Ala’a Ibrahim

For some time, I needed to convert a big number of files from mp3 to ogg format, as I didn’t see any loss of quality with the ogg format, also it need less space.

The problem was that I want to keep my id3 tags, rewriting them would be a pain in the a**. I searched the web for free tools to do that, but I couldn’t find any, maybe I didn’t look enough. So I had to implement it myself.

Also, as I’m learning ruby, I thought it would be a good idea to use it for the script.

The tools I needed to do this, were mplayer, id3tool, and oggenc (vorbis-tools). Also in order to utilize my quad-core processor, I built it in a multi-threaded way (not so much, but it works ).

Now, I noticed that oggenc takes a lot of time, more than mplayer, so it was loading my tmp directory, so I made the mplayer thread wait when oggenc has 20 or more in it’s queue to process. Also, for more utilization, I put 3 threads for the oggenc to process.

I think that the script can use some improvements, feel free to post your feedback.

The script is available at git-hub at http://github.com/alaaibrahim/mp3toogg

Enjoy

When you have more than one gentoo machine, a good thing to do to manimize the bandwidth usage, is to run some local mirrors, so that you would get the file only once, for all the machines.
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I’ve written a small CAPTCHA library, in an OO style, and I love to share it with you
http://sourceforge.net/projects/php5captcha/

Software Freedom Day (SFD) is a worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). Our goal in this celebration is to educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using high quality FOSS in education, in government, at home, and in business — in short, everywhere! The non-profit company Software Freedom International provides guidance in organizing SFD, but volunteer teams around the world organize their own SFD events to impact their own communities.

While surfing the Internet last night, I reached some sites talking about a free (as in freedom) clone of MS Windows called ReactOS, ReactOS is an effort to create a Free Software replacement for Microsoft Windows(TM) that is compatible with existing hardware and software!
A good review for the product can be found on The NeoSmart Files here.
Well, it’s still in an alpha version, but they seem to have a lot of good work done.
Now to my point of view, for GNU/Linux which is based on UNIX, the root is not a proprietary to anybody, it’s based on the POSIX standards (which the only UNIX that doesn’t comply them is Sun Solaris, I don’t know if Sun ever heard about it), so any change in UNIX is not forced to be done by the GNU team, when it comes to ReactOS (also WINE) I guess this is going to be a problem, there root is Microsoft, which means any change Microsoft makes, they should do it too. Also would it be really free, GNU/Linux was a crowning achievement in the free software world, because it eliminated the one remaining barrier to having a 100% free software environment on your computer. ReactOS isn’t leaning that way, because even though it’s shooting for a free kernel, O/S, and GUI, you’re still doing it in the service of proprietary applications.
Anyway, I guess I’m going to try it soon using VMWARE, and surly I would post my feedback.
And remember, A computer is like air conditioning: it becomes useless when you open windows.

If you aspire to be an early adopter, here’s your chance. An alpha version of Firefox 2.0 called “Bon Echo” is available on Mozilla’s FTP servers, and you can choose from the Windows version, Mac OS X version, or Linux version.

Due out later this year, Firefox 2.0 promises a handful of improvements and new features over what is already a very solid browser. (By way of disclosure, I use Firefox 1.5 exclusively on my PC.)

Version 2.0 has a handful of new features. One of the more interesting features is the revamped places menu, which is accessible from the bookmarks toolbar. Clicking on that brings up a box that will allow you to search your history, bookmarks, and RSS subscriptions for a keyword. Very useful if you remember reading about something interesting earlier in the day and need to quickly locate the web page again. Aesthetically speaking, there are a few minor tweaks to the UI, such as Xs on inactive tabs for easy closing.

Google’s antiphishing tech is also planned for inclusion in a future version of Firefox. Although it does not appear to be incorporated into this early alpha of 2.0, Google Safe Browsing—which uses a combination of blacklisting and “best guesses” about a site’s intention—may yet make it into the final release of Firefox 2.0.

Technorati Tags: Firefox, Release

Today I was surfing the internet and by chance I went to the PC World site, I stopped at the best products of the year, and as Expected Firefox is on the top of the list, and IE is not mentioned :p.