IBM Watson Text To Speech Bower_Components - text-to-speech

I'm pulling my hair out and would welcome some input/advice. I can't get any of the code examples for Watson's Text to Speech service to work. Or example codes for Amazon Polly or Read Speaker for that matter...
Every time I try to track down the problem it seems to boil down to something along the lines of "you need to install such and such (Composer, curl, Bowser, Drush, etc.) via the command line". That's all well and good, except for the fact that I'm new to web development and my company is currently using a shared hosting platform for which I do not have command line access.
Is there any way to get a decent text to speech engine installed on a shared hosting platform, or do I just need to bite the bullet and make the switch to a VPS?

Depending on what your actually trying to do with any text to speech solution, you should at least be able to test from a command line locally and then deploy the solution in code to a shared environment.
Regarding IBM Watson's Text to Speech, there are no dependencies in and of itself. In the most basic form, you're just making a call to a REST API: https://www.ibm.com/watson/developercloud/text-to-speech/api/v1/#synthesize_audio
As an example, using curl from any command line, the following will return a wav file:
curl -X GET -u "{username}":"{password}"
--output hello_world.wav
"https://stream.watsonplatform.net/text-to-speech/api/v1/synthesize?
accept=audio/wav&text=Hello%20world&voice=en-US_AllisonVoice"
How you handle that file will depend on the programming language you use, but it still doesn't have any dependencies to get started with the examples.

Related

How to Install Things off Command Line in Computer we are SSHed to

so my general problem right now is that I'm SSHing into another computer and would like to download Java, however a lot of what I would need to get things set up can only be accessed, from what I can tell so far, from a download off the web browser. Of course there are likely several solutions to this, such as ways to download the environment and language outside of a web browser, but at the same time I'd like to know the general strategies one would take in downloading new languages and environments on a computer they are SSHed into, or don't have as much utility in its use. Thank you!

serve oracle service cloud Customer portal locally?

I am working on customizing the oracle service cloud customer portal, but since OSvC provides only WebDAV to connect to it. It is very time-consuming to edit files and then upload them to WebDAV even for a single word change.
I am looking for a solution to serve it locally make desired changes and then upload the desired code to webDEV.
But after searching the file structure I can not make which framework it uses, I tried to use websites like https://builtwith.com/ and WhatRuns but they are also not able to find anything useful.
Although after searching in the file structure, I find some files of CodeIgnitor but the structure is way more different than the CodeIgnitor folder structure.
The short answer is no, you will not be able to run Customer Portal locally. While it is a fork of CodeIgniter from many years ago, there are server-side dependencies that will prevent you from running it in a local sandbox.
That said, it is possible to automate many of the manual tasks of interacting with WebDAV for change testing. If you edit locally, then you can use scripting hooks or event RPA robots to automate some of the manual file movement. Personally I have a flow to edit remotely in my test environment with an editor (like VSCode or Nova) that can connect to a remote server via WebDAV and edit files directly in the development area of a site. Then, when finished, I have a script that pulls down the latest version of all files and then allows me to commit changes to Git for SCM.
Another option is RPA. You can develop a robot that can be run to automate the manual tasks that you face in your workflow. Personally, I think that scripting is a better solution than RPA since you can automate all of the actions via scripting or a shell. But, it's another option to consider.
Another way of "Live editing" the OSvC CP code is to connect to WebDav via a software that supports it like Mountain Duck which uploads your code to OSvC on save.
OR use the better solution Windows Explorer which supports connecting to WebDav and treating it like a network drive, by going on My Computer -> Computer -> Map Network Drive then put https://yoursite.custhelp.com/dav/cp click Next then you'll be promoted to login using your OSvC login.

How to convert to a full browser-based web development environment?

I would like to build web software, using only a browser. I'm looking for a third party service that offers me (perhaps a subset of):
Obviously a code editor with intellisense and extensibility
A way to run console commands
To run npm scripts, webpack, gulp that will build my code
To ssh to other computers
To be able to even run my server-side code in a dev environment
node app.js, dotnet run, maybe even apache + php
Ideally I'd be able to have a database in that environment
So, is there a service that will allow web developers to operate completely within a browser?
I imagine it being like a VPS, but with a great web interface that lets you manage installed packages and a custom built text editor that doesn't stink, and a button to open a new bash session, or open existing bash sessions.
I'm looking for recommendations from those who have actually used the service they are recommending, not just people who googled one of the million "Cloud IDE's" or browser based text editors, which offer no other functionality.
In an ideal sense, I'd be able to work on projects with complex development environments, from any phone, any computer, or even an iPad with a keyboard, simply by signing into a website and choosing the project.
You are looking for gitpod.io.
Check it out it does everything you asked for.

Is there a decent, standalone, cross-platform webserver that will work in concert with Autorun on USB Jump Drives?

