Thoughts of a future engineer

How to make vi colorful on xubuntu

2009-03-16T13:39:00.000-07:00

Hi...
We started to study shell programming in school and we use VI to code some scripts. I noticed that all my colleagues using vi on ubuntu are very irritated and seem to envy their friends who use VI on Fedora 10 because it's very easy to use and colorful, it helps to detect syntax errors. Some of my friends started to regret installing Ubuntu instead of Fedora and even blamed me for recommending it. As an Ubuntu fan I looked for a solution for this tiny problem. I won't accept any lame remark about Ubuntu !! you need a colorful VI ? Here you are !

1- You have to install VIM which is "vi Improved" just tape this code in your console:

sudo apt-get install vim

2- After installing it you have to edit a file () and uncomment a parameter. To do so first you have to turn into root so type su and enter your root password:

then change this file mode for writing (so you can change its content)

chmod +w  /etc/vim/vimrc

no open this file using vi if you want and uncomment syntax on. i.e erase the (") before syntax on in line 20.

vi /etc/vim/vimrc

After doing that save changes and exit using :wq
try writing something, save it and re-open it and you will find your beautiful colorful script. ENJOY !!

Xubuntu and low performance machines : The perfect match !

2009-03-16T12:26:00.000-07:00

When the machine gets old and becomes useless. You get short on options. You can't sell it because you are so emotionally attached to it and it doesn't worth that much and you can't run new applications on it because it can't afford them. But you can turn it into a beautiful workstation. Able to open your pdf documents, play your music and videos and does your office tasks... You need just a light operating system that doesn't consume much hardware resources.

I'm talking about a Linux system of course so you won't spend any dime on proprietary software and you can avoid the headaches of the anti-viruses and etc...
The choice was : xubuntu .

I installed xubuntu 8.04 on my Compaq Armada notebook. This notebook is really a disaster running with WinXP but not bad with Windows 2000 and this is its configuration :

Intel Pentium III 750 MHz
64 MB Ram
20 Go hard disk

Pathetic isn't it ? But it was all I had when I needed a Linux system for my SHELL programming courses. I downloaded the Xubuntu which is an ubuntu distribution designed for low performance machines and it was just perfect. The graphics were nice and simple. Most of the applications run properly. The execution of the system in the start up doesn't take much time.
You can see down here the "system monitor" and how xubuntu is using the ressources of the machine.

Torvalds' gift for the Linux community... The new Kernel 2.6.28

2008-12-31T03:34:00.000-08:00

Actually, it was on the 25th of december. Linus Torvalds plays Santa clause and released a gift for all Linux users. It's the New Kernel.

Ext4 :
The most important thing in this relase is EXT4 the new Filesystem of Linux which will be :

Compatible with the old EXT3 : you can have and ext4 partition as if you have a ext3 one.
Larger filesystem : The capacity of this FS was extended to be able to support 1 Exbibyte and files of 16 TiB ( about 16 000 Gigabytes). The number of possible used directories was extended to 64000.
Journal Checksums : The Journal (a file containing the changes of a hard disk) will be using a new technique which will improve the reliability of the disk by cheking the occurence of anyy error during the processing of saving data.

You can check this link fo further informations

Graphic performances :
The release of the new GEM (Graphics Execution Mananger). This piece of software will take care of the graphic chipset ressources and how to exploit them for different multimedia applications. This GEM will improve the graphic performance of you graphic card.
Some improvments were made to KVM. It's the part of the kernel that take care about virtualisation for some architectures like intel-V and AMD-V. It will allow the machine the possibility to seperate several systems without restarting and the possibility to use some pieces of software that don't exist on the HOST system.

Drivers:
Many improved drivers specially for USB and Wirless devices. The tree of these drivers was considered as stable.

As a conclusion, the new Linux has many new features. Will they be adopted by the different distributions ?

References :
Site du zero news article.
Kernel.org changelog

The status of the engineer in Tunisia

2008-12-26T13:32:00.000-08:00

In order to find out the status of the engineer in Tunisia we will try to answer these questions:

Who`s he ? What does he do?

How much does he earn ?

What is his image in society?

What does he suffer from ?

What are the potentials of this career in Tunisia ?

