JCHo Blog

SkypeMinutes - keep track of Skype call minutes

I use Skype very often because of the good call quality and the unbelievable monthly subscription for unlimited calls to landlines with no minute costs...or so they say. It's not really unlimited, there's a limit on 10000 minutes per month and if you talk more than that Skype will charge normal rates according to Skype's list. Even though the limit still is more than enough for average people to use, I think it's a good idea to keep track of the amount of call minutes for the current month. Since Skype gives you the option of exporting the call history to a *.csv, I decided to develop a simple application for showing the number of call minutes for the current month.

The application is contained in a jar file and can be found on this link.

Currently the application only supports .csv files in Swedish, and I haven't implemented support for differentiating between calls and received calls because I only use Skype to call people. Future work would be to implement support for .csv files in all languages supported by Skype and separate calls and received calls when counting.

Well, for all the swedish people, I hope you find it useful.

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Ubuntu Karmic Koala is COOL

The end of October has passed and a new Ubuntu distribution (9.10) is released. Karmic Koala has changed the boot screen and the startup totally. There is no longer a progress bar when booting up. The time to shut down Ubuntu is significantly faster, I think it takes less than 8 seconds to shut down. Instead of Pidgin it's Empathy messenger program that's pre-installed. I don't mind using it becuase it has most of the functions which Pidgin had. The biggest difference might be that your previous conversation is shown even if you close the window and open it again. Another nice update is new pre-installed icons. The default icons look really beautiful, a nice change from my previous icon set GNOME Colors. At last but not least is the new Firefox 3.5.

Ubuntu just got a nice and fresh update, nothing big but I like the new boot screen and startup.

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Read Metro news on Symbian S60

While browsing on Ovi store application I found an interesting application that I think a lot of people would like on their Symbian phones. It's a free application called Metro and it's for reading Metro news, both online and offline. I've got a Nokia 5800 which has the S60 5th Edition, I don't know if there is a version for the 3rd Edition.

After a quick test I can confirm that it works great. You can even change to eight different languages, and Swedish is just the one I needed. There are the startpage and other categories like news, sports, fashion, etc. Everytime a category is chosen all the news will be downloaded, ready to be viewed for offline. In the categories page only the headlines are displayed and by clicking on them the whole article will be shown. I was surprised to know there was such an amazing application. I mean now I won't have to worry not getting a newspaper on the bus or in town, I always have my phone with me. Let me give you a scenario of using the application:

I wake up early in the morning and eat a healthy breakfast consisting of breads with cheese, ham and butter. I then go and brush my teeth. Afterwards I go and change my clothes preparing to go to school. Since I still have some time I might as well open my Metro application on my mobile and open all the categories to download all the latest articles. This won't take more than 2 minutes. After taking a ride with my bike to the bus stop I might as well read some news on my mobile while waiting. When the bus comes and I've sat down I can relax myself and just read the news on my phone, smiling everytime someone walks into the bus and takes a Metro newspaper, man that is so 90s.

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Sync Google Calendar using Mail for Exchange

I've posted earlier in my blog about synchronizing Google Calendar using GooSync, but unfortunately the free service provided by GooSync is now discontinued, they will instead offer their service for a yearly fee.

Obviously I don't want to pay for such a service and decided to search a bit in Google. What I found is a solution completely free and the service is provided by Google themselves. Yay!

The problem is their guide at http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=147951 is completely different from my version of Mail for Exchange on my Nokia 5800. Although it gives the configuration settings for the application, the screenshots are completely different. After some searching in Google I found a post at http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Google+Mobile/thread?tid=4fc290b0536a718c&hl=en which discuss about the exact same issues that I have. Among the many different solutions I found one that worked for me.

• Uninstall old version and install latest version of Mail for Exchange found at http://www.businesssoftware.nokia.com/mail_for_exchange_downloads.php (version at the time of this writing: 2.09.158).
• Launch application found in Mfe > Mail for Exchange.
• Select Yes when prompted to create a new sync profile.
• Select Cancel, this will take you to all the settings.
• Fill all the settings according to http://www.google.com/support/mobile/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=147951.
• Select Back to exit.

The trick was to select cancel after selecting yes to create a new sync profile. This is because it will require that you fill the Domain which is to be left empty according to Google. So you had in some way bypass it, and it was simply by pressing Cancel.

Anyway I managed to synchronize both ways between my phone and Google Calendar. An important note is when creating a calendar event in Google Calendar it won't send events whose time are 'All day' to your phone.

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PHP: foreach forbids changes

These couple of weeks I've been busy with a web shop project for a course which addresses security vulnerabilities to web applications. During the course of this project I stumbled upon quite a few problems related to PHP. One of them is the foreach statement.

I have a cart which stores all items added by a user. Each item has a number of attributes like name, price and amount and its key is the item's ID. To get the name of an item with ID 1, it looks like the following, $_SESSION['cart'][1]['name'].

Now everytime a user adds an item I use a foreach statement to loop through the array and if the chosen item already is in the list I add that item's amount with 1. It might look like the following:

foreach($_SESSION['cart'] as $key=>$item) { if($_GET['pid'] == $key) { $item['amount']++; break; } }

But the above code wouldn't work because when modifying a value in the list like this, $item['amount']++, it won't update the corresponding element in $_SESSION['cart'] variable. I reason it like foreach only returns a copy of the element in $_SESSION['cart'] and that is why it won't change the original element in $_SESSION['cart']. So to fix this I had to update $_SESSION['cart'] directly.

foreach($_SESSION['cart'] as $key=>$item) { if($_GET['pid'] == $key) { $_SESSION['cart'][$key]['amount']++; $found = TRUE; break; } }

This fault in code caused me 20 minutes of debugging. It wasn't entirely obvious for me what fault it was when the amount just wouldn't update no matter what I pressed on the website.

