Ubuntu - installing and using lxsplit

Ever used HJSplit for file-splitting and joining? It supports multiple platforms and all are compatible with each other. While there is no HJSplit yet for Ubuntu, there is "lxsplit" which is the linux equivalent of HJSplit.

Here's how you install lxsplit on your Ubuntu, fairly straightforward.

1. Download and install these two Debian packages (using GDebi Package Manager or deb)

lxsplit deb package (command line)
gtksplit deb package (GUI)

2. Install 2 more libraries, libgtk2.1 and libgtk2.1-common, using Synaptic Package Manager

3. You're ready to use - just type gtklxsplit in the command line and it opens up a easy to use GUI window that allows you to join and split files.

paddu@home:~$ which gtklxsplit
/usr/local/bin/gtklxsplit
paddu@home:~$ gtklxsplit &


Just as HJSplit, lxsplit also uses the .001, .002 , etc. convention for the extenstions after splitting the files. So, files split with HJSplit in Windows can be joined together using lxsplit in Linux, and vice-versa.

You will find these tools very handy especially when downloading/uploading huge files from/to the Internet. The storage websites like Rapidshare, MegaUpload, etc, all have size limitations per file uploaded for Free accounts. Most people use HJSplit (or lxsplit in our world!) to circumvent these restrictions. Enjoy.

Google maps blooper! Russia invades Georgia - Atlanta ! ???

Google Maps, when used in an Associated Press Report about the Georgia conflict (that's the Georgia near Russia of course) got mixed up and used the Georgia in the United States. Yeah, right. And this is the image they had in the report

I tried Google Maps for "russians invade georgia" as my search string and this is what I get still.

I think journalists will remember and laugh over this for a while. Google goofies.

Heights of security - using SMS to unlock public toilets in Finland

That's what it's come down to. In response to an increase in arson and damage to public isolated roadside toilets, the transport authority in Finland has come up with a solution (stupid ? but seems to work) where the user needs to SMS "open" (in Finnish) to a short code to open the door and use the toilet.

The solution is as stupid as breaking into a public toilet and damaging it. Seems to work though, since they installed it in Feb 2008, or at least that's what they claim.

Smart self-service scales on the radar for future grocery stores

German researchers have developed new self-service scales able to automatically recognize fruit or vegetables placed on them. As says the lead scientist, 'The scales automatically recognize which fruit or vegetables are to be weighed and ask the customer to choose between only those icons that are relevant,' such as various kinds of tomatoes. These scales are equipped with a camera and an image evaluation algorithm which compares the image with other ones stored in its database. These scales are now being tested in about 300 supermarkets across Europe

I think this is cutting edge. Useful ? Certainly, yes. Profitable ? Well, I'm not sure how much grocery stores would be willing to pay for this feature. But again, I'm not a big self-service guy when it comes to grocery-shopping, primarily because most often I cannot get it to work upto satisfaction and ease. I have to call somebody. Plus, I think entire grocery shopping should be done online, although I still end up visiting the store at least every week, because we're not there yet. Also, I don't see big lines in the self service stations which means the idea still hasn't taken off big. I do see value for grocery stores to go self-service or even enforce them for their customers - saves labor, time and money.

So, I guess grocery stores still need to do a better job in selling their self-service lines rather than labored billing lines. Maybe offer a discount for a while? or some free coupons ?. On the flip side, these smart scales that are being researched on are a good idea and may make things easier for the consumers to check out faster and easier. Adoption period ? Not very near, IMO...let's see...The question is - when would you be ready to pick a grocery store over another because it has a smart self-service scale and makes checkout easier ?

Faxing thro' OpenOffice.org

Faxing made easy through OpenOffice, without the need for a win-modem. I haven't tried it yet on my Ubuntu, but recently I bought a Brother 4-in-1, and am certainly inspired to try setting that up for fax through my OpenOffice, it's the question of time. Will keep you posted if I succeed.