Definition

An engineer is a person professionally engaged in a field of engineering. Engineers are concerned with developing economical and safe solutions to practical problems, by applying mathematics and scientific knowledge while considering technical constraints. As such, the work of engineers is the link between perceived needs of society and commercial applications. Some consider this profession to be the link between art and science.
wikipedia definition

Problems

joblessness and overexploitation :

Some statistics of a study made on 4763 young graduated students in 2005 after 18 months from their graduation

Financial status

For newly graduated engineers with no experience the wage is from 800TD to 1200TD.
After 5 to 10 years of experience the wage can touch the 1500TD to 2000TD.
Earnings mainly depends on years of experience, certifications and of course the engineer himself. Once he proves to his boss his skills and abilities, he can renegotiate his salary.

The gap between Tunisia and Europe in wages

In France, the salary of a newly graduated engineer is from 2000€ to 2800€ ( 3600TD to 5000TD).
In the end of his career, a well experienced engineer can touch 6000 € (10800 TD).
The standard of life is very different. The daily needs are expensive in Europe compared to what is available inTunisia but still an engineer in Europe is better remunerated.
The evolution of the engineer in Europe and USA is faster. In fact, occidental companies evaluate talent and take it into consideration.
The competition between these companies to have the best members in their crew make the salary negotiation more simple and efficient.
In conclusion, Tunisian engineers won`t skip the chance to travel and work abroad . Consequently, Tunisia lose many skilled engineers and this is just a sample of a wider phenomenon called `Brain Brand`.

Social status

57,2% of higher education students are female (www.universites.tn)

30% of working engineers are female(2004 statistics INS)

conclusion : The society consider engineering as a masculine job

To proceed in explaining the social status of the engineer Tunisia we will use a study made by Raoudha Ben Othmen a professor in the university of Tunis:

Subjects:

180 secondary school students aged 15-16
180 primary school pupils

Tools :

Questionnaire
Draw me an engineer test
Teacher led class discussions

N=140 Questionnaires (45% boys and 55%girls)

Drawings

No major difference between children and teenagers’ drawings.
None of the drawings contained a picture of a woman.
Most drawn engineers have glasses, are middle-aged, look scruffy wear a lab coat and hold some kind of tool.
Some pictures contained a working bench

Class discussions

Teachers seem to have naive ideas about engineers and engineering.
Teachers did not give the children the name of a famous modern engineer. Most of the examples are old (Graham Bell)
In leading the class discussions about future careers, teachers allocated more turns to boys than to girls
In leading class discussions about studying engineering, teachers seemed to allocate turns equally between girls and boys

Tests conclusions

• Students and teachers hold naive conceptions of engineering
• The necessity to enhance the image of engineers and specifically of the working environment
• Both male and female students are determined to choose other lucrative careers than engineering

Potentials

Many foreign companies choose to invest in Tunisia due to the low taxation and labor cost.
The Tunisian government aims to attain 7000 engineers in 2011-2012.
Many Mega projects are scheduled in Tunisia as ` The Mediterranean gate` which will host hundreds of companies.

Conclusion

All the figures are showing the fact of the promising future of engineering as a profession in Tunisia. However, many laws and interventions have to be made in order to protect the engineer`s rights and ameliorate his status and his image is society.

Diapositive 1

how to get your blog back on track after a long period of inactivity.

2008-06-12T14:40:00.000-07:00

First, Let me apologize to all my readers for my absence. I was really busy lately because of an important exam that I hope I will pass.
As you all can notice my blog was inactive for more than six months. My Alexa rank dropped from 500k to 2M ! My PR dropped from 4 to 2 ! ( That's hard ! ah) . My visits kept an average of 50 visitors a week most of them from google. So to fix these problems I put some steps to take :

1- Finding new content :
I have to write and make some new fresh articles about the latest news. I made a tour among the E-magazines that I used to read and I found a couple of subjects that I definitely will write about. Since I was cut off from the world, I will need some time to figure out what is going on in the world.

2-Gathering old web traffic sources :
Get back tou your Web analytics and open the archives of the happy days ! The busiest months and the best traffic days and find out the websites that directed to you and try to post your content in them again. Believe me it's very efficient.

3- Gathering keywords :
This absence is a very good experience for my blog. In fact, I kept on having traffic from google. So it's very important to get those keywords and work on them more so you can still have traffic if you will get absent again.

4- Heavy social networking :
I will need thousands of diggs and stumbles. I will use everything I can use to get the old traffic.

If I follow these steps my blog will definitely be back.

KDE 4 shining points..

2008-01-21T13:36:00.000-08:00

Originally posted by bluestorm

KDE4 Libraries have witnessed major changes in order to make coding KDE applications an easier task. Many shining points in this new edition which make of the future of KDE more promising.

