Troy: GSoC 2012 Pronunciation Evaluation Week 5

Sorry for the late update. Following are the stuff done in week 5, mainly problem solving.

1) Solving the Flash based recorder doesn't allow users to enable their microphone access problem. 

At the very beginning (before the Flash player 11.2 and 11.3 update), the audio recorder I created using Flex works fine. Users can simply right click the recorder and select the "Settings" to allow microphone access. However, with the new updates, that option is disabled without giving any information. 

To solve it, many people suggest adding the websites into the online global privacy list. However, after trying many times still not working for my case. 

Furthermore, checking the http://englishcentral.com/ which also is Flash based recording suddenly gives me a clue. In their website, after clicking recording button (which is a microphone image), a popup window shows up with the Flash Microphone privacy setting dialogue. Yes! Instead of finding the problem disabled the "Setting" option for Flash object, why not checking the accessibility of microphone in code and prompt the setting dialogue when necessary. Here comes the solution:

First, checking whether the microphone is available, if not show the microphone list dialogue of Flash object ask the user to plugin a microphone:

var mic:Microphone = Microphone.getMicrophone();

if(!mic) {

Alert.show("No microphone available");

debug("No microphone available");

Security.showSettings("microphone");

}

Otherwise, check whether the microphone is accessible or not, if it is muted, prompt the privacy dialogue to ask user to allow the microphone access:

if(mic.muted) {

debug("Microphone muted!");

Security.showSettings("privacy");

}

With these testing during the initialization stage of the Flash recorder, it can allow users to enable the microphone access at the early beginning. One interesting thing is that after doing this, the "Setting" option of the Flash object now is clickable. 

Now, looking back to the code solving the problem, which is so apparent, however, before you know the answer, it is really hard to predict. 

2) Cross-browser Flash recorder compatibility

As the Flash recorder problem was finally solved using the above method, I was so happy to update the trunk and our server and hoped to see the site working nicely. But the browser shows that the Flash recorder cannot load, the only information I got is "Error 2046". ....

Although rather depressed, I still have to solve the problem. Googled a bunch of pages and tried several suggestions, the one that first clear the browser cache and then set the Flash player not to save local cache and then re-enable its local cache (some kind of clear Flash player local cache), gives some progress by changing the "Error 2046" to "Error 2032". 

For "Error 2032", there are mainly two groups of explanations, one said there are something wrong with the URLs in your Actionscript's HTTPRequests, which is not my problem as those URLs are definitely correct and are under the same folder as the player. The other is the RSL problem of Flash compiler. To solve the RSL linkage problem, go to the "Flex Build Path" properties page, "Library path" tab and change the framework linkage to "merged into code".

3) Adding password change page

4) Refine the user extra information update page to reflect the existing user information if available, instead of always showing the default values.

Till now, the website for exemplary recordings are finally come to a usable stage. 

In this week, I will try to accomplish followings:

1) Prompts adding page for administrators;

2) Design recording prompts to start our exemplary recording data collection;

3) Bug fixing and system testing;

4) Study the Amazon Mechanical Turk and start thinking how to incorporate our recording onto that platform.

Troy: GSoC 2012 Pronunciation Evaluation Week 4

Finally, the data collection website now can provide the basic capabilities! Anyone who are interested, check out our website at http://talknicer.net/~li-bo/datacollection/login.php and have a try. If you encountered any problems, do let us know. Following are the stuff I have done during the last week:

1) Discussed with my mentor James to finalize the schema design and created the whole database with MySQL. The whole database design could be found http://talknicer.net/w/Database_schema .  During the development of the website, slightly modifications were carried out to refine the database design. Such as the age field for the users table, only when I try to insert user values into the table did I realize the age value is dependent on the registration date which may not be a good idea to store age. Storing birthdate would be much better. Similar changes like that are updated. What I learnt from these is that a good design comes from practice not purely imagination. 

2) Implement the two types of user registration page: one for student and one for exemplary. As we don't want to constrain the two types of users to be exclusive and to avoid redundant work, the registration involves two steps: one basic registration and one extra information update. For student, only the basic one is compulsory, but for the exemplary they have to finish both the two forms. 

3) Adding extra supporting functionalities for user management. These including: password reset, mode selection for users with multiple types. 

4) Incorporating the audio recorder with the website for recording and uploading to servers. 

Things to do this week:

1) Prompts adding page;

2) Testing the system; 

3) Design the pronunciation learning game for student users.

Troy: GSoC 2012 Pronunciation Evaluation Week 3

Due to some personal stuff, I haven't made much progress during the 3rd week of GSoC. I will try my best to catch up in this week.

Things done:

1. Tailor the previous audio recorder to provide only the recording and playback functionality and leave interfaces for Javascript to communicate with the web site pages. 

2. Discuss with my mentor regarding the database design. 

Things to do this week:

1. Fix schema for prompts to handle word lists with pronunciation and parts of speech (along with a separate text string for display which might not have as clear word boundaries because of punctuation--such as this--etc.)

