All in vain

Well if you are a programmer you have to read this. Its awesome, it brought smile to my dry lips. What can i say "pure genius". Excerpts from the article.

Those of you who are looking for a good library package to create visually appealing graphs or charts using GD library and wish some package was there which was GPL'ed then look no far. Artichow graph library is the perfect candidate which fits this description. While i like Jpgraph but the fact that its not GPL'ed makes me crib.

Since the library is in French i suggest you use Google translator to navigate the site.

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Well this blog made an interesting read. I was in the process of killing some time and stumbled here looking for Orkut creator. This girl sure has a thing for everything spooky. But it is well worth the time, i am going to bookmark it and will try to check it out from time to time.

Recently i was asked (rather commanded ;) ) by my friend to search for her favorite song. Well this song is by Jennifer Paige ("beautiful" OST Autumn in New York). I searched realy hard but could not find it. Then Finally i found a video on Youtube. Apparently this song was used as the background score of that video. So my mission was to get the audio-track from this video.

First of all you need to grab the video from youtube. Make sure you save it with .FLV extension. Now you are ready to go.

1. Convert this flash video to mpeg format.
   ffmpeg -i video.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 test.mpg (check out google for more options)
2. Extract Audio from this MPEG video
   

   ffmpeg -i test.mpg -vn test.wav

3. Convert this WAV(PCM audio) to MP3 format
   toolame test.wav test.mp3
   
   

A few notes about the above command. I have Xubuntu and i have ffmpeg and toolame encoders installed. You should use appropriate package managers to install them for you. Also i haven't had the time to play around with quality settings, i think it could have been done even better. So if you know a better process please do let me know.

Those of you who came late, a CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart“ . Basicaly the system asks you to read an image and input the words exactly as written on it, before it lets you perform the desired operation. While i think no doubt it would slow down the spammers, but i have seen some people who claim to have the ability to read a captcha.

While going through this site i wondered is it possible to combine the idea of captcha with the human habit of reading a word partially. For example if we want the user to enter the word "glass" we can make the captcha to read "galss". Only a human being can infer that it is indeed the english word "glass".

Attention all you CSS lovers, get your free CSS tabs here. This one is from exploding boy, whatever that means ;) Well i have been facinated by css tabs myself because they make your site look much more professional than random links thrown here and there. Also if you are making some kind of an Web based application then its crucial that you create a logical navigation. Grouping similar functionality is best achieved with tabs.

The tabs on the above site uses images for that polished look. Though nothing is wrong with that but i think i like the pure css tabs more with no images used. And the best example i can think of can be found here. I have used them on more than one occasions and find them quite good. More links to other tabs can be found here.

Also one more css site worth visiting is this one. I learned quite a lot about css from this site; thanks paul. You can learn some css techniques here and pick up some layouts too.

It seems i am late on this, but wtf. I have been on ubuntu for almost 6 months now. Well not actually ubuntu but xubuntu. Since my PC is an old one, i am not able to use the latest KDE. So i installed XFCE as my desktop manager, its light and it works(TM) . The latest version of ubuntu promises to be much more polished and efficient.

From the site i can see that it has a lot of new features, like the newer init system. It seems upgrading it is not advised but some people have reported that it went ok for them. I think i would do a full install instead of the upgradation because i have experimented heavily with my current version and i just need to take a backup of my home dir and htdocs directory and i am good to go.

Now some caveats, from what i have read it seems the newer ubuntu has replaced bash with dash as their default shell. Some people are complaining about this issue and we have to just wait and watch for the repercussions.