Oxygen:

Oxygen has remarkably changed. It's the standard graphic kit of KDE, developed by KDE designers. Oxygen Includes Wallpapers, buttons and themes... You can change any theme you want but Oxygen is the standard theme of KDE4. May be some screenshots could describe better than words: (by SDZ)

and here are some Oxygen designers :

Qt4:

The graphic library used by KDE users to code most applications. QT4 wasn't compatible with the previous editions of KDE. Now, KDE4 is using Qt4.

Qt4 will allow KDE developers to make better graphic applications. Qt library was optimized to reduce its appetite to memory and hardware resources (RAM,CPU..etc). This optimization is still not complete. Qt developers are focusing to make the use of Qt4 easier than they will continue this optimization.

Qt4 is portable through KDE. We previously explained that Qt4 was distributed under both proprietary and GPL license. From now on Qt4 will be distributed with KDE which will make it accessible to everyone.

Plasma:
Plasma is a KDE library dedicated to the desktop : background, menus... Plasma was tweaked to become more personalized. You can change your desktop by adding widgets and plasmoids on your Dashboad, add RSS wires, and many other features.
These plasmoids are independent from each other which makes them easier to create. You can code your own plasmoids using C++ or Javascript.

Phonon:

Phonon is a multimedia library which I previously talked about ( Phonon : where Qt and KDE meet) dedicated for Sound and video. This library will allow KDE developers to include sounds and video effects to their KDE graphic applications smoothly. this is the blog of Matthias Kretz the Phonon creator.

900 fixed bugs with Mozilla Firefox 3 beta 2

2008-01-10T10:53:00.000-08:00

Firefox 3 developers are taking all the time that they need to accomplish their new Firefox. After the Beta 1 Mozilla has released Firefox 3 beta 2 to get more feedbacks about bugs from its testing community. Bugzilla was a little bit busy lately since the beta 1 thousands of bugs fortunately 900 of them are fixed. Firefox developers are trying to reveal more bugs to make their Firefox 3 better. The Beta 2 features are very promising and the Firefox 3 will definitely beat all competitors.

What's new in Firefox 3 :

Security :
I think that the previous reported vulnerabilities in Firefox made them more determinant to improve the security of Firefox users. The most important improvements in this issues were the the protection against cross-site JSON data leaks,anti-virus integration, malware protection, add-ons version check and the one click site info.
Easier to use :
developers added new buttons to save time when bookmarking. The ability to put some tags about the page you're bookmarking. You can also search your bookmarks through a Places Organizer.Tabs will also be easier to locate and better integration with Vista, Mac and Linux.

Performance :
Mozilla developers are dealing with Firefox's appetite for Memory. Around 30 memory improvements were included in the Beta 2 and developers are still working on optimizing the Firefox memory use, speed and reliability.

Related links :
SDZ news article by misterti (Fr)
All the features presented by Mozilla
The Beta 2 release notes
Firefox security add-ons

Mozilla Weave... Mozilla is trying to be more social

2008-01-02T14:34:00.000-08:00

The newest Project of Mozilla labs was "Weave". It allows the user to save his browser settings on Mozilla servers (Favorites, sessions ,passwords...etc..) and be able to load it wherever he is.

What are they preparing ?
Mozilla labs are trying to make some Mozilla-hosted online services which means that Mozilla is trying to be more social. Weave project still a prototype and Mozilla labs are planning for the future. Early in 2008, Mozilla Labs will try to offer some initial Web service APIs for developers to build on and will enable sharing on applicable interfaces.

Privacy : The biggest challenge
Many visitors asked about Privacy in Mozilla Labs Blog. Developers were very conscious of this issue because putting such important individual data on the web is risky. Weave developers answered these questions:

We currently encrypt on the client all data that gets placed on the server, with an encryption passphrase that only the user knows.
We kept the server intentionally dumb and standards-based, so that anyone can set up a server for themselves and/or their friends or company.

How to use it?
First you have to create an account in this website https://services.mozilla.com/ then you download Weave extention. Once you sign in you can install the extension then you need to save your settings on you hard disk. You risk loosing them. It's still a prototype!
Second, The software will ask you to put your email and password. Then will ask you to put a passphrase to encrypte all your data.
Finally, you make your first synchronisation then it will be automatically done every 30 minuts.

Related Links
Create a Mozilla Weave account
Introducing Weave

Would Ulteo help OpenOffice to beat MS Office ?