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Google Translate at your service

Don't fully understand english or do you prefer other language. Then use Google Translate gadget on the right menu to translate this blog into any language you like.

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Are you human?

That question is important for preventing computers to automatically submitting forms for posting spams. As a precaution I've implemented CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) with the help of CI's plugin. So when registering for an account you have to type the characters shown on the generated image.

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My way of transferring new mp3 files to Nokia 5800

Ever since I bought my Nokia 5800 I've tried to find some quick and efficient way to transfer my new mp3 files to my phone from my computer and add it to a playlist that I always listen to on my phone. Nokia didn't provide any application for Ubuntu. One way I found was to manually copy files to the phone folder and then have a m3u with the exact name as you would want the playlist to be named in the phone. By opening it in Totem, drag-and-drop the newly copied files onto the playlist in Totem and save it in the Music folder in the phone, I could get the new files to be added onto the playlist on my phone when I update the music library. But this takes too much time in my opinion. Putting all my steps in a short summary would be:

• Connect phone to computer
• Copy the new files onto Music folder on the phone
• Remove the track number from the filenames
• Open the .m3u playlist file in Totem
• Drag-and-drop the new files from the Music folder on the phone onto the playlist
• Save the playlist
• Unplug the phone and update the music library from the music menu

I found a much faster way to do this. How about having a right-click menu button to do all the work. This works by installing the Nautilus extension "Nautilus-action". You can define any kind of command to use it in the right-click menu. So my idea was to mark all the new files in computer and click on the menu to transfer them and add them to playlist in one click. I created a shell-script that would be used as the command in Nautilus-action. The final result is as follows:

#!/bin/bash # Playersync # Script to transfer music files to media player (Any device that can be mounted) # Usage: playersync playlist file1 file2... # Commands usage in this script: # cp /media/disk/music/album/01-track.mp3 /media/disk-1/music/track.mp3 # echo "track.mp3" >> playlist # # Last updated: 2009-09-03 # Script written by: Cherng PROG="playersync" SYNCPATH=/folder/to/device/ LOG=/folder/to/log playlist= function output_error { echo "${PROG}: [Error] $1" 1>&2 echo "$(date +%c) - ${PROG}: [Error] $1" >> $LOG echo "" >> $LOG echo "" >> $LOG exit 1 } function output_log { echo "${PROG}: $1" echo "$(date +%c) - ${PROG}: $1" >> $LOG } function add_to_playlist { # Add file to playlist output_log "[Add to playlist] $playlist" output_log "----COMMAND: echo $1 >> $playlist" echo "$1" >> "$playlist" output_log "[/Add to playlist]" } output_log "Executing playersync" if [ $# -lt 1 ]; then output_error "Please specify some files" fi test -d $SYNCPATH || output_error "Sync directory: $SYNCPATH not found" test -f $LOG || output_error "Log file path: $LOG not found." test -f "$1" || output_error "Playlist doesn't exist" playlist=$1 shift while [ "$1" != "" ]; do # Copy file to phone. newfilename=$(basename "$1") folder=$(echo $1 | sed -n 's:\(.*\)\/.*\.mp3:\1:p')"/" if [ "$SYNCPATH" = "$folder" ]; then # File is in the same folder as syncpath, just add it to playlist. add_to_playlist "$newfilename" else # New file to be copied and added to playlist. newfilename=$(echo $newfilename | sed -n -e 's:[0-9][0-9]*[\.\ -]*\(.*\):\1:gp') if [ ! -f "${SYNCPATH}$newfilename" ]; then output_log "[Transfer] $1" output_log "----COMMAND: cp $1 ${SYNCPATH}$newfilename" cp "$1" "${SYNCPATH}$newfilename" output_log "[/Transfer]" add_to_playlist "$newfilename" else output_log "[Transfer] $1" output_log "----File already exists in sync path: ${SYNCPATH}$newfilename" output_log "[/Transfer]" fi fi shift done output_log "Sync done" output_log "" output_log "" exit 0

I added one additional feature that was when the file marked is from the phone, just add that file to the playlist.

The last step is to add a new object in Nautilus-action configuration. Make sure to specify where the script is in 'Command' and in the 'Arguments' define the path to the playlist on the phone and add a '%M' after the playlist in order to take all the marked files as arguments to the script.

There isn't any kind of notification if the transfer process is complete or not, but that is why I use a log to register all the events occuring during the execution of the script.

I hope this inspired you to some new ideas of your own or if this was exactly as wanted it to. Anyway, lastly I just want to do summary of the steps needed to transfer new mp3 files to my phone:

• Connect phone to computer
• Mark the files
• Click on right-click menu item (I named it to Sync music)
• Unplug the phone and update the music library from the music menu

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Search in my blog

Isn't there times when all you want is to find a particular page or certain keywords in JCHo Blog. Well, no more troubles with that anymore because I've added a search for my blog. You can find it on the right menu of this blog.

What are you waiting for, just go and search through my blog!

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How to connect bluetooth keyboard to Nokia 5800

By following these steps I got my Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard connected to my Nokia 5800. I can browse through my phone with the keyboard, surf the web. It was all thanks to this webpage that I got everything working.

The first step is to download and install an application that will handle bluetooth keyboard connectivities.

• Download the install file to the application in this address: http://nds1.nokia.com/phones/files/software/Nokia_Wireless_Keyboard_S60_31.sis (I browsed to this address directly from my phone, but you can also download it to your computer first and then transfer it to your phone).
• Install it

The second step is to set up the connection between the keyboard and the phone. This is done by a process where the phone gives a passcode to the keyboard in order to have permission granted to set up the connection.

