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Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Published Mar 27, 2008 | In Apple/Mac/iDevices

Recently I got some MP3 audio books from a magazine CD. I wanted to upload them to my iPod so that I can listen to them during my compute to office. But then I found that these were in MP3 format and not in iPod audio book format.

The main feature of the iPod audio book format is that the iPod can remember the last listening position and also we can adjust the reading speed in case, which is not possible if it is in MP3 format.

I started looking for a program to convert MP3 files to iPod audio book format and found an excellent program MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter. It is free, opensource and the best part is that it works.

Download the program and install it. Once installed start the program from start menu and then click the Add button.

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Select the MP3 files and then click the Open button. (You can also press shift to select multiple files)

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

Arrange the files in the correct order and then click the Start Conversion button. You can also edit the tags if you want.

Convert MP3 audio books to iPod audio books file format

The program will ask to specify the file name and once given it will start the conversion.
Once the program finishes you can add the file to iTunes and then sync it with iPod. Happy Listening 🙂

Links:

You can download MP3 to iPod Audio Book Converter from its download page.
You can also get some free Audio book from AudioBooksForFree.com

Posted in Apple/Mac/iDevices | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

No Browse Happy Plugin

Published Mar 15, 2008 | In Plugin Releases

There was a thread in the WordPress hackers mailing (wp-hackers) list today discussing about the browse happy logo which is displayed in the footer of WordPress admin screens, when a user views the admin pages using Internet Explorer.

There were lot of arguments for and against the removal of this logo, at least for IE7. I found that there was even a ticket created in trac (WordPress public bug reporting database) for removing it, which was closed by Matt as wontfix. I personally felt it was a very minor thing to argue about and I neither agree nor disagree in removing it.

Someone in the thread suggested that we can create a Plugin which could output some CSS to hide the logo, which let me to create a very small (probably useless) Plugin called No Browse Happy Plugin. This is similar to the No Howdy Plugin by Ozh, very useless in my point of view but might matter a lot for someone.

If you look at the source code you could find that it is nothing fancy but just an echo statement which prints the following CSS code in the header.

#bh {
display: none;
}

In short, I just wasted two minutes to stop someone from wasting hours in arguing about something which is useless (at least in my point of view). 🙂

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Recommend some books to buy

Published Mar 13, 2008 | In Books

Even though I was not an avid reader in my childhood, I started cultivating the habit of reading books after college and one of my resolutions for 2008 is to read at least a book every month. I have successfully kept up the resolution for the past two and a half months. 🙂

I recently received a gift certificate for Rs 2000 from my office, which I can use to buy either books or cds. I am planning to spend Rs 2000 equally among technical, fiction and non-fiction books and I need your recommendation. For technical, I am planning to buy some books related to Ruby but I don’t have much idea for fiction and non-fiction books. So suggest me some books which I can buy.

Posted in Books | Tagged | 4 Comments

Running multiple instances of Google Talk

Published Mar 12, 2008 | In Google/Yahoo

Ever since I moved my mails from Gmail to Google Apps, I was using my Google Apps email address in Google Talk. But still some of my old friends are added in my Gmail address. So I was searching for a way to run multiple instance of Google Talk in the same machine and found this tip. I thought of noting it here so that I know where to search if I reinstall Google Talk in my system.

To run multiple instances, all you need to do is to pass the parameter nomutex to the Google Talk Exe file.

c:\program files\google\google talk\googletalk.exe" /nomutex

If you want, you can create a new shortcut in your desktop with this parameter.

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Rotating Apache log files using Cronolog

Published Mar 9, 2008 | In Unix/Server Stuff

I must confess that I am a stats freak. If you are a long time reader of my blog, then you would have known that by now yourself. 😉 This explains the reason why I want to preserve my Apache log files in spite of using a variety of stat services like Google Analytics, WordPress stats, statscounter, performancing metrics (before it was closed).

The default Apache configuration preserves the log files only for the last 10 days, but I wanted to permanently archive this files. After some searches in Google I came across an excellent program called Cronolog. Cronolog is a simple filter program which writes each log entry to a separate log file named after the filename format specified. You can use a variety of parameters like current date, time etc to define the filename template.

First we have to install cronolog, either by using aptitude or by downloading it from its download page. Then you have to change the log file name path in the virtual host file. (In Ubuntu Gusty, the virtual host files are situated in the path /etc/apache2/sites-enabled). I am using the following file format for this blog
# Custom log file locations
LogLevel warn
ErrorLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-error.log"
CustomLog "|/usr/sbin/cronolog /path/to/logs/%Y/%m/%Y-%m-%d-sudarmuthu.com-access.log" combined

which will store my log files in separate folders for each year and for each month, like the below hierarchy
/2007/12/2007-11-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2007/12/2007-11-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......
/2008/01/2008-01-01-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
/2008/01/2008-01-02-sudarmuthu.com-access.log
......

You can use a variety of modifiers for the filename and I have documented some of them in the below table. You can get more information from its documentation.