2007-12-30T09:17:00.000-08:00

Openoffice is an open source software offering its users many desktop applications as text editing and spreadsheet application. Since its appearance it was the first competitor of Microsoft Office but has never been the number one ! Microsoft Office is still the best sold Microsoft product ever! This desktop suite alone is making huge revenues and still the most desktop suite used in the world. You may say that's because integrated with Windows but it doesn't. It's sold separately from Windows. IE is integrated in Windows and couldn't beat Firefox so it's time to OOo to have some wings !

Wings.. This is what Ulteo is offering to OOo. Ulteo will allow users to use OpenOffice desktop suite on line with no installation process required. May be it will give some lazy and curious users an opportunity to give it a try. It will also allow people who were making some economies to buy a MS office suite to give OOo a try and may be they will be convinced to download OOo.

How to ?
Make sure you have:

A high speed network connection
A recent Safari,IE( 6 or 7) or Firefox(1.5 or more) browser.
A virtual Java machine
An Ulteo free account.

The OpenOffice.org desktop suite is great and can satisfy all the users need but it wasn't well introduced to users. That's what the Open source community lacks! The ability to make people try their products. If Ulteo could reach many users I'm certain that OOo will get a great step forward. Ulteo is counting (until now) 15,000 beta users. If you want to be one of them visit this page.

Best Free C/C++ IDE

2007-12-28T15:07:00.000-08:00

The first question to ask is what does a programmer need ?
To create an application you have to make sure that all these tools are available.

A Text editor : To write the code source ( of any language). Basically a simple software as "bloc-notes" under Windows or "vi" under Linux is enough. The best thing is to have an intelligent text editor that make your code colorful and make your codes more comprehensive and easier to read.
A Compiler : to compile your source code to binary code.
A debugger : To help you to correct the bugs in your code.

Programming demands a lot of effort and concentration and you have to pick the tools that can make your life easier! You can look for these components separately but this will be like torturing yourself! You should pick 3 in 1 software called IDE : Integrated development environment.

Best Free C/C++ IDEs

Both of them are free and simple which make of them the best tools for beginners.
Note that both work on Windows and only Code::Blocks can run on Linux. And for Windows vista users you should follow some particular procedures to set up thes IDE or else you'll face many bugs with compiling. Nevertheless, Visual Studio Express work correctly on Vista.
For mac users, I recommend "Xcode". You can install it from the CD of Mac OS.

Phonon : where QT and KDE meet

2007-12-27T16:26:00.000-08:00

Originally posted and verified by bluestorm

Trolltech has recently announced that its graphic library Qt will be using Phonon, he new multimedia library created by the KDE developers. This is good news for Qt4 users allowing Qt to be better and simpler and it's a good sign of a great collaboration between Trolltech and the other Free software projects.

Qt is a library which allows programmers to write graphic application codes. Basically used in C++, it's also available with many other languages (Java, Python, Ruby...). Qt is Free software and can be used in many OS (Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, BSD...)

Trolltech is the enterprise which has developed Qt. Founded in 1994 by students. It's counting about 100 developers in Norwich, Australia, California , China and Germany. Influenced by KDE, Trolltech has made of Qt a free software by using a clever double licenses : One Free ( and free of charge) license allowing to create Only Free software and proprietary software editors have to buy a commercial license. This politic is also used by MySQL, it allows to have a free library and have a good financial sources.

KDE is one of the most famous Free desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions and the first competitor of GNOME. Allows the user to exploit many features : Desktop, menu, control panel...etc. KDE has also some applications as File explorer, Browser, Text editor, PDF reader...etc. To that purpose, the KDE project builded (on top of the Qt librairies) a framework helping programmers to create desktop application easily..

KDE Screeshots:

Phonon is a multimedia library ( sound and video) developed by Matthias Kretz, a KDE developer. KDE4 developers intend to use Phonon so any developer will be able to add a video or a sound to his application.

There are many multimedia libraries dedicated to sound and video like Xine , Gstreamer and FMOD. Phonon doesn't make the whole library from the beginning but uses the existing ones and propose some unified functionalities for all developers.

Qt developers were so interested in the multi-platform aspect of Phonon. In fact, Qt uses the same ingredients and gives some features to facilitate software conception. ( It's easy to manage networks, SQL...etc).
Consequently Trolltech suggested to support Phonon development. Which was very convenient for KDE developers, because this will bring to them more programmers. Phonon will be integrated in the new 4.4 Qt version and the Qt developers are already improving the library
during their work time. Trolltech hopes to finish the backends early allowing to Phonon to use some multimedia systems of MacOS (QuickTime 7) and Windows (DirectShow 9).