• Open the installed application in Applications in the main menu.
• Select Options and choose Find keyboard
• If the phone asks if you want to activate bluetooth, select yes.
• The phone will now try to find the keyboard, select OK.
• Select More Devices.
• Select the keyboard.
• Select a passcode of your own choice (for example 123) and select OK.
• Type the same passcode on the keyboard and press Enter key.
• Select the language layout of your keyboard.

You can disconnect the keyboard by going back to the application, select options and disconnect keyboard. I also turn off the bluetooth by clicking the bluetooth icon in top of the main screen and switch Off.

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Android: TicTacToe

During my summer vacation I took the opportunity of learning how to create application for the Android platform. A really great development guide is their own official guide. Anyway, after reading through the guide I was eager to try creating something, and the result is Tic Tac Toe for Android. :)

The download link is here. I have only tried running it on an emulator, so I would appreciate any feedbacks on running the actual hardware. It was fun creating a simple application such as this and I'll be aiming something bigger later on. Be sure to write comments about my application.

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SSH: Changing SSH keys

I was thinking of changing my SSH key into a new key with no password, that way I would be able to make cron jobs that would remotely access my NAS for backup purposes. But after generating a new key ($ ssh-keygen) and transferring my new key to the NAS a message was always displayed every time I'd log in. "Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.".

• cherng@computer:~$ ssh cherng@server.com
• Agent admitted failure to sign using the key.

The solution that I found from this site was to make the computer forget the old identity of the former SSH key. This was done by running ssh-add -d, renaming the id_rsa and id_rsa.pub temporarily and log into my NAS, then log out and lastly change the names back to original.

• cherng@computer:~$ ssh-add -d
• cherng@computer:~$ mv .ssh/id_dsa .ssh/id_dsa.bak
• cherng@computer:~$ mv .ssh/id_dsa.pub .ssh/id_dsa.pub.bak
• cherng@computer:~$ ssh cherng@nas
• cherng@nas:~# exit
• cherng@computer:~$ mv .ssh/id_dsa.bak .ssh/id_dsa
• cherng@computer:~$ mv .ssh/id_dsa.pub.bak .ssh/id_dsa.pub

After doing all the steps above, the new SSH key should work. I hope this helped, because it did for me.

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What music am I listening to right now?

If you look on the menu to the right you will see a list containing recently played songs. Last.fm features a widget which shows the latest songs I've been listening to. It's just something cool that I thought would be nice to have on my blog. :)

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JCHo Blog gets a new refreshed look

It's summer and it's time for a redesign of this blog!

I've completely restructured the design of this blog. There are no longer any tables used, I've used only div layout. The reason why I made the change is my website didn't look the same in Internet Explorer 7/8 as in Firefox. The HTML code is now smaller and more maintainable. If you have looked at my previous table layout design of my website there's a lot of tr/td, everything looks like a mess. An article that addresses the issues of table layout and div layout can be found here. Another great article that I used to get some help coding the website using div is here.

I also took the opportunity of tweaking and changing the design, hope it looks good for you. It's been a pleasure redesigning this website and bringing a refreshed look for this blog. Hope you enjoy it. :)

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Latest news here in JCHo Blog

There is now a list of the latest news that I find interesting and which I would like to share. This is thanks to Google Reader which I use daily for getting news from several websites. Google Reader let's you share news from news feeds and paste a snippet of code on your blog/website for viewing the shared news items.

All you have to do to get going is to get an account from google (if you haven't already), log into www.google.com/reader, add some news feeds from various websites (recommending digg or reddit), and then click share at the bottom of each news item. Then go to 'Shared objects' on the left menu and there should be a link at the top that says something like 'share on your website'. From there you can customize your own style for your shared news list.

It's simple and adds more content to your blog :). See my shared news on the lower part of the right menu of this website.

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Spotify - great alternative to Last.fm

Recently, I've begun using Last.fm, which let's you listen to music similar to an artist that you choose, but the catch is it requires you to pay for it after playing 30 songs on their website. So after some googling I stumbled upon deezer which have a lot of different music including japanese music that I wanted. The service was provided only through its website. I liked its vast music library but you couldn't easily and quickly add songs to a new playlist. That was when another provider caught my attention after getting an invite from a friend (thnx wulf :)). It's Spotify. I immediately liked the ui, it's user friendly and easy to navigate and use. Adding a new playlist was as easy as going to an album and right click on it and add new playlist and it's done. Fast and easy, just the way I like it. The only downside is it totally lacks japanese music, but it has a lot of chinese music :), so it kind of compensate for that. The service is run in an application downloaded directly from their website, the only supported OS are Mac OS X 10.4 or later and Windows XP or later. Since I use Ubuntu I had to use wine, and fortunately it works great.

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RSS on JCHo Blog

I have now added RSS feed link so that anyone can add this blog to his/her favourite rss reader. Here's a link.

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YooouuuTuuube

Youtube.com is a great website for watching a single video, but how about watching several hundreds or thousands of the same video at once. That is what Yooouuutuuube.com does and you can zoom in or out. It's pretty cool seeing so many moving pictures in squares at once, it creates some kind of illusion or some kind of mosaic.

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Synchronize Google Calendar with Nokia 5800

I've been looking for a way to synchronize between my calendar in my mobile phone and Google Calendar. I want to be able to add new posts in Google Calendar and see the new post in my phone, and the same on Google Calendar when I add a new post in my phone.

After some googling I found GooSync which can do exactly that. I had to register on their website (for free of course) and then configure it to recognize my phone and my account in Google Calendar. Afterwards everything worked superb. All I need to do after adding a new post, no matter if it's in Google Calendar or in my phone, I just choose 'Synchronize' from the profile which I created for GooSync in the data transfer settings on my phone and it will connect to my wi-fi point and voila, it's synchronized. It can't get easier than this.