But here's how to do it anyway - on Linux Journal

More music..free...and on-demand

Free and on-demand music on the web is certainly one of the big contemporary crazes, and it seems to be reaching new heights in 2008.

(1) Last.fm - was relaunched last week, and I registered (free) over the weekend. They seem to be having a pretty huge collection of songs and these are mostly full tracks, unlike Lala. The best thing I like about Last.fm is that its player works just fine in Firefox, unlike most of the online radio stations which work only in IE. Their playlist capabilities is not very intuitive - I still haven't been able to figure out how to play songs from my playlist in order, rather than shuffle - and how to create multiple playlists. It looks like if I remove songs from my one and only (so far) playlist, I need to find those songs again if I like to listen to them sometime next week. It doesn't store more than one playlist. That is pretty primitive I think. But their collection is good, I could find almost everything I wanted this weekend, but certain famous bands like Black Sabbath and Floyd, I was surprised to notice, had more previews than full tracks, and that's what I hated about Lala, but nevertheless Last.fm is much better. I believe I could also embedd the playlist into my Blogger, but I haven't tried that yet.

Unique listeners jumped 85% from the previous week on the day of the launch. And they stuck around: The next day, unique visitors were again up 80% over the previous week.

(2) QTrax: This is another name that hit the press this week. QTrax is the long-delayed, much awaited, first legal P2P music sharing service that is expected to launch this week. But there already is a lot of controversy around the launch. QTrax has announced that all four major music labels, including Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, EMI, and Sony-BMG are on-board and that it can offer for free close to 5 million songs that Apple iTunes SELLS today on their music store. However, WMG has declined involvement with QTrax, so that could result in a potential lawsuit soon after the launch (midnight today!!). I'll be curious to see how many downloads happen tonight.

(3) Seeqpod: This is a web crawler that allows you to search for playable songs. This is a great search engine, but has several limitations.
(a) As you may think, it depends largely on file names that the web page owners have used for the file that they've uploaded. I tried searching for Black Sabbath and I got tons of files,most of which were called Black_Sabbath.mp3. So until I started listening to the songs there was no way that I could know what song it is. Some were the actual Black Sabbath song, some weren't.
(b) It listed like 20 copies of the same song, doesn't attempt at uniqui'ng them out.
(c) Doesn't list duration - so I can't know if it is a preview or the full track. That's where Last.fm was much better, but I understand the two sites have a different purpose.

Seeqpod is a very useful service, but it has a long way to go, it still is in Beta.I wasn't too happy with the search experience.But already, is is not left out of the controversies. WMG label has just filed a lawsuit against Seeqpod. This is very similar to the Viacom-Youtube case.

The bottomline of this post, is that there's a lot of activity, various kinds, going on in offering free music to the world. Some may succeed, some may crash due to the controversies. At the end, music will certainly be a winner, and so will open sharing.

Great pictures and hilarious captions from Macworld '08

From the Borkware miniblog.

Click here to view the picassaweb album.

This is one conference I want to make it to, in the years to come. Phew!

Simple hack to increase #posts/page in Blogger

Q: How to increase the # posts per page in Blogger?

A: Blogger defaults to 20 posts per page. There is a simple hack to increase the #posts. Open your customized Blogger template and wherever the home page or label/tag page is being submitted, add the name=value pair, "max-results=200" as a HTTP GET variable. For example, if Home page is HREF'd to http://lifeisjfk.blogspot.com, add the GET variable to the URL in the anchor tag as, href="http://lifeisjfk.blogspot.com/?max-results=200"

Encoding movies in Ubuntu - How?

Alright, so now I want to convert RM and WMV into AVI. Here's what I did that worked (of course after quite a few experiments)

1. Enable multiverse repository

All the package installations work from repositories. There are a few kinds of repositories depending on the level of security and authority. If you want to follow the GUI approach, open System->Administration->Synaptic Package Manager. Go to Settings->Repositories. I think the 'main' and'universe' repositories are enabled by default, but for mencoder we need the multiverse repository. So, enable it and ensure you're connected to the Internet and click on Reload to sync the packages with the repositories.

