To play 3gp videos with audio using mplayer in Ubuntu Jaunty, add the following line to your /etc/apt/sources.list file

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/jaunty.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

You need the GPG key for medibuntu packages. Get it the following way.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring

sudo apt-get update

now install the following packages

w32codecs mplayer mencoder amrnb

You should be able to hear the sound in mplayer now.

Source

It seems Yahoo! is changing their protocols for client connection. Heard somewhere this is done to disallow 3rd party clients like pidgin and trillian access yahoo’s messenger service. On my Ubuntu Jaunty, this has not affected pidgin yet! (looks like it auto adjusted) , but for Kopete I had to override the server connection to cn.scs.msg.yahoo.com and now its working fine.

Got the workaround from here.

Kopete is the only yahoo client on linux, AFAIK that allows video chat. Not sure if anything else has surfaced up yet. Haven’t been able to use Gyache yet with my webcam.

This post has reported that the flex builder work on linux has been put on hold.  Noted Adobe techie has said “there is not enough requisition for the product to continue its development”

Well, that’s not a great news to hear.. considering the open sourced SDK of adobe flex,  good amount of interest was generated in the FOSS developer community. To help it revive again, use this link to vote on the adobe site.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-19053

From the current builder available on linux ,which is infact a eclipse plugin, the main feature I missed was, the design view in it. Hopefully, when the development continues design view is also ported to linux.

New in gmail labs allows you to preview your inbox when gmail is loading. Useful, if you have a little slow connection. Your anxiety of which mails you are about to open will be served too.:) Just goto gmail -> settings – > labs look for inbox preview enable it, close the browser and relogin again.

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/new-in-labs-inbox-preview.html

If you have been working with Eclipse 3.2 or 3.3 with flex builder 3, and if the upgrade to 3.4 broke the builder, try the following patch http://www.tekool.net/blog/2008/06/28/flex-builder-3-plugin-dont-work-with-eclipse-34/

Just download the patch from here unzip it somewhere on your desktop and copy the plugins content ( 2 jar files) to your eclipse’s plugins folder. If you have any existing files while copying good idea would be to take a backup before doing so.

Now restart eclipse with -clean option. Your flex builder should work as it used to before.

India’s only and premiere foss event has been announced. It is to be held at its traditional home, IISC Bangalore between 25th November and 29th Novemeber 2008.

Register now http://foss.in/register/delegate-registration

or visit http://foss.in for more info.

Happy FOSSing!

Around 8 million downloads in 24 hours for Firefox 3, great feat! Get your certificate from here..

A guiness world record day has been planed to mark the official release of Firefox 3. On the day, a record for the most number of downloads for a single software in 24 hours will be attempted.

Spread the word around and help FF achieve this unique feat. Signup and pledge here. Experience the Web in a better way.. Get Firefox!!

Update: Firefox 3 is officially out! http://www.mozilla.com/firefox/

India’s first ever Developer summit held recently at IISc, Bangalore, concluded friday night with them giving out developer awards. The event was aptly titled, The Great Indian Developer Summit held between May 19th to 23rd 2008. Yes, it feels great to be recognized as a developer, more so for Indians. FOSS.in, Barcamps and this, I think am becoming a conference junkie.

Saltmarch Media, organized the event. The event was spread over 5 days based on 3 main tracks, for .Net, Web 2.0, and Java. All the talks and workshop sessions were based on the above topics. Who’s who in the respective fields had come over to present the sessions and workshops. I had a chance to interact with Jesse James, popularly called as father of Ajax, or as the person who coined the term ‘Ajax’. Also got a chance to have a picture along with him

On the final day post the sessions, the action shifted to Palace Grounds, where a first ever Developer Awards were given out. Before the conference started, a online vote was taken for various categories including best IDE, best configuration management tool etc. The list also had a vote on the top committer to open source projects from India. Some of the names included were, Shreyas (Foss.in) and Peter Thomas(Satyam). Eventually Peter Thomas went on to win the award. Among others, Oracle tools, Eclipse, MySQL and Microsoft tools were the potential winners in different categories.

This night also marked the Thirteenth (13) year of Java, a huge cake was cut marking the entry of Java into teenage. The show was well anchored by Divya from Saltmarch with lots of fun activities for the crowd and so on. Rock bands Motherjane (Cochin based) and Bhoomi rocked the crowd with their tracks. Overall a satisfying conference experience, well co-ordinated and executed. Looking more from production team in the near future.

Tags: gdis, developersummit, saltmarch

Searchme is a search engine. Yes, one would guess, oh here’s another one out to change the way one searches the web. But this one does catch your attention. It displays results in visual format and lets you slide through results using a slide bar in the bottom. The visual effects are appealing, which gives you a impression like as if we are flipping through yellow pages. As you type the categories are auto suggested and placed as icons right below your text box as shown below.

As is evident, the whole site is Flash SWF file. The rich look and feel is driven by Flex and is currently under beta stage. It would take them some time to establish themselves, but their crawlers are already on the sprawl to index the web. You can join their development team by applying to jobs@searchme.com .

Watch the demo videos

Tags: searchme, searchengine, flex, flash