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VMware Server 2

After stumbling upon this website I found a really great application for setting up a virtualization server. It's called VMware Server. Since I have a Nokia 5800 I needed Nokia's PC Suite software to backup/update my phone and the only OS that was supported was Windows XP. They really put me on the spot, because I don't want to waste disk space to have a dual-boot. That was when it came to me that I could use this VMware Server to emulate Windows XP without having a dual-boot on my computer.

The application is absolutely free, which surprised me a lot. Just go to VMware Server's website and follow the instructions to register and then download. When I was at the download page I downloaded the TAR file and installed the application. A really great tutorial can be found here. All I did most of the time during installation was to hit ENTER, since the default settings were good enough. A quick summary of the tutorial would be, in the terminal type the following commands:

• $ tar zxvf VMware-server-2.0.1-156745.i386.tar.gz
• $ cd vmware-server-distrib
• $ sudo ./vmware-install.pl
• ... hit ENTER on all instructions...

After installation I typed in the terminal 'vmware'

• $ vmware

and it will start Firefox to go to the address https://127.0.0.1:8333/ where the virtualization server is. The first time didn't work for me, all it showed was 'Loading...' at the title and nothing showed up on the browser. But after rebooting I tried retyping 'vmware' in the terminal and this time it worked. I got to a login screen, and this is where I was completely gone, I never got to type any username or password during the installation process. Luckily I found a website (thank you Google) which says that the username and password is the user that has administrative rights on your computer. So I thought it must be 'root'. But the problem was that I didn't know the password, but fortunately there was a comment on the very same webpage that says to type 'sudo passwd root' at the terminal to change your password to whatever you want.

• $ sudo passwd root

It was then that I was able to log in and finally got to the VMware Server main page.

In this page I just chose create a Virtual Machine and followed the instructions to configure it (I chose to have 512 MB out of 1 GB RAM and 6 GB for the harddrive) and put the CD in to install Windows XP. In order to see the screen I had to click on console tab and then install a plug-in for Firefox. Afterwards I clicked on the console once again and there clicked in the middle of that black surface.

The installation process went without a problem. I installed VMware tools after the installation (when I was in the Windows desktop) in order to get a higher resolution. Everything went smoothly until I tried to plug-in my phone via USB. I had to click on the 'Connect' on a small icon in the bottom of the window, but I get an error saying 'remote usb device error: remote device disconnected: an error occured while sending data'. So I googled and found this forum where the solution was to run Firefox as root. So I closed Firefox and in the terminal typed 'sudo firefox'

• $ sudo firefox

and entered my password and opened the virtualization. And this time when I click 'Connect' Windows XP recognizes that a new device has been connected. I could finally install Nokia PC Suite and start using it.

The only issue left was the sound. The solution was to power off Windows XP and then in the VMware main page click on 'add hardware' and there I chose 'Sound adapter' and followed the instructions to configure it (I didn't change anything, the default was 'auto-detect' and 'connect at startup'). After starting up Windows XP I tried going to youtube and the sound was working properly, YAY!

I was really happy that I got everything working, I actually didn't have any expectations of getting it to work perfectly like a dual-boot but surprisingly it worked like it was really installed on my computer. And the awesome thing is other computers in my home network can connect to the VMware Server and run Windows XP. It's hard to believe that this piece of software is free. I can only thank the team behind VMware server for creating it and sharing it for free. I hope this helped someone to get the application installed.

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Ubuntu 9.04 is GREAT

Hoho, am I glad being back to Ubuntu (9.04). I love the new theme that's included at start. The new notification system looks great. Now I get notifications telling me what my contacts in MSN are saying, just like Windows Messenger. Everything is just as it should be, simple and looks good. Enough said.

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Good bye Nokia 3410

Hihihihi...hehehehe...mwhuahaha...hahaha, I can finally say good bye to my Nokia 3410 after 7 years. Yes, that's right I haven't switched to any new mobile phone, even when the first mobile phone with coloured screen was released. -_-

Hm, which phone did I buy? I can happily say it's one of the mobile phones with a touch-screen and it's the same company as my old one. Well have you figured out? Yes, it's none other than Nokia 5800! I have to say it's freaking awesome to have a new mobile phone, finally coloured screen, and how I've longed for a better MP3-player.

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KDE was a disappointment

I've installed and used Kubuntu for 7 weeks and I have to say it was disappointing. Looking at all the screenshots it looked really nice, but as they say, you can't judge a book by its cover.

One of the dissapointing things was that you couldn't configure everything, as you can in Ubuntu. I couldn't configure it to share a folder in samba in the file browser (though I got it to work through editing the smb.conf), you can only browse files in dolphin with single-clicks, the interface doesn't look all that nice, in my opinion the panel and the windows doesn't match each other, file management isn't what I expected (when I click delete it says my drive is full...have to use another delete that is 'shift-delete') and some other things that I can't remember. Since KDE 4 is relatively new, it isn't perfect yet, quite far from it in my opinion. Firefox doesn't look like to be all that compatible with KDE 4, the tabs looks weird (when you mouse-over it it changes and stays that way even after when you're moving your mouse out), text fields in forms also need some fixes.

Well anyway, at last the new Ubuntu 9.04 is released and I've decided to switch back to Ubuntu. I think it was good to try KDE, knowing what you really have in GNOME, and that is it looks good, everything can be easily configured, and it's simple. I am now sure that Ubuntu is the only one for me.

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Still can't get over it...

I still can't get over the fact that Malena Ernman won and will be the Swedish representative in the Eurovision Song Contest somewhere in May. I think there was several songs that I thought were better than her song "La Voix". The judges from the various city gave a lot of points to Måns Zelmerlöv who easily became number 1 at one point of the tv show. Malena Ernman was at this point almost at the bottom of the list. But that changed in the last minutes of the tv show. When the "People's votes" was handed out, Malena Ernman surprisingly got the most votes from the people of Sweden. With that she went from the bottom to the very top and won. I would rather want Måns' song as the Swedish representative. Oh well, if it's what the Swedish people want then I can't say anything else...