2. Install mencoder

This can be done easily from the terminal using apt-get, since we've enabled the multiverse repository. So get to the bash and,

$paddu>sudo apt-get install mencoder

This should be done w/o any problems.

3. Add the Medibuntu repository (Multimedia, Entertainment and Distractions in Ubuntu) to the list of APT repositories.

Again, the Medibuntu repository is not included with the default Ubuntu distribution due to copyright, patent, licenses and other issues. We're adding this repository to get two main packages - w32codecs and libdvdcss2 - which are needed my mencoder to perform to conversion.

The repository can be added by the following steps
(a) Get the list using HTTP GET and add it to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/

$paddu> sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/gutsy.list -O /etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

(b) Then, add the GPG key

$paddu> wget -q http://packages.medibuntu.org/medibuntu-key.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add - && sudo apt-get update

Now, the codecs would have been installed at /usr/lib/win32 or /usr/lib/codecs

4. Run mencoder with parameters

This is the easy part, but may take a few minutes depending on the size of the file and the input and output audio and video types.

I'm just going to give an example of RM to AVI here -

$paddu> mencoder source.rm -ovc lavc -ffourcc DX50 -oac pcm -o target.avi

ovc - output video codec
oac - output audio codec
ffourcc DX50 - This option is used because although the video is produced in MPEG4 AVI, the default header is FMP4 which is not widely recognized. My IOmega player did not recognize the format (said - Codec not supported) when I first tried the conversion without that option. A header with DX50 claims that the video is DivX 5 (hence MPEG4) compatible and should therefore play on any media player that can play MPEG4 video.

That's it and you're good to go!

Steps 1-3 are just required the first time to set things up. Then on onwards just running step-4 would be sufficient. Even that can me minimized by adding the parameters to the mencoder config file at ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf

More tutorials on the mencoder options and various other format conversions can be found at Gentoo Wiki

Encoding movies in Ubuntu - Why?

So much to my heart's content, since it's been quite some time that I've been out of school and don't need that crappy OS on my system (you know what I'm talking about) I upgraded myself from a dual boot of Windows XP and Fedora Core 3, to a single boot Ubuntu. After a lot of self-debating and reading from forums on whether to migrate to Core 8 or Ubuntu, I went with the Gutsy Gibbon 7.x flavor of Ubuntu. The installation was like eating a piece of cheesecake. Almost a single click installation. Even if Microsoft were to reverse its name, they can't beat this. And remember, although I installed it, one can run the OS directly from the CD. Isin't that cool?

I'll write about some of the cool things of Ubuntu later, now I want to talk about how to encode movies in Ubuntu, since I just went through the process. I had bought an Iomega 500 gig Screenplay which is a hard-drive with multimedia playback capability. I bought that so that I can use it as a hard-drive and at the same time connect it via RCA or S-video to my TV and play directly.Reviews on that product to follow later.

Now this player has some limitations, it plays only AVI, MPEG-4 (with Divx 3.x, 4.x, 5.x encoding), and of course, MP3, JPEG and all that. AVIs just played perfect. Now, I wanted to play some .RM and .WMV movies, that my Iomega player wouldn't normally play. That's where MPlayer and MEncoder came to my rescue. MPlayer is the world's best and most-equipped multimedia player, hands down! Just imagine, if I were to switch to Windows, just to substitute the capabilities of MPlayer, I would need at least 10 different players or softwares. All supported here by just one Mplayer with the appropriate codecs. That's the power of open-source. That's the power of Linux. MEncoder is the encoding engine that comes with the MPlayer and separate.

What do you need to do to convert these RM and WMV files into AVI or MPEG, that my player understands? Read on, the how's on the follow up post...

