Saturday, August 11, 2007

Battle at Kruger

Amazing fightback from the wild buffalo's to save the calf attacked by the lions, royal retreat for the lions.
It has all the elements of the edge of the seat hollywood thriller.
Must watch at all cost.

Monday, August 06, 2007

Quercus - the caucho project for 100% Java implementation of PHP5

For long time we (our company), were looking for a way of having both php and java to run together, so that we could utilise a open source java application web server.
But most of the times we hit roadblock as either the existing solution was too cumbersome and difficult to comprehend.
Today found an interesting article on Caucho website, wherein they have developed Quercus, which is 100% Java implementation of PHP 5
released under the Open Source GPL license.
Caucho mentions that "Quercus is Caucho Technology's 100% Java implementation of PHP 5 released under the Open Source GPL license. Quercus comes with many PHP modules and extensions like PDF, PDO, MySQL, and JSON. Quercus allows for tight integration of Java services with PHP scripts, so using PHP with JMS or Grails is a quick and painless endeavor.
With Quercus, PHP applications automatically take advantage of Java application server features just as connection pooling and clustered sessions.
Quercus implements PHP 5 and a growing list of PHP extensions including APC, iconv, GD, gettext, JSON, MySQL, Oracle, PDF, and Postgres. Many popular PHP application will run as well as, if not better, than the standard PHP interpreter straight out of the box. The growing list of PHP software certified running on Quercus includes DokuWiki, Drupal, Gallery2, Joomla, Mambo, Mantis, MediaWiki, Phorum, phpBB, phpMyAdmin, PHP-Nuke, Wordpress and XOOPS."
For more information please visit Caucho:Quercus.

We would giving it a try and hopefully we should be succesful in moving towards java web server for php applications.

Gran Paradiso : Firefox3 on the anvil

Firefox3 is on the anvil, code named Gran Paradiso.
For the requirement document check here.

Know more about Gran Paradiso.

Manging your itunes Library

An article on code project by one of the readers igalnassi is quite interesting, it explains in simple way how to be manage your itunes libray with simple rating of the songs on iPod, once the songs have been rated as he has explained, a small application he has wrote does the managing job wonderfully by deleting unwanted songs from iPod, identifying duplicates etc.

Download the application.

Read the article Manage Your iTunes Library With Simple Clicks to know more about it.

Friday, August 03, 2007

Why tagging is important

I always wondered why tags are so important and why does everyone talk about it so much, but once I started using it, I have found it very useful it helps in organizing the stuff and also if we use the tags in a very appropriate way, it also ensures that search engines pick the right tag and in a way tagging the title appropriately makes it a good SEO practice, also unnecessary tagging also doesn't help the cause.

Wayne Hurlbert has written a good article on title tags, I think spending 10 minutes reading the article is worth the salt.

There is so much to learn :)

Tidying up the mp3 ID3 tags

Everton from Connected internet, has written this very useful article on how to add ID3 tags to your mp3 collection.
He details the steps to add the tags using couple of freeware software and iTunes (for iPod).
I found this article very useful and especially the picard tool from MusicBrainz is a great one.

For the steps to add the tags to the mp3's please check the article mentioned above.

Cool and necessary tools for iTunes

Using iTunes throws up a lot of questions.
I have been using iRiver for couple of years, and when I plugin my iRiver, I manually manage the music files on it, drag and drop the files required and deleting and not allowing windows media player to manage, but with iPod, since I am forced to use iTunes as and when I hit a roadblock, I google and have found some cool tools for iTunes

1)iTunes ART importer
This allows users to search for an album cover image of a song automatically.
More information regarding this can be found at iTunes ART importer.

2)iTunes library updater
How to make iTunes automatically scan for new songs added to the your songs folder without you having to add it manually every time, this one I found it to be very useful since I keep updating my songs list every week.
More information regarding this can be found at iTunes library updater.

Deleting songs from iTunes but not from iPod

After getting an iPod (actually gift from one of the clients we have for having delivered the portal), I am totally hooked on it and every day I use it, I am finding different issue and googling for the problem took me to this url, which explains how to delete songs from iTunes but still keep the same in iPod.

The author provides 2 solutions, simple and ease to use (does not need any additional install).

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Fixing up your iPod music collection

Found this cool video which explains how to get rid of duplicate entries, adding artwork, tags.
I found this very useful as I am new to iPod.

Video can be found at Cnet Reviews.