As a last word here's a video of her performance in the tv show.

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Sony Ericsson W995

Not long after Idou was announced, W995 was announced in Barcelona. It's described as a music and video mobile phone. Here's the spec:

Turbo-3G med wi-fi Screen: 2,6" Size: 97 x 49 x 15 mm Weight: 113 gram Camera: 8,1 megapixels med 16x digital zoom Battery: 4 hours of conversation, 360 hours of stand-by 3,5 mm earphone

I've thought that Sony Ericsson has been in the downfall lately because their latest mobile phones weren't really all that attractive compared to others like Nokia, Samsung and LG but I have to admit that they might go up again.

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Idou, Sony Ericsson's biggest Iphone competitor

Sony Ericsson just announced their newest touch mobile phone that is going to be a big competitor against Iphone. The spec is the following:

12 Megapixels camera Screen size: 3,5" 640 x 380 touch screen Turbo-3G, WLAN, GPS OS: Symbian

Idou is supposed to be released by the second half of 2009. More details will emerge in May.

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Time to mark March 13th on my calendar!

I've finally pre-ordered Resident Evil 5 and March 13th is the date everything will be in chaos. *Gulp* I better prepare myself mentally...hmm maybe play Resident Evil 4. d-_-b

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The best tennis game is back: Virtua Tennis 2009

Virtua Tennis 2009 boasts improved player control mechanics, the serve and volley is improved and player can stumble on court. Apart from the traditional modes like tournament there is also a new mode, Davis Cup. The World Tour mode is getting a lot of new things and the online mode will definitely be fully integrated.

The game is announced to be released in May. I can't wait to begin smashing, hitting, beating everyone in Virtua Tennis. I've longed for the online mode since only XBOX360 owners got that opportunity in Virtua Tennis 3, I really hated that they left all the PS3 owners out of that fun. I hope this will make up for that. :)

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Linus Torvalds prefer Fedora

According to this article Linus Torvalds uses Fedora. It looks like his main reasons were that it must be easy to install, kept up-to-date on applications and kernel. Other Linux-distributions that he had on his mind was also openSUSE and maybe Ubuntu.

The Linux creator is choosing Fedora...hmm...may have to give Fedora a try some time in the future. :D

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Share my blog!

I've added a AddThis button for every post. With this button you can share/bookmark my posts in other social networks like digg, Delicious, Facebook etc.

It's amazing how easy it was to get a button like that. I just registered in AddThis.com and copied the small snippet of code and paste it in my website. I can only say thank you. :)

If you have a website I strongly recommend to put an AddThis button, it doesn't hurt to raise your chances of getting more traffic to your website.

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Wow, KDE 4.2 looks good!

I've always thought that GNOME is a lot better than KDE. But after seeing some screenshot I think KDE looks really good. I might give it a try the next time I re-install Ubuntu. Be sure to watch the video.

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My top applications in Ubuntu

Here's my list of top applications that I use a lot:

Pidgin
A really light-weight chat client that can connect to a number of chat networks, including MSN Messenger, Google Talk, IRC, ICQ, etc. The chat client has support for other OS too. Go to Pidgin's website to find out more.

rTorrent
A terminal-based torrent client that is really powerful and optimized. It doesn't take a lot resources to run it, and there's almost no CPU-usage even when downloading at high speed (~1MB/s). There are a lot of useful and powerful features that can be added but may be a bit complicated for a beginner. Some examples is automated downloading of torrents, removing torrents when a certain ratio is reached. For some more features and information check their website.

Firefox
This is my favourite web browser. It has support for a lot of plugins. I have Flashblock that blocks flash objects in websites, Firebug that is a really useful web development tool.

PS3 Media Server
This is an application for streaming media to the PS3. This is probably the application that saved me because if it weren't for this I would've had to buy another computer to connect to my HD TV just to watch my videos on a big screen. I wouldn't stand watching videos on a small screen of 19" :P. This is really a lifesaver, it's easy to setup and it works incredible. Read my tutorial for how to set it up. Go to their website to download it.

Aptana Studio
A really good editor for web development. It's great for writing code in HTML, CSS, PHP. It has plugins that you can install easily. I have installed the SVN plugin to have version control on my websites. I actually used Aptana Studio when I developed this blog. You can download Aptana Studio as a stand-alone application or install it as an eclipse plugin. I installed the stand-alone version because I don't use eclipse a lot and it runs a lot quicker on an older PC. I recommend going to their website for more information.

MPlayer
A really great movie player that I grew fond of. It has good short-keys which you can use to quickly fast forward/backward, pause/play. It also has some preferences like delaying audio/subtitles in the video.

GNOME Do
One of the best applications made for Ubuntu. It's an application for launching application, opening folders/files with only the keyboard. To use it hold the windows button and press space and a window pops for you to begin typing an item that you want to find. Depending what it is (application, folder, file or web url) just hit return key to execute it. This way I don't need to use the mouse to launch an application, it's fast and comfortable. Go find out more at their website.

gedit
A really simple text editor that is easy to use and has features like coloured text for displaying different file types (html documents, c programs). I use it a lot to write C programs together with the terminal to compile it.

Exaile
I use Exaile as the music player in Ubuntu. Although there are a lot of music players I chose Exaile because it looks good and I didn't have any problems with it.

One of the things that worried me when I switched to Ubuntu was the applications, would I be able to do all the stuff that I do in Windows. And I'm happy to have successfully switched to Ubuntu because there are all the applications that I need and it's all free. There are even some applications that I find are really good which aren't even available in Windows.

