The Yahoo! Messenger folks gave our team at Colle+McVoy an opportunity to do something fun and original for the holidays. Four weeks later, the Emoticarolers were born! You can create your own lyrics for one of three holiday tunes, choose between a number of characters, and the Emoticarolers will sing a custom carol to your friends.

We tackled some really interesting challenges with this one: an aggressive schedule, finding a reliable way to do text-to-song, and creating a user interface that makes it as simple as possible to enter lyrics to replace the words of well known tunes.

The timeline was the most familiar of these challenges and we're getting to be pretty good with turning awesome stuff around quickly (I don't mind bragging about this too much - our team rocks).

On the text to song side, the biggest hurdle was dealing with the fact that doing text to speech for each of the 4 voices and then compiling all the audio into one mp3 output track is a massive CPU consuming task. So all the technicalities of text-to-song aside, this had to be built in a way that we can just throw servers at it if we get a big spike in traffic. It needs to do this without any bottleneck point, storing data for tons of users, and it needs to start up and shut down extra servers as needed so that we can accommodate load spikes without costing more than necessary.

The most unforeseen challenge, however, was getting the UI right for song entry. Just entering a song into a big input field made it difficult for the user to match their lyrics to the right notes in the song. On the other hand, the notes are all syllable dependent—what if you want to shove a 2 syllable word into a one syllable slot?

We ended up using an interface similar to MadLibs, where you match your input with the words you are attempting to replace. The system will determine the number of syllables you entered, compare that against what it expected for that word replacement, and figure out how to make any note timing adjustments, if necessary. You still have to do some phonetic spelling if you're doing any serious funny business, but it works pretty darn well, and messing with the language really ends up being half the fun.

Give it a shot, send it around, and let me know what you think. We're all pretty stoked with how it turned out, and we're looking forward to hearing people's feedback.

Happy holidays BlogCadre!

View or edit this song
Emoticarolers.com

Monzy performing Kill Dash Nine at Stanford's Computer Science building.

It’s kill dash nine
No more CPU time
Because it’s kill dash 9
and your process is mine

I said kill dash nine
Because it’s my time to shine
Bitch you stepped outta line
And now it’s kill dash nine

For more fun, check out the Nerdcore albums that you can download (free) from Rhyme Torrents.

The video really speaks for itself, but I'll only comment that this version of Blackbird communicates the themes of hope, optimism, and determination in an altogether different way than the original. To a nine year old, perhaps the world is less broken and in need of mending as it is unformed and in need of imagining.

I'm loving this video of Darth Vader tagging the Wikipedia entry for the force.

I'm really happy to see that the dark side is still getting some solid representation in this whole internet thing. I posted a while back about his "Qee Vader" video, where he designed a pop-vinyl toy in his own image. Hopefully, this new video won't be the last.

Here's a link to the final product:

Darth deserves some credit. Make sure to go and vote it up.

See also:
Qee Vader - Darth Vader creates his own designer vinyl toy
Paint That Shit Gold - tag the web

We launched paintthatshitgold.com today to coincide with the release of Atmosphere's new album, "When Life Give You Lemons, You Paint That Shit Gold".

The site allows you capture and tag your favorite corners of the web (or your least favorite, if you're the glass half empty type) all while listening to songs from the album. Check it out, you'll find an audio player with a legit equalizer (finally!), and a realtime web capture utility.

My sad attempt to be a graffiti artist is pictured above. I'm pretty sure that you folks will be able to do better.

To make the web capture stuff work, we had to build a little internet rendering farm to tap into the pipes and process all those juicy slices of interweb that people are sending in. I've literally got one of fifteen or so machines sitting on my desk right now that's sole purpose in life is to load up web pages and screen capture them for Atmosphere fans. How cool is that?

Linkses:

• Paint That Shit Gold
• Grab the album here - if you dig the music on the site, which you will
• Atmosphere's Myspace page

For an April Fools gag, YouTube RickRoll'D their user base, sending all the homepage's promoted video clicks straight to that heinous Rick Astley "Never Gonna Give You Up" video. While I appreciated the joke, the information that it contained was a bit more interesting.

As far as I can tell, the video has been on the home page for about 24 hours now, give or take a few hours. In that time, it's racked up over 5.9 million views, almost 41 thousand comments, and 17 thousand ratings.

I'd assume a non-trivial portion of this traffic is from referrer links and multiple page views. That said, it gives you a rough snapshot of the upper limit on the typical volume of visitors and active (logged-in, commenting or rating) users that visit the YouTube homepage on a Tuesday.

Back in August 2006, YouTube had announced that over 100 million videos were watched per day. This figure is probably higher now, but it puts the homepage count into perspective, suggesting that perhaps 95% of YouTube's video views are from deep links to the site and offsite, embedded views.

A one, and a two, and a chicka booma chick. Bert starts things off smooth for us, because he's a hep cat.

But man, when Bert plays the drums, he's the most far out swinging person of them all. And by far out, I mean seizure inducing, man!

My friend Chris sent me some photos of this amazing orrery that he comissioned. Created by artist Eugene Sargent, it's a beautiful piece of engineering.

There is a small shaft to the right of the main shaft which turns at one revolution per moon orbit around the earth. The moon orbits smoothly on extremely tiny 2.5mm diameter ball bearings.

We definitely picked made the right decision on the cranking ratio...one fortnight instead of one moon orbit. It’s extremely easy to turn and still gives plenty of planetary motion satisfaction.

Here's a video of its making, filmed by Sarah Moore. Notice the ice caps on the Earth—a nice touch that'll be memorable when the real ones have melted away.

The Orrery has landed - Link

Oh man! Check out Ben Cohen's outrageous Qee Vader. He screengrabbed the whole process, so you can figure out how it was done - Link.

There isn't a video, but Ben also made an R2Qee2. I'm hoping he'll finish a whole Star-Wars Qee series.

He says it took about 30 minutes, but I figure it'd take me a week. Unreal.

One of my favorite projects this year is the artisagift.com site for Free Arts Minnesota, a non-profit organization that helps kids overcome traumatic life experiences through the healing powers of art.

Baby Qees: vinyl designer toys that are well loved and collected by folks who, well, love and collect vinyl designer toys. You know who you are.

My employer, Colle McVoy, purchased about a thousand of these cute little buggers and gave them to Free Arts Minnesota for kids to paint any way they like. The result was really outstanding.

To support the project, we put together a fun site that shows off these little works of art, and we also cooked up a virtual Qee maker that will let you participate too. Some quick dragging and dropping will let you create and share a virtual Qee of your own.

I showcased the three virtual Qees above just to give you an idea of what you can do. The Qee editor allows you to choose different body types, change the color and skin, add eyes, mouths, and accessories. It's really in keeping with the concept behind the vinyl toy subculture, only the limited edition design is created by you.

The AC jack and the turntable are mine. I have no idea who made the stormtrooper, but it's my favorite so far. It's your challenge to make something even more impressive.

Make sure to send your Qee to yourself and your friends. It'll toss a direct URL to your Qee in an email. Post your Qee's URL in the comments here. I'd like to see which ones team BC comes up with.

Art Is A Gift - Link