Christopher D Thompson

For the last 8 months, I've been working with the group at Symantec Health. This is a new initiative within the company whose aim is to target the technology needs in the healthcare space. See http://symantechealth.verite.com. In that 8 months, we've gone from prototype to full GA of our two solutions, Health Safe and Health Share.

The broad goal of these products is to ease the burden of IT on hospitals with respect to image archiving and sharing. For those who follow technology trends, healthcare can be surprisingly behind the times. I think this group is on track to place Symantec as a trusted name within healthcare IT, and I'm proud to be part of it.

On a more personal level, my wife, Kelly, has been hard in training for the upcoming Escape From Alcatraz triathlon. The course winds through downtown San Francisco, which we have been able to enjoy during our weekend training. I say "our" training since inevitable I'm along for the ride. The race is this coming Sunday and I'm sure she's in a great shape for it. Go Kelly!

As of mid-September, I've started on a new project 3000 miles away from New York! I found a great team within Symantec , mostly with backgrounds in web and other tech startups, who are working in health care services. You can have a listen to Gary Sevounts talk about the solution here. I'm really happy to have found these guys; I have a lot I can learn from them.
As far as West Coast vs. East... California is nice. It's like being on vacation, with the weather nice all the time. My wife and I still talk about how we miss New York, though. Right now we could be ice skating at Wollman Rink, or seeing the fall color at a cabin up in the Catskills. Perhaps again some time in the future, but for now I'm gonna soak up the sun and enjoy CA!

As it turns out, the state of TTS on Android has tended to what I proposed in an earlier post. With limited resources on handheld devices, TTS libraries had to resort to solutions other than a straight port of existing Java TTS libraries. The eyes-free project resorts to some offloading to a web server, while a more official solution comes from SVOX. See the announcement here. The SVOX solution is what Android really needs to make TTS a reality. The product is embedded and has been proven in other limited resource environments such as automobiles.

For those who don't know me personally, I have spent the last 2 years working with a great team at MarketFactory. I was fortunate enough to meet the 3 founders via an online ad in summer 2007. It was a great opportunity to work with the founders establishing the core technology. It's really quite an experience to start at nothing and see a product ship.

When we started MarketFactory, we had no office, no infrastructure, no code, and only a vision of how we could make the world better. Though the CTO had the final say, I was given freedom to choose most of the development solutions: languages, libraries, development and support tools. Usually when someone in my position is faced with these choices, it's best to pull from what you know, because it's what works. I was also fortunate that I was trusted enough to be allowed to research new unproven technologies as well. Open source is still a relatively new philosophy for the financial world though there is much out there that can be leveraged.

I've worked at a few startups before, but this is the one I put the most of myself into. It's also the one I'm most proud of out of all my past experience.

I've decided to open source the Text2Speech project for Android. The code can be found at http://code.google.com/p/android-text2speech/.

The Text2Speech project has run into some obstacles. The amount of data required for voices combined with the limited processing power of the devices at which Android is targeted makes for some pretty tough hurdles.

Application developers are faced with a few options regarding speech. The first is pre-recorded audio, which is a piece of cake for most applications and a no-brainer. Why burden the device when you only have a small number of repeated phrases?

The second choice is Text2Speech. This is necessary for applications such as screen readers, navigation systems which speak names of streets. This is also where we run into limitations. An amount of optimization can be done at this stage. Also, mobile devices are always increasing in power and storage. So there is some hope yet and the Text2Speech project will continue. It will remain closed source for the immediate future.

New release of Keltris has the following updates:

• New artwork!
• High score retained between plays
• Left/Right block sliding was too quick in higher levels, toned it down a bit
• Bonus points for multiple lines cleared with one block
• Better keyboard controls. Now you can use the arrow keys the same as ASDW. Left/Right/Down for movement and Up for block rotation.

Download: Keltris_1_1.zip

Yesterday I was thinking about how I could salvage the game code I had from the last project and turn it into something useful. Then it struck me that my girlfriend had been asking for a copy of Tetris ever since we purchased a Nintendo Wii. Unfortunately, there isn't a version of Tetris on the Wii. So within 24 hours or so, I worked hard to create Keltris! This was mostly for fun, and to win points with my girlfriend, but also as an exercise in rapid game development as well as a good test of the code I had around.

I have a simple design document which I'd love to share in order to show the creative process from beginning to end, but I used MS Office OneNote to create it and it's not so easy to get it into a nice HTML format. I'll save that for a later time. For now, here are a few screenshots and the game to download.

Download: Keltris_1_0.zip

It's been about a month since I first started this project. I wanted to get familiar with Google Android by taking some existing Java code and porting it to the Android platform. I was also hoping to provide something actually useful in the Android environment. Hopefully this Text2Speech service is. It is entirely derived from FreeTTS.

Here I provide the code in hopes that some screen apps can make use of this service on the device. Examples could be an alarm which reads time, weather, and RSS feeds. Or an email reader.

I worked hard getting it to compile but ran into a bug in the Android SDK InputStream implementation. That's where it currently stands. If I have the time I will try to provide updates for it.

EDIT: Based on a lot of feedback from folks working on Android Developer Challenge submissions, I've decided to keep the source closed until the end of the challenge. If you would like to make use of the Text2Speech service within your application, please send me an email and let's work together.

Not quite a dead project yet, but my game development efforts have been shelved indefinitely. The short version is that my job is currently taking up most of my development efforts. Rather than let this project fade into the background, I decided to do an analysis of the project for my own benefit going forward. What went right, what went wrong, and how I can getter approach a project like this in the future.

There is a lot of useful code, which I don't plan to dispose of. I figure the best way to be sure the project survives is to share the code here. It needs some polishing and packaging, but I hope to share all of what I have, which includes a simple 2D game engine based on DirectX, plus a simple game based on that engine.