Hope you enjoyed reading this post and found it useful. Do you have any specific application that you want to share, be sure to write it in the comments section below.

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New OS specifically for netbooks

A new OS is on its way and it's specifically built for netbooks. The OS is actually another new Linux-distribution. Because the new OS is built for netbooks, it's probably going to have low requirements on your PC specification.

From their website it shows that it will be released during 2009. So until then you can have a preview of it by checking this screenshot of the OS.

It looks quite nice from the screenshot and it's interesting that netbooks have become so popular. This OS may become the next big Linux-distribution.

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Happy New Year!

To all asians out there, Happy new year!

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JCHo Blog moved to web host

Since I'm going to move soon, it would cost too much to have my computer running 24/7 in order to have my website published. So I decided to switch my blog to a web host. This way I won't have to worry about shutting off my computer and you will be able to access this blog all the time. This'll be better for everyone.

The new address will be jcho.iblogger.org.

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Reasons to switch to Ubuntu - part 3

Here's the third part of Reasons to switch to Ubuntu.

Mutiple workspaces
I never thought something like switching between workspaces could be so useful. But after experiencing it in Ubuntu I just love it. It's great when you work with something and have a lot of windows and applications opened, and all of a sudden your parent comes in and wants you to help him check something on the net. It would look messy if another window would be opened again, so why not switch to an empty workspace, in this way you won't close anything by mistake. Another example would be when you copy something to another harddrive which takes a long time, then if you don't want to cancel the transfer by accident when working with something else, you can switch to another workspace.

SSH server
After getting used to working in the terminal I discovered that Ubuntu had an SSH client pre-installed. This is where I discovered the existence of having an SSH server-client system. If SSH server is installed in Ubuntu then you can log in to your computer through the terminal (or via putty in Windows) from any computer that is connected to the Internet. And the cool part is that once logged in it's like sitting in front of your own computer with only the terminal opened. You can access anything on your computer, just like at home. The best thing about SSH is that it's secure, all the trafic between the computers is transferred through a secure channel.

Everything works!
All the hardware that I have, printer, scanner, wireless bluetooth keyboard and mouse, are working in Ubuntu. They almost worked right away after installation of Ubuntu. The only little problem that I had was my Logitech diNovo Edge keyboard, because the bluetooth manager in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex was pre-configured in a way that all bluetooth devices was hidden, disconnected. But this was easily solved by configuring it to be always visible.

It looks good!
I don't think I will explain anything other than showing a picture of my desktop:

You can customize the desktop to suit your own style. Things like the icons and the windows are easily customizable. There are tons of themes that are downloadable from gnome-look.org.

File structure
All Linux-distributions have a very different file structure from Windows. There isn't a drive C: where all Windows directories reside in. I'd think of the file structure more like directories, where at the top is the root, '/'. A quick explanation of the most important directories can be found elsewhere. One of the important directories is /home where all local configurations are stored and also your documents and files if you want. The greatest thing about this file structure is the ability to set /home in another separate partition. This way I can keep all the configurations of the applications that I use even after re-installing the OS. This means all the bookmarks and preferences in Firefox are still unchanged, your wallpaper and desktop theme are still the same.

Well that's pretty much it. Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Don't hesitate to send a comment to share your thoughts.

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Being employed at Google is the Promised Land?

Studying computer science I've always thought that Google would be the best place to work at, where you can work at your own time, at your own speed and you have a "free-time" included in the time that you work which is meant to give you more creativity. Like a dream come true...

...But it may not be as I imagined according to this article.

Well, if something seems to be too good to be true, then it probably is. :P

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W3C validator passed!

I have finally received the following message from W3C Markup Validation Service:

"This document was successfully checked as HTML 4.01 Transitional!"

You can check it yourself through the link at the bottom of this site.

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Sony's own netbook

Netbooks just keep on coming out from electronics manufacturers. This time Sony releases its own. It's called Sony Vaio P and has the most impressive screen resolution of all the netbooks, 1600 x 768. The design looks awesome, as with all sony notebooks. Here's the spec:

Vista Home Premium Atom Z520 @ 1.33GHz or with a Z530 (1.6GHz) / Z540 (1.86GHz) 2GB of RAM 60GB of HDD or up to 128GB of SSD 8” UWXGA Screen with a stunning 1600x768 resolution WiFi B/G/N a 1.3Mpix Camera Module WAN and GPS (in Option) for just 639g and 245 x 19.8 x 120 mm

It can supposedly run a full HD trailer without any problem on Windows Media Player.

There's also a button for quickstarting the netbook so that you can quickly check email, surfing the Internet etc. The quickstart will get you to a XMB menu (just like the one on PS3).

I have to admit that I want it. It looks small, thin, beautiful...ugh...I want it now. The only thing that's keeping me from buying it is the price, it's going to cost about more than double the price of a normal netbook.

For more pictures check here.

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Streaming media to PS3

Do you have a nice, big Full-HD TV in your home and the only time you actually use the TV with HD content is playing ps3 games, but you want to use the TV for all the money you've paid for it. Well then you and I are in the same boat. Usually I have my computer connected to my HD TV so I can watch movies in HD quality, but I will soon move to a new house and the TV will be in a separate room from my computer so it won't be able to connect to it easily. One solution would be to have another computer by the TV. Another solution would be to try and stream media on the computer to the TV via PS3. I chose the later alternative because I've already got a PS3 and it would require some money to get a new computer.

There are several applications which can stream media to the PS3, for example TVersity (Windows only), MediaTomb (Linux, OS X), FUPPES (Windows, Linux) etc.

