“This is a pre-study for a larger audiovisual speech synthesis project that is planned to be carried out during 1998-2000 at Helsinki University of Technology. The main objective of this report is to map the situation of today’s speech synthesis technology and to focus on potential methods for the future of this project … The objective of the whole project is to develop high quality audiovisual speech synthesis with a well synchronized talking head, primarily in Finnish. Other aspects, such as naturalness, personality, platform independence, and quality assessment are also under investigation.” Be sure to check out the Speech Synthesis Demonstrations page.

“PHP, defined by its developers as a ’server-side HTML-embedded scripting language,’ provides both novice and expert programmers alike with an extremely powerful set of tools which they can use to serve dynamic content to their web site. Created in 1994 by Rasmus Lerdorf as a personal project, a core group of developers soon joined Rasmus and continued to develop the software package that, as of November 1999, has been installed on over one million servers worldwide according to Netcraft. Furthermore, it is the most popular Apache server module, edging out industry behemoths such as Microsoft FrontPage and mod_perl.”

“PHP makes our lives easier. We began our exploration into the good life with What You Should Know About PHP. In that article I focused mainly on PHP concepts with a little script thrown in for fun. Now we’ll delve deeper into the power of PHP and cover several strategies that will help you quickly set up a site that’s easy to maintain and update.”

“I mourn the death of design, yet I am grateful for its existence. As a discipline, design has entered the same meaningless existence as art. Before discussing this further, it is appropriate that I admit to the same arrogance frequently found amongst designers. Namely, the belief that ‘graphic design’ is the only design-related term that doesn’t need to be prefaced by interior, clothing, software, etc. in order to be placed in context. Furthermore, I believe we could ignore the introductory statement if we stop trying to apply design as a discipline to its digital/ online/ whatever permutations, or trying to define ‘new media’ design as a subclass of graphic design.”

“What good is storytelling in an action game? Steven Johnson looks for answers in the new game Oni… ‘One of the best fundamental principles that anybody ever expressed to me about game design is that games should teach you how to play them,’ says Hardy LeBel, designer of the newly released Oni, from Bungie Studios. An action title deeply influenced by Japanese animé films like Akira or Ghost in the Shell, Oni follows the story of a young cybernaut named Konoko and her battle against an industrial espionage outfit called, predictably enough, The Syndicate.”

Eric Costello: “If you are looking for help making the transition to CSS layout (that’s Cascading Style Sheets), you’ve come to the right place. I am cataloging here as many useful cross-browser CSS layout techniques as I can find, and some that I made up when I was bored last Thursday. All the examples on this site have been reduced to only their essential code, and you will find the source displayed on each page to hopefully make it quick and easy to understand the inner workings of the CSS. Feel free to steal all the code you find on this site, and consider linking back here on your site or in your source comments.”

“Anxious advertisers are studying a myriad of methods to encourage visits to their World Wide Web sites, but few have considered a multimedia campaign to urge computer users to not visit their Web sites. But one big media company is undertaking just such an exercise in reverse psychology, with apparent success so far.”

“This is a pre-study for a larger audiovisual speech synthesis project that is planned to be carried out during 1998-2000 at Helsinki University of Technology. The main objective of this report is to map the situation of today’s speech synthesis technology and to focus on potential methods for the future of this project … The objective of the whole project is to develop high quality audiovisual speech synthesis with a well synchronized talking head, primarily in Finnish. Other aspects, such as naturalness, personality, platform independence, and quality assessment are also under investigation.” Be sure to check out the Speech Synthesis Demonstrations page.