Techie Blogger

The name foobar is derived from a common meta-syntactic variable name used in computer programming. Foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for windows, it has highly modular design and extensive SDK which allows third-party developers to customize even change the interface. The core structure is closed source but the SDK is under BSD license. Foobar2000 is very small in size and includes many tools like tagging and audio conversion and all this and more at merely a size of 3MB. Many other audio players more than double the size wont offer such features. Foobar2000 increases audio fidelity using noise shaping and dithering. Ask anyone if they have opened a 7z file with an audio player, well Foobar2000 does that with no problems, all you need is an addon.

The Main Feature of Foobar are:

• Audio formats supported natively: MP1, MP2, MP3, MPC, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC / Ogg FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, AU, SND, CDDA, WMA, and more.
• Full Unicode support.
• Customizable user interface .
• Advanced tagging capabilities.
• Support for ripping Audio CDs as well as transcoding all supported audio formats with command line support.
• ReplayGain support – both playback and calculation.
• Gapless playback support.
• Customizable keyboard shortcuts.
• Media Library with automated folder watching.
• Open component architecture allowing third-party developers to extend functionality of the player.
• Embedded support for album list, album art, spectrum visualization.
• Metadata support and file organization.

Moreover Additional components can be added providing more support

• APE, ALAC support.
• Playback statistics.
• Kernel streaming support.
• ASIO support.
• WASAPI output support.
• CD burning support.
• Ability to open archives (7z, RAR, ZIP ).

Foobar2000 is a must for all music fans out there. So Check it out.

Screenshots:

Download

Plus there are additional components here.

There are also skins available here.

Or If you are interested in developing additional tools download the SDK here.

So Have fun with Foobar2000.

Popularity: 17% [?]

If you are using a linux based operating system like Ubuntu, literally downloading the youtube videos is as easy as just watching it. I mean it when I said it. Anyway here I explain the best and the easiest options I found in downloading the youtube videos.

1.Just Watch the video.
One thing you would have rarely noticed is that when a video is buffered completely in Youtube, a copy of that video is saved in /tmp directory. So after watching the video make sure the you do not close or change the page in the browser. After the video is streamed fully in the browser just move to the /tmp directory and you can find a .flv file with name beginning with Flash*. Just copy that file into your desktop and it’s done. This is not the case with just youtube videos but any flash videos on net can be downloaded this way.

2.Command Line way.
If are comfortable with using command line, this way is for you. Youtube-dl is a Python script, which  can run under Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows platforms as long a latest version of python is installed. For installing the script in Ubuntu just type

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Now for downloading a youtube video, in the terminal type

youtube-dl **video page url***

There are also a number of options available for you with this python script. You can view this by typing

youtube-dl –help

Options:
-h, –help            print this help text and exit
-v, –version         print program version and exit
-u USERNAME, –username=USERNAME
account username
-p PASSWORD, –password=PASSWORD
account password
-o FILE, –output=FILE
output video file name
-q, –quiet           activates quiet mode
-s, –simulate        do not download video
-t, –title           use title in file name
-l, –literal         use literal title in file name
-n, –netrc           use .netrc authentication data
-g, –get-url         print final video URL only
-2, –title-too       used with -g, print title too
-f FORMAT, –format=FORMAT
append &fmt=FORMAT to the URL
-b, –best-quality    alias for -f 18

3. Grabber websites.
There are many websites like keepvid.com which allow users to download the youtube video by entering the url. But in many cases I have found this way do not work well.

4.Firefox plugins
If you are a Mozilla Firefox user there are a number of plugins which automatically detect any flash videos being played in the page. It need not be a ‘you’ tube page. This supports most of the other favourite websites. The below are just a few to name.

1-Click YouTube Video Download

Download Flash and Video

Flash Video Downloader

Fast YouTube Download

This is way I personally follow

Popularity: 85% [?]

After one of my friend’s blog started creating considerable revenue through Google Adsense, he wanted to try his luck in Mobile Advertising. I had heard about Google Adsense for Mobile Content and also rumours that mobile ads were high paying compared to the usual web ads. So I thought why not help him. Browsing number of forums and posting my thread, none drew much response. I was actually searching for plugins for monetization with Google Adsense for Mobile Content. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any. But that was when I heard about AdMob which was yet another mobile advertising networks. Just like me for many, had a doubt if it was legit? Though I don’t have much experience with it personally,  I think it’s worth giving a try as Google has recently acquired AdMob for it’s expansion, with Adsense for Mobile Content. So it’s future is not going to be dull

The other advantage is that with mippin, you will have your webpages optimized for viewing in Mobile Browsers.

I will explain step by step about installing the plugin and Configuring with AdMob and Mippin.

1. Get your mobile version of the site registered at Mippin.

As the first step give your RSS feed URL/Website URL, Select the Layout and Customize it according to your likes.

Now for proceeding you will have to register at Mippin.com. Get it done.

2. Under the Publicize tab, give the URL  of your Mobile Webpage of your like. Give your tags. Also keep a note of the “code below”. Just Copy it into somewhere in your PC.

You will be needing the id in that code when configuring the plugin.

3. Now under the Monetize Tab, you will have to validate your website.

So copy “Mippin Feed Validation Key= XXXXXX” and publish as a post in your blog with the the copied statement as the title and content.

Then click Validate.

4. Now register for an account at AdMob. After confirming the account, login with your username and password at Admob. Click Add new Sites and App under the MARKETPLACE tab.

Now give your Mippin Site URL under the url coloumn.