Since MediaTomb was the only applications that was in the Ubuntu repository I decided to try it. After having spent about two days trying to set it up for playing video files (.avi, .mkv, .wmv) I got it working. But there was one big problem, I couldn't get subtitles to work on any of the video files. Anyway, clearly MediaTomb wasn't what I expected. So after some frustration I decided to give up on MediaTomb and almost on the whole idea of streaming media via PS3...until I stumbled upon this web page. After downloading the application and read through the readme I just want to quote one sentence, "I was quite fed up with TVersity and others servers I've tried as none of them easily supports subtitles and 1080p transcode, as well as any kind of files I want to play without worrying about ps3 compatibility.". I feel exactly the same. :).

As I said before it took about two days to get MediaTomb working, but this took only max one hour for me to get it working.

Just to get things straight, I'm using a 2,4 GHz Core2Duo, 1GB RAM, Nvidia GeForce 7900GTX computer with Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex installed.

Ok, here's how I got it to work.

First I installed all the necessary codecs, that included:

• VLC (straight from the repository)
• FFmpeg (latest version from svn, but repository version probably works)
• MEncoder (also from the repository)

If you don't know how to install applications from the repository, then here's what I did:

• Go to System->Administration->Synaptic.
• You will then be prompted for your password, enter it.
• Then search for the application in the search box at top of the window.
• Right click on the application and choose "Mark for install".
• It's not installed yet, now you can choose several other application that you want to install.
• Lastly confirm at the top of the window. And it will install all the necessary packages for it.

• Ok, now that I've got all the codecs I downloaded ps3mediaserver.
• Extracted it to my home directory.
• Ran PMS.sh.

PMS.sh is the file that you will always open in order to run ps3mediaserver. If you want to debug you can run it in terminal.

Now I've got a window and the server is up and running. Lastly but not least is configuring the ps3mediaserver so that it works.

• I clicked on Transcoding Settings in the tabs.
• There I chose MEncoder as the top priority in Video Files Engine, FFmpeg as the top priority in Audio Files Engine.
• When clicking on MEncoder in the list I disabled 'ASS/SSA Subtitles' and enabled 'Autoload *.srt/*.sub subtitles with the same filename'.

Note that I had to disable 'ASS/SSA Subtitles' in order to get .mkv files with subtitles to work or else MEncoder would crash.

If you have issues goto the issues section in ps3mediaserver's official site.

And that's it. I can stream .avi, .mkv, .mp4 in HD quality with subtitles to my Full-HD TV via PS3.

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JCHo Blog officially opened

I have finally finished most of the work on this website and can seriously begin blogging. Stay tuned.

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Reasons to switch to Ubuntu - part 2

Here's the second part of "Reasons to switch to Ubuntu". Continuing with the list:

Can communicate with windows computers
If you were worried about not being able to communicate with other computers on your home network that uses Windows, then there's no need to worry anymore. I got my Ubuntu computer to connect to folders from my laptop that uses Windows XP in the living room. There isn't much work to be done either to make the whole thing working. It's just about changing some values according to your home network configuration (network group etc) in a config file. Then you're good to go. Just like Windows there's also the possibility to share a folder in Ubuntu so that other computers in your home network can access it. If you know how to do it in Windows XP then I can say it is done the same way. Just right click on the drive and choose properties and click on the tab share. Then click on the button that you want to share the folder. It's probably not as easy as I said above, but there's only some minor tweaks that needs to be done.

Visual effects on desktop
One of the cool things in Ubuntu is the visual effects on the desktop. Some examples are fade-out when closing windows, fade-in when opening windows, mini-preview of windows while pressing alt-tab (if you have a video on that will be rolling on real-time). It's hard to explain so here's a link to a video demonstrating it. Note that some of the effects have to be activated through another program that can be easily installed. After experiencing it I can only think that Windows XP is outdated. :P

Ubuntu is free!
Ubuntu is absolutely free. No need to pay (no need to crack :P). I can not believe that all the amazing work the developer's done is for free. That is really nice. :)

The community
Ubuntu has the largest community among the linux distributions. If you've got a problem then there's a big chance that someone else also has the same problem. Simply doing a google search will surely solve your problem. At least it solved mine. :)

Lastly I want to say that if you still have doubts about Ubuntu then at least try it using LiveCD that can be downloaded from Ubuntu's homepage. There is no need for installation, it's run directly off the CD.

Thanks for reading this post. Hope you enjoyed it.

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Reasons to switch to Ubuntu - part 1

If you asked me a year ago if I had any interest of installing any linux distribution on my computer I'd definitely say NO. That's because Windows XP worked absolutely fine for me then and I had some applications like Photoshop, Microsoft Visual Studio, pc games which I thought wouldn't work on a linux distribution (but Photoshop actually works with the help of Wine). I've always had Windows since my first computer and I've only emulated the Linux distribution, Red Hat (now renamed to Fedora) via VMware. It didn't looked so good and I wasn't completely interested of learning it either.

As time went by a few years I heard about Ubuntu and for the first time I admitted that a Linux distribution looked good, the desktop and the file explorer looked a lot like Windows. At the time I had a programming course at my school and it would simplify things if I used the terminal in a linux distribution to compile the programs for the Hand-ins. So I decided to emulate Ubuntu on my computer. But because I only had 1GB RAM and half of it was used to run the OS it became slow and wasn't very comfortable. So I decided to take the big step to switch from Windows XP to Ubuntu 8.4.

Since then I haven't regretted one bit that I switched to Ubuntu. Here's a list of my reasons to stay on Ubuntu:

New upgrades
Every 6 months the Ubuntu team will release a new version of Ubuntu, containing new versions of the existing applications, all previous security updates and new features. This means that you don't have to wait years as you do with Windows in order get new features.