The most important detail in this news is that Phonon will be related the KDE project. KDE developers will continue developing the library and will discuss with Trolltech developers about its evolution. The whole source code of Phonon will stay hosted with the KDE code. Instead of working on Phonon alone, Trolltech engineers will collaborate directly with KDE developers.

QT
KDE
KDE announcing the integration of Phonon
Trolltech announcing the integration of Phonon with KDE

eZ Publish CMS 4th version : all the features you need

2007-12-22T14:16:00.000-08:00

CMS are Content management systems created to make creating a website an easier task. Among many others, eZ Publish has some unique criteria. It's a flexible and extensible CMS created by eZ Systems, a Norwegian company was behind the PHP eZ Components Library, eZ Publish is an ECMS ( Enterprise Content Management System) distributed under both GPL and proprietary licenses.

eZ Publish offers a great number of features: document publication, as text and multimedia files, is possible once the software is installed. Integrated solutions gives you the possibility to manage : Web shop, news, a social website, a personal website, photo gallery, forums and polls...

Mainly dedicated to enterprises, eZ Publish included many features as : Product catalog, the caddie function, tax and promotion management, sells stats and sending management using a secured payment system.

For developers, such features are implemented in eZ Publish 4: Classes and object definition, parametred and programmable workflows, WebDAV interface and clustering..

Where hides the revolution !
After many bugs corrections, the fourth version is a revolution by being the first version using PHP 5. So many new features are available as autoload, DOMDocument...
Another new thing, eZ Flow. It's a new extension dedicated to media publication using the WebDAV technologies. The import/export communication with ODF you can stream Flash and videos in eZ Publish.

Ameliorations:
eZ is more efficient with ameliorated scripts and a reorganization to the XML. The new versions also allows you to use eZ Components Library in the extensions. A great importance is given to the famous Web 2.0 by giving many features to publish pages with tag clouds, photo galleries, blogs...etc..

The eZ Publish community counts about 25000 members, composed by 2000 reference clients, 2 millions downloads and a network counting 200 partners.

Related links
Official eZ systems website
download eZ Publish 4.0
eZ components

12 Megapixels video cam... and more !!

2007-12-21T08:59:00.000-08:00

astonished! this is how I was when I saw this "supacam"! You can call it the video cam of your dreams! I'll try to be brief so you can get its fabulous criteria easily:

12GB VGA Streaming video
Tapeless digital movie cam
HD photo W/face detection
15 X Zoom. 30fps @ D1 720x480
6 HR personal Media player

You can get some of these extra accessories:

Water-proof case
Tripod
Remote control
Extra battery
Fast charge
Memory ( high speed SD )

It's a 12 Megapixels video cam. It means that you can make a DVD quality videos and stream it directly to the web using this cam! This cam contains a face detector so you can use it as a security cam for your baby. The Tripod allows you to use it as a web cam and the remote control will allow you to manipulate it easily for family home videos. It contains Flash and night shouting video!!
The price is $349
You can find it here

Free international calling : The real deal !!

2007-12-21T07:40:00.000-08:00

Imagine that you can call for free! Talkster givs you the possibility to do this. All you have to do is visiting their home page and fill the forms and your call will work. You can do this either from your desktop, your phone or via sms. If you want to get more informations about how to make your free calls work visit this page.
Actually, this service is free. You may be wondering "hmm.. free things doesn't exist anymore... there must be something in return..!" Let me be frank with you : You are right ! After doing this phone call you will receive some sms ads on your mobile. There can be some surprises on these sms (prices, coupons...)
How can they make it possible?
Actually, after filling the forms, the server will search for a local phone and will make the call for you then bridges you and your contact together. This will allow you to have a good quality phone call. It makes also group calls possible! After this call Talkster will send a ad for you and for your contact, an ad that suits each country. Consequently, this service is available in a limited but a great number of country around the world. If your country doesn't appear in the list, don't worry all that you have to is filling a form asking to add your country. Tell your friends about it so they claim to add your country too. The operator will send you an email once the service is available in your country.
Now visit Talkster.com

How to run games on Linux (sweet links)

2007-12-18T06:27:00.000-08:00

The most important thing that make youngsters so attached to Windows and reject Linux distributions is running games. To solve this problem we give those links:

How to install any game using Wine?
This question was asked in the Linuxquestions.org and largely discussed. It mainly deals with the best tools to run games on Linux such as Wine and VMware.