VMware goes public!

I don't believe I missed this. If you did too, catch their IPO action on Economist.com

VMWare dominates the virtualization programs industry and I just read that investors drove their shares high by 76% on the opening day. I know that technology firms are again adored by investors and venture capitalists, but does this mark the restart of the tech IPO booms? Read more on the Economist.

Mossberg on the iPhone

Here's the Mossberg Solution on the iPhone -a thorough and comprehensive testing andd review, Walter Mossberg at his best as always...

WSJ Premium content

or catch it on his blog at:
The Mossberg Column archive

I love the way he's simulated the 7 hour phone call on the iPhone, check it out!

Prometeus - the Media Revolution

Fascinating video on the media revolution. It is a futuristic vision of the media industry all the way upto 2050, with some interseting predictions like Google buying Microsoft and Amazon buying out Yahoo! by 2020-2030, which is little over a decade from now. It also talks about Second Life and points out that virtual life is the way of the future.

Hope you like the video

Lala launches on-demand free streaming music service

LaLa is now offering users the ability to listen to an unlimited amount of on-demand streaming music, for free, marking the first time this has been available legally. Their tag line is “Play albums on demand, buy the ones you love.”

This Lala is clearly aimed at iTunes, users can listen to complete songs as often as they like, while maintaining their playlists online as well. I just tried them out, the player is embedded and pretty neat. Their website also now looks pretty intuitive with Web 2.0 capabilities. Songs can be directly downloaded directly to the iPod too, at a price of $0.99 per song.

So, this helps us in two ways -
(1) I don't need to maintain songs on my computer, which I currently do
(2) Unlike Napster which was doomed to be illegal, Lala is legal and hence prevents the need for P2P sharing

You must try this out, I have a feeling I'm going to be addicted to this.

iPhone fever to begin on June 29th!

Apple has confirmed to launch the much awaited iPhone on the 29th of June this year. It will retail for $499 or $599 depending on the configuration and will be offered exclusively AT&T's Cingular wireless service.

Apple's shares rose 7% last week and has nearly doubled over the last year to around $120 today.


The iPhone is the most awaited gadget expected to launch this year and it has been hyped up ever since Jobs announced its release in the Mac World conference earlier this year. I think this would have already been incorporated into its stock price rise and we may not observe any other hikes in this month or two during the iPhone launch - which would once again show us that the markets are effecient.

However, if the product does not do as well as expected, we might see AAPL's value drop as this is one of their biggest and revolutionizing products after the iPod. It would be interesting to keep track.

Geeks are sexy...and so are detergents...

Hey pals, sorry for not keeping this space active for a while. I've been busy with my finals and then guess what...my graduation! Yes, managed that! Will post a few photos soon.
I was going to resume blogging actively in a week or two, but couldn't resist this one! Don't ask me where I came across this.

There is a detergent powder that sells in Switzerland by the name 'Linux' and is owned by a company called Rosch. There you go, look at this - 10Kg of Linux! hahaha!

So, the first thing that came to my mind is, shouldn't Linux be trademarked to either Linus or IBM or Novell or anyone but a detergent company? So, is it a violation of trademark rights for some washing powder company to use that name?
I did a trademark search on the USPTO website for the term Linux and got 26 matches with two of them matching the whole word Linux.

Look at Trademarks -

(1) 74560867 -
G & S: computer operating system software to facilitate computer use and operation. FIRST USE: 19940802. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 19940802

Last listed owner - Linus Torvalds

(2) 75735641
G & S: laundry detergents and laundry bleaches for home use[; all purpose cleaning preparations for home use; general purpose scouring powders; skin soap for personal use; perfume; essential oils for personal use; preparations for personal hygiene and cosmetic purposes, namely, hair shampoo, skin toners, shower gel, skin lotions; hair tonic and toothpaste]

Owner
(REGISTRANT) Rosch (Swiss) AG CORPORATION SWITZERLAND Axensteinstrasse 4 CH-9000 St. Gallen SWITZERLAND

So, there are two trademarks, totally different, associated with the brand 'Linux'. This, I realized, is because trademarks are treated different than patents in that the mark is registered only with a specific type or range of products, and we obviously see that detergents have at least one dissimilarity with operating systems...fair enough? Well, I would agree, as long as the PTO officers are clear on how thick the line is between the various products and services that are being thrown into this earth everyday.......

