that wasnt entirely good, pointed out that some alpha bits for doing voice integration with .NET was passed out at the pdc. in other words, who cares about your voiceXml stuff, when we will get it built in soon enough. doh! -so a trip later to msdn.microsoft.com/speech and ive learned that MS is coming out with something called SALT, which is similar to vxml, and that there is a new version of the speech sdk 5.1. go ahead and download that while im there, after asking them to get me on their beta list for speech .NET. they typically ignore my requests :( --had this RDF book sitting on my computer for a couple weeks now, so crack it open hoping for ideas ... nothing that i wanted to do at the moment; so i was like h3ll, ive got no new legit ideas, and voiceXml is going to die ... so ill go revolutionize pr0n (scrambled for your safety) to cheer myself up. grab the directX sdk, and a couple hours later, my intelligent app is downloading movies, and generating thumbs. that was my 2nd attempt at gen'ing thumbs from movies; had tried the windows media sdk last time and failed miserably. regardless, i seriously believe i now have one of the best free, fully automated adult sites. intelligent agents, C#, ASP.NET, winForms, ADO.NET, XML, XSD, XSLT and all of that goodness, of course. -so im still idealess at this point, and am wondering what else i can do to the adult site other than passwords and movies. decide to go after live/streaming feeds. -im surfing around and checking out the state of the net, when i stumble across a couple sites dedicated to non adult web cams; a whole internet community that i had no knowledge about. mainly a bunch of college kids, probably english majors. im like h3ll, ive got a full on live video feed, with a scrolling marquee sign that you can send messages to through a C# class lib i wrote, ill blow these punks out of the water. note, that completes the triumvarant of categories i work on: fully legit bleeding edge stuff, revolutionizing pr0n, and pure silliness. spend that night (thursday) adding the reciprocal links to my live feed page and put myself out there for all the voyeurs to stare at. in fact, somebody is watching me right now. back to rambling, start getting lots of hits, because im a mega hit generating machine in general. had to recently shut down my winamp plugin because it was beating up my server too badly. -when i 1st setup the live video feed, had written a little winForm app called 3rdParty. basically, all it did was register with the media server and would audibly notify me when somebody was watching me by playing a wav file, so i could suck my belly in, stop picking my nose and such. usually its my parents watching, and making sure im not revolutionizing pr0n. regardless, it would not tell me how many people were watching at any time, just 0 or 1toN -when i checked out the server directly, i saw that up to 5 people were watching at once. dang, i needed some way to know how many people were watching at all times, to give me a priority on how much my belly needed to be sucked in. didnt want to create a whole bunch of wav files for diff # of people that could be watching, and it just happens that i downloaded the new speech sdk a couple days ago. remember. -so that afternoon (friday) bust that out and am like, how does this work. while somebody is watching me, i have the 3rdParty v2 counting off connections within 10 minutes. they had a C# sample ... serious! since i want to say something to the freak watching me, add that capability as well. granted he thinks im a freak for setting up a live video feed. its a vicious cycle. well, the lurker ends up writing me and saying that it sounds just like HAL 9000. so the 1st message i send him, is to the effect of 'would you like to play a game of global thermodynamic nuclear war?'. when he immediately responds on the scrolling marquee 'wouldnt you rather play a nice game of chess?' -after im done laughing my butt off, we then sit there in uncomfortable silence, i throw on some mp3s. but this makes it so we cannot hear the audio for the program i just wrote! -since winamp had already been conquered with the last plugin, i knew it could easily be integrated here. -trip to winamp.com later and 3rdParty is further upgraded to pause winamp, then speak, and then unpause winamp ... perfect. -then i just go speech crazy. decide that the messages that are posted to the scrolling marquee sign need to be read out loud as well, so in my apartment, it would be like g0d speaking to me. since i made the speech/winamp thing a class library, that took all of another 5 minutes. the only problem is that i could not get it to send messages to winamp's message pump. yes, tried impersonation and all that. impersonation will let me control the process, but the messages are ignored for some reason. ill revisit later. regardless, its late in the afternoon now, and had to go workout. thats why the sites named brains-n-brawn ... to force me to go workout :) should be able to write it off. -while im working out, im obsessed that all sorts of people are hitting my live feed and nothing is happening ... lame. recalling the hal 9000 comment, decide to make my computer randomly talk while im gone. -so when i get back, start checking out chat bots, which somebody had mentioned to me as soon as id released the MSN Messenger Web Service with corresponding MessengerResponder. find AIML and Alice and all this incredibly cool AI stuff. but ultimately, i find a COM that wraps AIML/Alice ... perfect. -but once i have this in hand, realize that it has much cooler uses then the original intention. -thus the whole msnBot thing above. that took be the rest of that night, and the morning of the next day (saturday). - the next day, played around with setting up 2 bots and letting them talk to each other, this worked, but the conversation was purely annoying. but the good thing out of that is it forced me to update my speech/winamp class lib to support multiple voices. and it gave me some other ideas. -if i could get the sign to pause winamp, then i could set it up to speak with a different voice than my 3rdParty app. so the 3 other people that were just watching, and not talking over the sign, could just listen to the conversation and understand whom said what. finally, went and updated 3rdParty with 'away' functionality, so that it would read a joshua/hal9000 quotes while i was working out or reading/listening to a book and away from my computer. which brings this back full circle ... to voiceXml. think i can add a vxml interface to the bot, so that you could call the bot on the phone and talk to it. the hard part is that the voiceXml spec doesnt easily support speech-to-text. which is needed to get the users input, convert it to text, and hand off to the bot so that it can formulate a response. but the servers do have a <record> tag that will post a .wav file to a server. so im thinking that i could post it to my server, and on my server, use the speech sdk 5.1 to do the text conversion and process as normal from there. that is the currently planned project for tomorrow. it is saturday night now, almost sunday. 2 people are watching me. they are full on lurkers, they have not posted any messages 1/17/02