Linux games lists:
You can find here some Opensource games easy to set up. Those websites use lists sorted by the gaming type, developers and liscence.
Linux gamers' game list
Gnome files game list

Frank's Corner
Frank is a linux user. His blog is about how to run windows applications on Linux. In this website you can find how to run a huge list of games using Wine. Most of them need to be installed in Windows first then run them on Linux and this is his list of games that worked on Linux using Wine :

First person shooters

Call Of duty
Code Red
Counter-Strike
Delta force
Delta Force 2
Gore
Half-life
Half-life 2
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2
Gunman Chronicles
Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Kingpin: Life Of Crime
Max Payne
Quake 2
Quake 3 Arena
Sin
Soldier Of Fortune
Soldier Of Fortune 2
Steam
Starsiege Tribes
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory

Action

AquaPop
Billy Bob
Bomber Mania
Daiktana
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project
Galaxy Invaders
Gem Mine
GeneRally
Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Highway Pursuit
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
JBall
Lode Runner Online
Mageslayer
Mummy's Curse
Naval Strike
Onslaught
Pacmanic Christmas
Pacmanic Worlds
Sky Fire
Snowball
Starball
South Park Mario Bro 2
Tank Assault

RPG/adventure

American McGee's Alice
Avernum
Avernum 2
Avernum 3
Baldur's Gate
Blades Of Avernum
Blades Of Exile
Dark Earth
Exile: Escape From The Pit
Deus Ex
Diablo 2
Heretic 2
Icewind Dale
Nethergate
Planescape Torment
Rune
Wizardy 8
World Of Warcraft

Strategy

Caesar 3
Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
Commandos - Behind Enemy Lines
Cyberstorm 2: Corporate Wars
Emperor
Europa Universalis
Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000
Pharaoh
Starcraft
Steel Panthers: World At War
Stronghold: Crusader
Sudden Strike
Total Annihilation
Warcraft 3
Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne
Zeus - Master of Olympus

This list is huge! If frank can do it you can do it. All you need is patience ... Now get back to work!!

Every video fan must have : A free and full featured DVD ripper

2007-12-11T04:24:00.000-08:00

Once we install the Linux on our desktop, the first thing we want to make sure it works properly is our media files : music and video files. We talked too much about music tools. It's time to have a clue about some powerful video tools.

DVD::RIP is mainly written in Perl, made to provide users an easy way to rip and transcode dvd. What makes this tool so special among others is the huge number of features:
This tool is able to support almost all major video codecs : Divx, Xvid, mpeg1, mpeg2,ffmpeg. That means that you can rip your DVD to any video type you want. It also uses Divx/Xvid multipass encoding. The transcoding process uses video filters with realtime configuration and a live transcoding preview window so you can make sure that your video is doing alright. You can also adjust every possible parameter of your zoom manually. The resizing modes are two : the fast one and high quality one.
The best thing in this tool is its manipulation of the audio data while the transcoding. It's able to rip as much audio tracks as you want to AVI/OGG/SVCD file. It also allows you to encode MP3, to maximize audio volume and range compression, to create WAV file form a selected audio track,render subtitle and create vosub... It supports OGG/Vorbis. It's easy to use your CD burning facility with this tool and much more other features
Dvd::rip home page

Edit sounds like a pro !

2007-12-04T03:12:00.000-08:00

You're a music fan and Linux user. the combination was a little bit hard to satisfy because proprietary sound editing software are expensive now let's find a solution. I'm trying to cater to music lovers as I did with Gnormalize now let's get a bit more professional and find some useful sound editing tools.
I'm suggesting Audacity: The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor
Audacity is an OpenSource software which allows you to manipulate digital audio data. The Audacity author is Dominic Mazzoni, an ex-NASA engineer and a Google engineer. Now he has a crew of 20 developers and 30 translators to help him.
The most important feature of Audacity is the ability to record digital sound via micro/cd... and treat it by manipulating and exporting using multiple filters and extra effects like pitch, tempo, noise reduction, equalizer, Fourier filters, increasing precise frequencies, compression, amplification, normalization, echo, phaser, wahwah, inversion. It also allows you to convert CDs and tapes to a digital support.
Audacity is considered as an alternative to some professional proprietary software like sound edit of Macromedia! It's also an Award winner from sourceforge.org considered as the best multimedia project of 2007 ! It works on Linux/Unix, mac OS X and Windows.