Double whammy for Vista

In addition to the world wide stock market crash today, where Dow fell 4% by 416 points, biggest fall since 2001, (I thought I'll post about that, then decided against it as it is all over the place today anyway, visit CNBC.com for expert economist opinions, or the special WSJ premium report), there were two news releases that caught my attention today

(a) What we've been waiting for has arrived, sooner than we expected. Microsoft discloses an antipiracy bug in Windows Vista, where users are prompted / forced to reactivate their Vista, even on PCs where reactivation is not required, after installing certain system drivers and utilities.
Microsoft acknowledges, "This is not a problem with any of the drivers and utilities. This is a Vista problem"

Worth the wait? Well, even worth the 'no-Vista'



(b) Worldwide PC maker, Dell to start selling Linux PCs - Wow! Isn't that awesome? After collecting some 1800 new products and service ideas from IT users and customers through an online suggestion box (in CEO Michael Dell's serious attempts to survive the phase Dell,Inc. is going through), Dell has annouced that it is going to sell a new line of certified ready-to-use Linux-loaded desktop and laptop computers. Way to go!

Apple's win over Cisco's iPhone

BBC Uncut

Last month Steve Jobs announced the forthcoming release of Apple's entry into the cellular phone market via the iPhone, but Cisco had registered the brand name in 2000 for its Linksys subsidiary.

So, Cisco had sued Apple on a trademark violation, but now the two firms have mutually agreed to use the term iPhone on their products worldwide. So, we are going to have two iPhones!! We still do not have the details on how they worked the deal out yet, but under the deal they will also work together on security, consumer and business communication.

This is a win for Apple, isin't it? It also stresses the value they associate with their brand name, and that they are not willing to settle for anything other than 'iPhone'. I still think Apple may go a step forward and prevent Cisco now from using the iPhone brand in the future sometime, as this starts leading to customer confusion. Just imagine, there would be two somewhat similar products called iPhone floating in the market. Consumers who want to buy one may get shown the other at the store and may stick with it. Search results for 'iPhone' would not return only Apple's product. Eventually, this might turn to be a disadvantage for Apple and so I believe since they possess an image for the i* products, they would even try to pay Cisco out of the way soon. Cisco shouldn't worry too much about that.

Downloading YouTube videos

They maintain everything on the server, that is their strength. But if you ever need to download YouTube videos to your desktop, you can try this simple tool.

http://www.downloadyoutubevideos.com/

You would need Flash Player (You can get it free here) since you would have to save the file as .flv

Note: This blog does not guarantee that it is legal or illegal.

Google = Internet

Google wants to go beyond just becoming a verb. They want to become our Internet. They've been acquiring huge volumes of fibre assets, not just for search you would imagine. They are building a LOT of data centers with close proximity to power, like they recently bought 520 acres in Goose Creek industrial park which is probably 100 times as much land as any conceivable data center would require. Why all this? The reason is simple and logical. As we all begin embracing Internet video (50% Internet bandwidth is over Bit-Torrent), it becomes a huge backbone burden on the ISPs and cable companies whose current network infrastructure cannot support anywhere close. Google is the first to see this, and has just started its building program. There will be a day when all the ISPs will HAVE to team up with Google to use their local data centers, as an alternative to bankruptcy.

"We won't know if we're using Google or if we're using Internet and for all practical purposes it won't matter. Google will become our phone company, our cable company, our stereo system and our digital video recorder", says Mr. Cringley