The American Telephone and Telegraph Company -- better known as AT&T -- has a natural affinity to voice-transmissions. It comes to no surprise that a company with telephony-roots would encourage and sponsor the developement of a high-quality, artificial voice system.

Still, listening to the Natural Voices demos is quite amazing anyway. Except for minor glitches, Natural Voices intoniation is first class. What's even more amazing: I like the german speech better than the english one. It sounds even more natural to me.

A few days ago, I met with a couple of friends in Viennas' first district. It is probably one of the most expensive places for businesses and also very crowded. Successful advertisements would probably have a very high impact there.

But what about non-successful, even non-working advertisements? Would they be also boosted? Or would people simple pass by and ignore them?

Most hosting plans including MySQL also include phpMyAdmin as a front end. A lot of open source php applications depend upon MySQL as a database backend. Knowing more about phpMyAdmin could thus improve a webmasters experience.

Packt publishing was as nice as sending me a copy of their Mastering phpMyAdmin book for review. I hope you enjoy this review as much as I did reading it!

...and by bombing I don't mean bombing Iraq. No, the term Google Bombing actually refers to something else, spamming Google by doing lots of links with a given anchor text.

In a recent post of the Google Blog, the major player of the search engine market itself defends this practice. It's reflecting the current opinion on the Internet and thus needs to be respected, they write in an article to be remembered.

September, 11 in US probably wasn't just another day. People thought about the World Trade center, the two planes that crashed into it 2001 and the sadness that followed that event. There is a reason why searching for september 11th on Google doesn't lead to a calendar.

But what about Europe, especially Austria? I haven't noticed too much of worries here. US is far away, there's a big ocean between Europe and America. Some people even get adventurous and fly anyway. Like us. We did a helicopter ride and enjoyed it.

A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Patterson started a phpWebSite contest. The judges Sharon Renshaw and Shawn Murray were found rather quickly, people started working on their submissions. The goal was finding a new look for a new portal.

phpWebSite themes is the new project from the creators of phpwebsitemanual.com and will focus on phpWebSite themes. I'm already curious how it will turn out and wish all involved parties the best of luck!

Today at breakfast I had a surprise on my homepage. The Outlaw Group apparently payed me a visit! Instead of the usual Sharondippity-Theme, all I got was "OutLaw Group". Nothing more.

The good thing of course is a lot of saved bandwidth. Instead of the old 3.7K, the dispatcher was only 13 Bytes big. Then again, a static content management portal isn't exactly my idea of a good time.

This is a small testpoll to find out, wether the phpWebSite poll module can handle images in questions as well. The answer to this question is yes, it can handle them perfectly.

Please look inside the article to see it for yourself ;-)

Robots kept fascinating me for years. When I was very young, I got a toy-robot as a present. But I've been disappointed, it was nothing more than a tape player.

Still, I've been monitoring the progress robots -- and especially androids, human like robots -- made. And they never failed to amaze me. The current c't even wrote about an android that interviewed people who passed by. Quite amazing.

I've been asked to review a book. It's called Typo3 Enterprise Content Management, it's about Typo3 and it contains a lot of information.

In this article, I'm trying to find out the focus of the book, the target audience and try to write a bit about its content, too.