Now you have to enter your admob id for getting it Click on “Here” and Click on the name of your website.

Now enter your Admob id at the coloumn at Mippin Webpage.

5.Things are almost done. Now get this Mippin plugin installed in your WordPress blog. After installation is complete go to the page of Mippin Plugin, there is a coloumn for entering Mippin id. Give the id found in the earlier code [Step2] found at the Mippin website.

6.Now just wait for a day for your ads to appear in Mippin website. Try accessing your website from the mobile.

You don’t need to manualy set the position of Mobile Ads in your website. Everything will be done by the plugin.

Best Wishes.

Just comment at the bottom if you have any trouble setting this up. I will try to help you.

Popularity: 59% [?]

XBMC (Formely Known as Xbox Media Center) is basically a free and open source cross platform media centre to suit all your media needs. It is written in C and using some python. Comes with a large codec support so that you can play all your media files with ease. It outperforms the default media center. A lot of plugins and addons like BBC player, Radio, ESPN makes XBMC more additive. Using XBMC makes you forget all about the Operating System that is siting ideal, such that they are providing it as Live CD and Live USB.

XBMC has greater basic hardware requirements than a traditional 2D software applications, this basically means that it needs 3D capable GPU graphics hardware controller for all rendering; on the other hand, powerful 3D GPU chips are common today in most modern computers. It even plays pure 1080p media files using a core 2 duo processor using only the CPU power. Hardware accelerated video decoding using VDPAU is supported in XBMC 9.04 (and later) under Linux on Nvidia graphics hardware.

You can make a cool library by adding covers, description, fanart etc. It moreover supports network playback so you can stream media anywhere in your house or from the net using practically any protocol available.

XBMC is used as a application framework platform for others projects to base their media center software on, and today at least Boxee, MediaPortal, Plex, and Voddler are separate derivative products that are all known to initially have copied the GUI and media player parts of their software from XBMC’s source code.

XBMC features a Python Scripts Engine and WindowXML application framework (a XML-based widget toolkit for creating a GUI for widgets) in a similar to Apple Mac OS X Dashboard Widgets and Microsoft Gadgets in Windows Sidebar. Plugin scripts like Internet-TV and movie-trailer browsers, weather forecast, TV-guides, e-mail clients, instant messaging, scripts to front-end control PVR software and hardware, Internet-radio-station browsers, P2P file-sharing downloaders, IRC, also casual games such as Tetris, Snake, Space Invaders, Sudoku, and much more.

XBMC is distributed as a GPL and is developed by a global community, so there is lot to offer. Moreover it doesn’t require a high-end PC making it is easy to build a Economical HTPC. If you want a HTPC you got to have XBMC, The Ultimate one. The difficult to put all the feature of XBMC in words, to know it ,you got to experience it.

XBMC supports a lot of platforms, namely Windows, Mac, Linux, Apple TV and there are also Live versions.

Download

and also dont forget to check out skins and plugins.

here is a site dedicated for all plugins and scripts.

Popularity: 32% [?]

Campuses have always been the places of innovation. The presence of of a super computing facility in a campus can greatly aid in R&D associated with the campus. The students will get an exposure to super computing arena and they can contribute to indigenous projects.

But what if we can setup such a facility using the computers already present in the campus with no extra investment??? And what if the  implementation do not induce any bottleneck in the proper functioning of those computers. Well it was a project we where working on..for quiet a long time… So that we can setup a virtual supercomputing facility in a campus in a cost effective way..which uses the unused processing power of all computers present in the campus.

We have derived the idea of implementation from grid and volunteer computing notions. For those not so tech-savvy people who may stumble across these lines, Grid computing is a variant of distributed computing. Lets say someone has a very complex, resource draining program and a dozen computers. He designs the program in a such a manner that he could divide it into pieces of program each running autonomously in one of the computers and giving the same solution as if we used a very powerful computer with the the high capabilities the program demanded. So GRID computing is called a distributed computing form with loosely coupled (the computers will not have to communicate with each other in solving a problem assigned to them), Heterogenous (computers can be of diffrent forms,using diffrent latforms etc..) and geographically dispersed.

In volunteer computing any person with his mind bent a bit (towards the side of greater human cause) can donate a part of their pc’s computational power as a service. Many data intensive projects like the SETI@home runs on volunteer computing with people all around the world participating in it.

So in a campus we have the computers in labs as well as those in the hands of students. Using an Open Source  middle ware called BOINC we can pool the unused processing power of all these computers. Here we will be using something like cycle stealing where idle processor cycles will be nicked from the participating nodes to setup the required virtual super computer.

The concept in its essence is similar to a volunteer computing project but essentially the BOINC middle ware should be adapted to perform in a smaller arena with the maximum number of nodes being 200 or 300. For this we developed some changes to  the original BOINC as such like the development of a hierarchal tree searching technique, development of an IDS(Intrusion Detection System) etc..

I have tried to outline the basic concepts of this implementation in a not-so-techie manner. In the next post i will outline the technical procedure to setup the same in a campus and more details on the changes we made to BOINC s/w..

And for those techie guys who i am sure will be bit disappointed after skimming through this – BOINC stands for Berkeley Open Infrastructure For Network Computing. It is an architecture developed by David Anderson to support GRID based projects.It is available in open source..thanks to those great minds.. And it is this middle-ware which integrates various nodes present in the virtual supercomputing facility, enabling them to interact with each other and manage multiple work modules…

Technical Procedure To Set Up the Virtual Supercomputer

Popularity: 39% [?]