I'm trying to find a decent standalone webserver that I can load up on a jump drive.
My wife is a photographer, and I'd like to present the clients with their images on usb. When they plug it in, I'd like a web page to load up, and run some jQuery magic to show them a nice carousel of all there images.
So far, this is all fine since it can all be done client side and doesn't need a server at all.
The problem I'm facing is that I'd like some server-side code to be able to read the images out of the directory so that once the interface is built, I don't need to manually create all of the <img /> tags.
If it was primarily going to be used in a Windows environment, I'd have no problem going with IIS Express, since I'm mainly a .NET MVC developer and this would be perfect for me... However, the fact of the matter is that a large amount of our client base is also OS X users.
I did find this Java one jlHttp, and I also found this thread here on SO, but I don't think I understand enough about either one of them to accomplish what I'm looking for.
Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
I'm looking for the same thing, and the two best options I've found were Flying Ant cd web server and Stunnix. Of the two, Flying Ant is cheaper, and I've tested it with success on my project.
I found Mongoose very convenient for this exact purpose. It's crossplatform, lightweight and requires minimum configuration. You may be interested in this project that uses Mongoose to display pictures in a folder tree or FTP directory.
How about Node.js
It says it runs on Linux, OS X, and Windows.

How would I created a flexible EC2 Windows 2008 boot script?

If you look at the Linux ecosystem (especially the Ubuntu and Alestic EC2 images) there is a common technique where the VMs are pre-configured to look at the EC2 user-data and use it as a boot script. The nice thing about this approach is that you can write a boot script that further provisions your machine, allowing you to avoid making a new image every time your software that runs on the machine changes.
I want to do the same thing for Windows, but given that I'm an Mac and Linux guy, I'm a bit lost on where to start. My requirements are:
This must run on Windows Server 2008
A bootstrap script needs to start when the machine boots up, read the user-data file by pulling down the contents http://169.254.169.254/1.0/user-data
The bootstap script then needs to run the contents of that file as if it were a script
The script embedded in the user-data needs to run in such a way that it has access to the desktop environment (ie: it can launch a browser, etc).
I'm not quite sure how services work in Windows or if I need to enable auto-login, so any advice here would be appreciated. The ultimate goal is to run a Java program that launches some custom software that in turn launches a web browser (IE, Firefox, etc) and is capable of taking screenshots.
The screenshot part is interesting, because in the past when I've tried this the only way I could get something other than a black screen was to have UltraVNC or RealVNC boot up as a service, though I don't know why that helped.
I'm looking for answers to three specific questions, as well as any general advice:
Should I be focussing on a Windows service or auto-login + bat file in the "Startup" folder?
If I use a Windows service, is there anything special that I need to do to make sure desktop access and/or screenshots are available?
Do you recommend any tools for common Linux commands, like curl or wget? Last time I used Windows I used Cygwin a lot, but is there something more appropriate to use here?
I have not tried auto-login on Windows instances in EC2, but here's the support document on how to enable it.
We boot-strap our Windows instances using a custom AMI with a custom Windows 'install' service already installed. The boot-strap installer reads a URL from user-data at startup. The URL points to a ZIP file stored in S3. The installer then downloads, un-zips, and executes the actual application installer -- in our case a simple CMD fie.
This setups allows us to have one base AMI and then be able to easily overlay 15+ different application configurations (without having to rebuild the AMI). If you only have one application configuration this may be overkill for your situation.
The only trouble we ran into was having our installer service start to early -- changing the service startup mode to "Automatic Delayed" fixed that issue.
We wrote our boot-strap installer in Java, launched via YAJSW, because we're comfortable with it. If you just want a few simple Unix tools, most are available pre-compiled for Windows, for example wget.
For something completely different, you could try PsExec to configure the instance after it has booted.
You can try using RightScale's free developer account to create plain Powershell scripts and associate them with your Windows instances to run at boot time. The RightScale dashboard solves exactly the problems you are trying to solve above.
DISCLAIMER: I work for RightScale.
As for screen capture CutyCapt is a simple tool you can point at a URL and generate an image from.
Unxutils is a great solution for those looking for unix tools on Windows. It's got the wget.exe that you're looking for, however, using Powershell to download stuff is not so bad either:
$wc = new-object system.net.webclient
$wc.DownloadFile("http://stackoverflow.com","test.html")
If you can write a batch file to do your setup, then you can run it at startup of the vm by doing this:
1. Run REGEDT32.EXE.
2. Modify the following value within HKEY_CURRENT_USER:
Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\ParseAutoexec
1 = autoexec.bat is parsed
0 = autoexec.bat is not parsed
As an answer to #3, I would say that you can do just about anything in a batch file that you need which includes downloading from a ftp server (but not from a http server). I am really interested in this stuff and so if you have questions, try asking me.
If you use Elastic Beanstalks you can use this:
Customizing the Software on EC2 Instances Running Windows
It uses YAML formatting standards, e.g.
packages:
msi:
mysql: http://dev.mysql.com/get/Downloads/Connector-Net/mysql-connector-net-6.6.5.msi/from/http://cdn.mysql.com/
or
sources:
"c:/myproject/myapp": http://s3.amazonaws.com/mybucket/myobject.zip
I know this is a little bit late to help out with the original post but for anyone who is still reading this one solution is to use the http://cloudinitnet.codeplex.com/ project. The service is easily installed using a powershell script and will create a local administrator account to use while running.
The goal for this project was to replace the Cloud-Init project used in Amazon Linux and Ubuntu.