Specifier Description
Time fields
%H hour (00..23)
%I hour (01..12)
%p the locale’s AM or PM indicator
%M minute (00..59)
%S second (00..61, which allows for leap seconds)
%X the locale’s time representation (e.g.: “15:12:47”)
%Z time zone (e.g. GMT), or nothing if the time zone cannot be determined
Date fields
%a the locale’s abbreviated weekday name (e.g.: Sun..Sat)
%A the locale’s full weekday name (e.g.: Sunday .. Saturday)
%b the locale’s abbreviated month name (e.g.: Jan .. Dec)
%B the locale’s full month name, (e.g.: January .. December)
%c the locale’s date and time (e.g.: "Sun Dec 15 14:12:47 GMT 1996")
%d day of month (01 .. 31)
%j day of year (001 .. 366)
%m month (01 .. 12)
%U week of the year with Sunday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Sunday of the year)
%W week of the year with Monday as first day of week (00..53, where week 1 is the week containing the first Monday of the year)
%w day of week (0 .. 6, where 0 corresponds to Sunday)
%x locale’s date representation (e.g. today in Britain: “15/12/96”)
%y year without the century (00 .. 99)
%Y year with the century (1970 .. 2038)

Posted in Unix/Server Stuff | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Useful jQuery links

Published Mar 6, 2008 | In JavaScript/jQuery

I found a lot of useful links related to jQuery while researching for my presentation on jQuery. I thought of sharing them here so that it will be useful for others who are looking to get their feet wet with jQuery.

I am planning to constantly updated this post, so if you have any other links which might be useful do leave a comment and I will add them.

Homepage

References

Tutorial/Articles

jQuery related slides

Some useful Plugins

jQuery Related Books

Posted in JavaScript/jQuery | Tagged , , | 4 Comments

Back from WebCamp

Published Feb 23, 2008 | In Events/Conferences, Web Programming

I attended WebCamp today as planned. It was good and there were talks about web frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Groovy on Grails, Django, Flex etc. Unfortunately I was not able to give my talk about jQuery as planned due to some issues with the timings. I was pretty disappointed at first; since it took me considerable amount of time to prepare for the presentation and added to that I drove for more than two hours to attend the event. Anyway that’s life isn’t? 😉 You will never know what life has for you the next second. If everything goes as planned, then life would be as dull as a recorded circket match. It is uncertainty which gives life to life (wow! I can make a quote too 😉 ).

Anyways to be positive I learned a lot of new things about jQuery when I did my research to prepare for the presentation, even though I have been using it for the past couple of months. Hope you guys also find my slides about jQuery useful.

Continue reading »

Posted in Events/Conferences, Web Programming | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Google Gadget to keep track of your FeedBurner stats

Published Feb 17, 2008 | In API's/Mashup

FeedBurner Stats Google GadgetI had some free time this weekend and I used it to create my second Google Gadget called called FeedBurner stats. (By the way my first gadget was Bloglines Notifier, which notifies the count of unread items in your Bloglines account). It uses FeedBurner Awareness API to fetch the subscriber count of your FeedBurner feed and displays it using Google Charts API.

The full source code of this gadget is available here and if you are interested you can add it to your Google personalised page by clicking this button. Add to Google

After you add the gadget, you just need to enter your FeedBurner feed URL. The gadget will fetch the subscriber count for the past one week and will display it in a nice bar graph using Google Charts API.

API’s used

The following are the API’s used for creating this gadget

Posted in API's/Mashup | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

DocSyncer adds support for Google Apps account

Published Feb 13, 2008 | In Google/Yahoo

Recently, when I showed you how to automatically backup documents to Google Docs using DocSyncer, I mentioned that it is not possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account. But today DocSyncer have released an update and now it is possible to backup the documents to your Google Apps account.

You have to go to the Account settings tab and then click disconnect and then connect again. You will be taken to a page where you can select either Google Apps account or standard Gmail account.

DocSyncer

This is very useful to me, since I have started to use my Google Apps account instead of the standard Gmail account. Good job DocSyncer!

Posted in Google/Yahoo | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Reverse the order of comments without editing theme

Published Feb 9, 2008 | In Plugin Releases

I was looking for a way to reverse the order in which comments are displayed in a WordPress blog for one of my projects. After a bit of Googling I found a Plugin called Reverse Order Comments. A quick look into the source code revealed that it was rewriting the comment template and you need to edit the theme to make it work. My instinct told me that it would be easy to accomplish it using the array_reverse comment in PHP.

I followed my instinct and tried to see whether it is possible to do it in a simple way. In the end I accomplished it with less than 10 lines of code and more importantly without the need to edit the theme files. Another instance of the KISS principle in action 😉

I packed it as a Plugin so that you can just drop it into your plugins directory, activate it and then forget about it. It is called Simple Reverse Comments and you can download it from my Plugins page.

Posted in Plugin Releases | Tagged , , | 7 Comments