2. Get separate registration interface for exemplar uploaders

  

3. Get an interface to add prompts

  

4. Do the interface to upload recordings for prompts

5. Think about the game play and do its schema once the basic features are decided

Troy: GSoC 2012 Pronunciation Evaluation Week 2

Following are things done in the second week of GSoC 2012:

1. Setup the server rtmplite to automatically check whether the process is still running or not. If it is stopped, restart it. 

To accomplish this, first of all, create a .process file under my home folder and put the current rtmplite process id as the only content of this .process file. You can use 'top' or 'ps' to find out the current process id of your application. 

Then I created following script file to do the status checking:

if [ -e "$pidfile" ]  then	  	# check whether the process is running  	rtmppid=`/usr/bin/head -n 1 ${pidfile} | /usr/bin/awk '{print $1}'`;  	  	# restart the process if not running  	if [ ! -d /proc/${rtmppid} ]  	then  		/usr/bin/python ${exefile} -r ${dataroot} &  		rtmppid=$!  		echo "${rtmppid}" > ${pidfile}  		echo `/bin/date` "### rtmp process restarted with pid: ${rtmppid}"  	fi  fi

In this script, first we will check whether the .process files ( i.e. the $pidfile) exists or not. If we don't want the server to check for this process for now (maybe when we apply patches to the program), we could simply delete this file and it won't check the process again. And after the maintenance, recreate the file with the new process id. The checking will automatically going on.

The checking itself is quite simple: getting the process id from the file and see whether the process exists by looking into the /proc system folder where each running process will have a folder. Goolge the '/proc linux' you will get more information about this mystery folder which contains quite a lot information about your system. 

2. Implement the login and registration pages using HTML5.

First for user information storage, we use MySQL database, thus a user table is designed and created in the server's mysql database:

      Field
Type
      
Comments
      
userid
      INTEGER
Compulsory, automatically increased, primary key
      
email
      
VARCHAR(200)
      Compulsory, users are identified by emails
      password
VARCHAR(50)
      
Compulsory, encrypted using SHA1, at least 8 alphanumeric characters
      
name
      
VARCHAR(100)
      Not compulsory, default 'NULL'
      age
INTEGER
      
Not compulsory, default 'NULL', accepted values [0,150]
      
sex
      
CHAR(1)
      Not compulsory, default 'NULL', accepted values {'M', 'F'}
      native
CHAR(1)
      
Not compulsory, default 'NULL', accepted values {'Y', 'N'}. Indicating the user is a native English speaker or not.
      
place
      
VARCHAR(1000)
      Not compulsory, default 'NULL'. Indicating the place when the user lived at the age between 6 and 8.
      
accent
      CHAR(1)
Not compulsory, default 'NULL', accepted values {'Y', 'N'}. Indicating the user has a self-reported accent or not.  
  

The creation of the database:

CREATE TABLE users   (  	userid INTEGER NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,  	email VARCHAR(200) NOT NULL,  	password VARCHAR(50) NOT NULL,  	name VARCHAR(100),  	age INTEGER,  	sex SET('M', 'F'),  	native SET('Y', 'N') DEFAULT 'N',  	place VARCHAR(1000),  	accent SET('Y', 'N'),  	CONSTRAINT PRIMARY KEY (userid),  	CONSTRAINT chk_age CHECK (age>=0 AND age<=150)  );
Secondly, the login and simple registration pages are implemented in HTML5 which I have to learn in practice. Follows are the screenshots of the pages:
      

  

Also if you are interested, you can go to this page to help us test the system: http://talknicer.net/~li-bo/datacollection/login.php . On the server side we use PHP to retrive information from the page and do the query in mysql database and finally sending the data back to the page. 
    
The recording interface, has also been ported to use HTML instead of pure Flex as I did before. The page current shows up OK but no event interaction between HTML and Flash yet. 
    

3. Database design for the whole project. 
A bunch of tables are designed to store various information for this project. Detailed table information could be found on our wiki page: http://talknicer.net/w/Database_schema . Here I will give a brief discussion. First the user table created in the previous step will be augmented to keep two kind of user information: one for normal student user and one for exemplar recordings. The reason to put them into one table instead of two is that student users, when they can do an excellent job in pronunciation, should also be allowed to contribute to the exemplar recording. Also for exemplar recorders, if they register through the website, they have to show they are proficient enough to contribute a qualified exemplar recording. 

Beside the user table, there are several other tables to for necessary information such as languages for list of languages defined by ISO in case we may extend our project to other languages; region table to have an idea of the user's accent; prompts table for the list of text resources will be used for pronunciation evaluation. 

Then are the tables to log the recordings the users do and tables for set of tests designed in the system. 

Things to do in the coming week:

1. Discuss more regarding the game part to finish the last part of schema design. 

2. Figure out how to integrated the Flash audio recorder nicely with the HTML5 interface. 

3. Implement the student recording interface.

4. Further tasks could be found on this list: http://talknicer.net/w/To_do_list