Now what are you waiting for to get your Free copy ? ... and let us see some of your art pieces !
All you need to do is to visit the Audacity home page and you'll find all what you need to install it properly.

More screenshots here

Playing MP3 on Linux have never been that easy !

2007-12-02T09:12:00.000-08:00

Let's Imagine this situation : " you're a Linux newbie and you have just got the ubuntu CD. You were so happy about it , after some hustle and bustle you could install it properly on your PC then you opened your music directory looking for an old MP3 file you want to play it loud so you can celebrate your new achievement... And BING : " Cannot open this file !! " you click over and over again, you change the song and the same thing occurs. Finally you find out that your Linux can't play MP3. You curse the linux and maybe you'll blame who told you about it."

You could prevent that if you come across this article before. Maybe you should send it to your Linux newbie friends so they won't hate Linux for preventing them from playing their music because we will show you how to play all music file type.

All you need to do is to set up gnormalize. It's an audio converter and it allows you to decode these MP3/MP4/MPC/OGG/APE/FLAC file to WAV so you can play it on your PC. With gnormalize you can also extract an audio CD and output as other audio format (MP3,MP4,MPC,OGG,APE,FLAC,WAV).

This software requires some programs to be installed first. Not all of them it depend on what you need gnormalize for. We will put only what you need to play MP3 on Linux :

You need perl-Gtk2
You need lame
You need normalize

To download this software:
RPM package ( mandriva, Fedora, RedHat...)
Debian package ( Debian, Ubuntu...)

gnormalize-0.53.tar.gz or http://www.gnomefiles.org/ (release notes).

With root privilege, execute the bash script commands to install gnormalize:
tar zxvf gnormalize-version.tar.gz
cd gnormalize-version/
./install

If you need other optional features on gnormalize you can check the Gnormalize profile on sourceforge.org and here are some screenshots of gnormalize

the author of gnormalize
Source of information

Thoughts about Google's online storage service : Google Drive

2007-11-28T15:08:00.000-08:00

Wall street journal has revealed that Google is preparing to announce a new online storage service. This service will allow users to upload their data on google's servers and use whenever they want.
Google Drive will be compatible with PC and mobile phones. All files will be accepted : documents, music, films, pictures.. etc. Google's challenge is to make this service available all the time so they won't give the user a hard time! Google is planning to make it easy to access to the service and there will be some fees on unlimited storage. Yahoo and Microsoft have the same service but Google's project will be definitely bigger.

Some critics around the upcoming service mainly about the illicit uploads. In the opposite side some privacy defenders are upset with manipulating the users data. Some will be sent and never seen again!

Just to answer those. Google had it all : mails, photos, address book and blogs what the difference would it make if he gets our data too?! This keeps me wondering again :" Is Google a monopoly?"

Graphic solutions for web developers.

2007-11-28T06:27:00.000-08:00

A web developer isn't a designer. You can be a PHP genius but you you're pages won't be attractive as some designers do. I feel frustrated when my own PHP chat page was badly presented while I spent hours to fix the code. I'm not a photoshop expert and I really don't have the artistic touch to treat pictures and create my own banners and buttons. Fortunately, we can find everything we need on the net.

The round corners pictures.
Round corners was my first source of frustration until I found this website which allows you to get your round picture in a second ! Round corner pictures are really sweet to present and I highly recommend it.

Curvy corners
Still dealing with the same problem here; the curvy corners. I liked the website dedicated for this issue. It gives you some tips and tutorials about making your own curvy corners and how to blend your header with the background color.

Javascript effects
Actually I don't recommend to use too much javascript in your page even if you like the effect that it makes because it will slow down your page loading and your visitor will hit the "X" button before he can see anything of your content but there are some light scripts that you can use as the javascript menu.
All you need to do is to download a javascript editor like this one and start to make your own scripts or download this free javascript menu maker .
Beware that you're code must fit most browsers or else your visitors will start complaining abou the bugs on you page.

France forbids illicit downloads

2007-11-25T09:51:00.000-08:00

After we witnessed some acts around Peer to peer network in USA now the French government aims to make some regulations to forbid illicit download.
This will to fight unauthorized downloading come from the highest scale of the French government. It was illustrated in the statements of Nicolas Sarcozy, The president of France :

"We run the risk of witnessing a genuine destruction of culture ....."

And for describing the situation of Internet nowadays he added :

" a lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity. And on whose backs? On artists’ backs.”