All software are free
All the software that are included with Ubuntu are free! It's really easy to install them too. All you have to do is click on Program in the top of the desktop and choose Add/Remove and there will be a list of programs that are available for install. Just click those progams that you want to have installed (or uninstalled) and it will automatically download from the Internet and install it in an appropriate location. There are programs for all the common tasks that you need, whether it will be writing a document (OpenOffice), surfing the web (Firefox), developing applications (Eclipse), watching video (MPlayer), editing photos (GIMP), downloading torrents (Transmission). And there are many more software from Ubuntu's repository. In the terminal you can write an application's name and if it isn't installed it will display the whole command for you to copy and paste into the commandline and it will install it for you. Everything is fast and simple. And as I said before every software is open source and free, you don't need to pay for any of them.

Terminal
I know that some don't switch to a linux distribution because of the terminal. But I think it's really awesome if you become familiar with it. I think that in order to survive in a linux distribution you have to learn some things about the terminal. At least be able to browse, create, delete, copy and rename directory and files. Here's a link to a great tutorial. As I learned more about the terminal I stumbled upon 'shell script'. It's script executed in the terminal. The shell scripts uses same basic code syntax as any other programming language, for example for-statements, if-statements, functions etc. There are a lot of built-in programs in the terminal, for example 'grep' which lets you search for words in files. Because of these built-in programs I could create a shell script for automatically download torrents. I mean that's totally awesome.

GNOME Do
There is an application which I really like and that is GNOME Do. It's not pre-installed in Ubuntu but you can install easily in the terminal. What it does is it lets you quickly open applications with your keyboard. That means you don't need to move your hand from the keyboard to open an application! I think that is just awesome. All you have to do is hold down the windows key and push the space and a small window will appear where you can write the application which you want to open and just hit enter. As you type down the application's name GNOME Do will try to guess the software that you are actually trying to open. It will also remember those applications that you use most. If I open Firefox a lot it will show Firefox as soon as I begin typing 'f'. GNOME Do has many plug-ins which can be easily enabled. Some of the more useful ones that I use are 'Files and Folders', which lets you open folders too, and Firefox bookmarks which lets you open the bookmarks in Firefox directly in GNOME Do, this means you can type 'google' and it will find the bookmark google (if you have it on your bookmarks) and just hit enter and it will open the URL in Firefox.

...it's getting late so this is the end of part 1.Stay tuned for more. :)

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About this blog

Why does this blog exist? It's because I've learned a lot about computers and I want to share it to anyone who needs it. Simply being able to help someone is an honor for me... actually that's not the whole truth. :P

The biggest reason I made this website is that I just felt like doing some webdesign during my freetime and a blog would be simple enough and wouldn't take too much time to make. This website uses php and mysql to display all the information, blogs, links and tags. It uses a framework from CodeIgniter. A very simple framework to base one's website structure on. This is actually the first time I used a framwork on a website. It's surprisingly simple and simplifies a lot of work. One of my first websites had like 30 html files and it happened once that I wanted to add ads in that website. Boy, it took some time to paste that small code on every page. Then I learned about php and mysql, which simplified the process of adding a review on my website, because I didn't have to update my webpages, all the information on the webpages were taken from a database. That saved a lot of my time. Then after some time (like a year or so) I stumbled upon this article and one of the things that really got my attention was the part about framework. I've never heard about it. So I thought to give it a read in the userguide of CodeIgniter. With this framework I didn't have to write php code for accessing database from scratch, there are already built-in functions for it. There are many built-in functions for the most commonly used tasks. One of the best things is that it uses MVC (Model-View-Controller) which separates data handling and presentation. Because of this I now have minimal html files (actually only 1, split in 4 parts: top, posts, sidecolumn and bottom). Now I can't think of building a website without a framework, it's that great.

At first I thought that this blog wouldn't take a lot of time to make, but boy was I wrong. I started building this blog a month ago. I thought it would take at most 2 weeks. But since I did a pretty lousy planning of the website, I had to do some major redesign of the website until I was satisfied (boy did I get a lot of strange results with the tables and the css is also sometimes unpredictable). And as I built the website I got new ideas and had to try it out. Like the tags which I didn't plan to have at all. I had an idea of how to do it, all that was missing was to have the right tools (mysql: relations and joining tables). There was a lot of other small problems which I eventually fixed. I real lifetime saver is the Firebug, which is an add-on for Firefox. When I it seemed like I got an unresolvable javascript error, Firebug saved me. When I thought I made the right changes after an update in my css file but it turned out to be a fault, Firebug saved me. It may be a web developer's best friend. :)

All the pictures that are part of the webdesign was made in GIMP. A truly fantastic and almost a fully capable alternative to photoshop. All my pictures used to be created with photoshop but when I switched to Ubuntu I was eager to test GIMP, since I've heard it's a really great application. I'm certainly not disappointed when I used it. The tools are a bit different from photoshop. For example when using Move tool in photoshop you just choose a layer and just click anywhere on the picture and it'll only move that layer you chose, but in GIMP it matters where you click on the picture. If you click on another layer's area, GIMP will switch to that layer. So be careful where you click, or use the arrow keys which I do. Another feature that I used a lot in photoshop was being able to click on blending options on a layer and easily choose a new colour for it. GIMP has also the possibility to change colour of a layer, but you have to do it in two steps. First step is using a tool which marks an area of the same colour and then in the second step choose a colour and use the paint bucket to apply the change. One of the biggest disappointments when I used GIMP is that you can't select several layers at once. This is something I thought was obvious but after doing som googling I found no easy way out. I haven't experimented so much on GIMP, it has some things that I wish it had, but it is free, and if you can't do something in the same way as photoshop there's always another alternative way in GIMP, it's just a matter of being more familiar with it.

After checking out this article I decided to choose these icons. I have to give my thanks to Icejoy team for creating the icon set. The icon set is really nice, clean and simple, just the way I like it.

I would like to end this post with saying that I've learned some new things about webdesign and I hope you will enjoy this blog as much as I did when I built it.

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