The Switched ON Phrase Generator

[Version3]

I'm on the snowy kitten....


I'll test it on one of the other Macs at home tonight, and figure out what the issue is. MS is just dumb.

[Larkitect]

OS X 10.6.1 with firefox 3.5.3 (and safari 4.0.3) works fine for me.

[Version3]

Yeah, so take that shit!!!


I'll find out why other configs are not happy though. Probably JavaScript poopies.

[Larkitect]

just fired up the wife's laptop. works fine with vista sp2 using:

firefox 3.5.3
ie 8
opera 9.5

java is SE 6 (i assume the most recent update, 15? 16?) on OS X and 1.6.0 on vista (i assume these are equivalent. don't know why windows still reports java this way).

[digitaltopia]

For some reason, there's nothing to click on in your post for me. I would assume the bold letters with the title of the project is what you're supposed to click on, but it just shows up as regular colored text to me, instead of a link.

[Version3]

The words "use it" were the link. I've added the link inline on the original post to make it easier. Anyone else still having trouble with it? I haven't worked on it by the way, I just reuploaded the file when I made a change.

[digitaltopia]

Ah, and so it is. Because the links look the same as the text sometimes I overlook them.

Here are my results:

Ubuntu Linux 8.10
Firefox 3.5.3 Generate button doesn't work
Opera 10.0 Generate button works fine
Chome / Chromium dev build Generate button works fine

For me, it works best in Chrome / Chromium. The fastest and the smoothest.

I came across one questionable phrase:

"as furry as a flea-ridden enigmatic hypocondriac with a enlarged tooth"

The "a"s need to be aware of if they're in front of a vowel or not.

as lazy as many foreign street performers in a porn film

[Version3]

Yeah, I've built that in to a few areas, but I have to rebuild part of it for the last noun. The trouble is, in making them a new category (that's how they are organized) the odds change for the words being picked. So I'd need to have a lot of words to put in there, or nest it in something else to work the odds back down. Thanks for the feedback there. There are a few of them that have 'a a' or 'a the' and stuff in them. And that's just from being entered incorrectly. Thanks!

Interesting on this FF thing. I'll look into it. Could be the positioning thing, anyone tried to click to the right of the button in a problematic FF page load by any chance?

[digitaltopia]

Why not just do a parse on the final string? I'm not sure how you'd do it in PHP, as I have yet to learn it, but in Python for instance you could do a quick scan of the string for the word "a", then move two characters farther in the string and check to see if the character is a vowel. If so, use the index of "a" to replace it with "an". That's how I'd do it anyhow.

In Firefox, the JavaScript error you get when clicking the button is: "testFrame is not defined" from line 57.

[Version3]

ah, I've got a framename wrong. Thanks for that.

As for the idea of parsing, see that's not 100% either. The trouble you get into is the rule is obvious, however in conventional spoken English, there are times when you would use AN because the rule is based on pronunciation, and not on spelling. For example, "A unicorn" or "AN hour". So, that's your answer as to why I wouldn't do it that way.


The way this thing works, I'm choosing a random entry from a set of nested arrays that build the sentence. For example, one array may have "noun" for an entry and " 'adjective' noun" for another, so it has to pull another random entry from the nested array to populate the adjective variable that exists.

The solution I was using before was to put the "a/an" into the array entry, but makes updating them suck. I'll probably just use a new nested array for entries that are dependent on the word "an" and work to not inadvertently increase their odds of being displayed.