The government was to pushed to act from the whole film and music industry so it has come to an agreement with Internet providers to warn their users with messages if they download illegally and they will cut their Internet access if they ignore the warning.
Now fighting illicit download is becoming an international movement. governments are trying to put more regulations to forbid it so what comes next ?

PHPBoost for web newbies

2007-11-25T09:25:00.000-08:00

PHPBoost is an Open Source CMS dedicated to Web newbies, developed by a member of the francophone SDZ programming community. This CMS can be a solution for people who wish to make a dynamic website without having any PHP programming experience. Thus, newbies can install it in few clicks and easily edit their content via the Framework given by PHPboost.
These are the main criteria of PHPboost 2.0 :

GNU/GPL liscence.
strict and semantic xhtml 1.0 code
Multilingual
Easy to edit ; contains many themes and templates
Good users management ( groups...roles..)
Url rewriting
Automated updates

Although you can create your own design thanks to the templates system, the addons given by the CMS are enough to resond to all you needs. There is also a good documentation (fr) to help you.

try PHPboost

Successful bloggers full story : Bryan Clark

2007-11-24T13:34:00.000-08:00

I think it's encouraging to tell you some stories of successful bloggers. If they can do it so do you. I won't be talking about those blogging "superstars" as John Chow and others like him.. I will be talking about people who started from scratch and were so determinant to achieve their goals. I'm talking about somebody who were able to make a great success in a really short period of time. It's Bryan Clark with the "One Man's Goal" blog. Bryan's goal intended to create a respectable income by being a full time blogger within 365 days and after only four months he sold his blog for $8,500 !!

One Man’s Goal was 4 months old
Pagerank 4
Over 10,000 backlinks
1,500 daily pageviews
750-1,000 daily unique visitors
$941.27 Last Month
SOLD for $8,500

Onemansgoal.com niche was about blog monetization. Traffic sources were mainly from social bookmarking sites, specially Stumble Upon. Monetization methods were from direct advertising, paid posts and adsense. Bryan Clark was so active and able to post one quality article per day. His writing style is original and able attract readers.
The blog was put on auction in site point and sold to Austin Long. You may be wondering why he put so much money in such young blog? Let me tell you that Austin was intelligent because he gained a loyal audience that he probably couldn't create it and his investment will give its fruits soon.

A lot of noise around Peer-to-Peer

2007-11-19T14:35:00.000-08:00

As many of Internet users were so excited to use the file sharing system P2P. Many producers find it very difficult to live with such network by considering it a violation to their copyright. Some universities are paying money to cut P2P from their network and investing in producing anti-P2P software.

Today, the university uses a nearly $60,000 software and hardware package from Audible Magic to stop file sharing on its network and pays about $16,000 for support, maintenance and regular database updates that allow the system, called CopySense, to detect newly released music.

Peer to peer has another problem with traffic filtering efforts and data control. Comcast is having some accusations about manipulating data floods and bandwith and cut roads to P2P.

Comcast denies it has blocked any traffic outright, but admits to using "network management" techniques to handle the rising tide of peer-to-peer traffic, and thereby maintain service for all of its other customers

Will we see some regulations forbidding using this network ? We know that there are giant proprietary software makers which aren't very comfortable with P2P and they are very powerful and can easily create any rule they won't.

Is google a monopoly?

2007-11-19T11:36:00.000-08:00

Through the last ten years google has been growing fast, gaining many loyal users and creating a huge business opportunities around it as advertising and search engine optimization. Other companies have tried to imitate the google way of work and started to create its own text advertising programs, even started to compete Google adsense in the web advertising market.

Moreover, google's page rank has become a very trusted criterion in websites evaluation. Highest PR owners sells more expensive ad spots and even in website markets as SitePoint (where people buy and sell websites) people refer to PR to fix their first price.

And here we come to the point where google used his weapons to kick his competitors by cutting down PR from their affiliates. So is that an antitrust move? PR is google's tool and he can make what he wants with it...

Google has also slammed paid links users and cut off their PR. As we all know google is responsible of the relevance of his search results and he don't want to have links to show up first because its owner paid more ! But don't you think that Google exaggerated by cutting down PR that way? I think that wasn't because of the relevance of the search engine but to make bloggers and webmasters get away for paid links programs as payperpost. Because these programs were loved by bloggers because they generate a respectable revenue and for advertisers because it creates better keyword density to their link.

Finally, I am afraid that Google gets to the point to be a beast that can not be fed and turn into a manipulator of the whole network because it started to show some signs of Power and monopoly... What do you think?