Tech and some...

I had just brought a new headphone for making Skype calls. I was trying testing it out, and I recorded my voice to test it. What came in was a movie song that I was chanting over. I played it back to find too much of background noise. I wanted to remove it. Now for any utility for my OS, I do not rely on a search engine,.. I rely on my "Synaptic Package Manager" on my Linux box - Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala). Quick was it, to get "Audacity" to help me record, and edit audio.

Notice, that I split the audio into multiple tracks easily and mix it at proper timings.

A tribute to my ex-colleagues

Moving with the waves of time, I changed my job. So did some of my other colleagues at Miediant Solutions - my previous employer. Now after we all are into our new jobs, happy and looking forward for a pleasant and prosperous future with our new jobs, we all miss our team, the togetherness we shared. We enjoyed the fun-filled, yet productive work environment, that had so much to learn, and had contributed so much to our professional career. While, many love to hate their bosses, we hope to have him again in our team. We all keep our fingers crossed, and hope for the best to happen, and meet each other and work together again some day.

Thank you all for making the work a pleasurable experience, and the office - a home away from home,
a place we wish to stay together. We shared so much professionally, and 
we worked like soldiers in the war.

Thank for all the sprints, the daily scrums and the virtually fighting retrospectives,

the lunch, the outings - thanks for all that time.

Thank you all for the professional and personal growth gained together.

Wish you all a prosperous and happy future!

QCon London 2010 slides

The QCon London 2010 has just concluded. There was extremely good response from the delegates. Many attendees have blogged on the same.

The conference had 19 tracks spread over 3 days:

Wednesday
1. Architectures You've Always Wondered About
2. Software Craftsmanship
3. Non-Relational DBs & Web Oriented Data
4. Dev and Ops: A single team
5. Functional programming
6. Solution Track: Wednesday
Thursday
7. 2015 Software Development
8. Irresponsible Architectures and Unusual Architects
9. Pragmatic Cloud Computing
10. Agile Evolution
11. AlphaGeeks on .NET
12. IT - more than tools and technology
13. Solutions Track: Performance and Scalability
Friday
14. The Concurrency Challenge
15. Cool Stuff with Java
16. How do you test that?
17. SOA 2010
18. Browser as a Platform
19. Solution Track: Friday

Some great speakers such as Robert C. Martin, Martin Fowler, Rod Johnson, Joe Armstrong, Dan North teamed up for this.

Some of the slides for these are available online on the official QCon London website. Although, the slides by themselves do not ever match for going there yourself, these and the blogs are good for those who could not attend it.

Saving a streaming video / presentation

Ever wondered to to save those streaming videos from Youtube, Metacafe, InfoQ, and so many others? I always wanted to save those streams, so that I could watch them again and again even without an Internet connection.

I am a faithful Firefox user, and one of its wonderful plugin - DownloadHelper has helped me for a long time to capture and save Youtube videos as flash video files on my local hard disk. That was quite helpful. But I always wanted to save those InfoQ videos as well, but unfortunately, DownloadHelper did not provide support for InfoQ (among others).

It was only recently, that I used the conversion feature of DownloadHelper, in which I was converting one of those Youtube videos to be converted to wmv format. I noticed, that the conversion started only after the whole of the video stream was played on my browser. And I could readily guess, that the conversion must be using one of the libraries on my machine. So I looked at the process to find that it was using ffmpeg command to do this job. I also noticed, that actually every video was buffered to the /tmp on my Ubuntu. The filename I could see was something like FlashVOZFnS.

This was a great news, because this was applicable even to InfoQ videos. Naturally, if a movie plays on your machine, it must be stored somewhere before being played on your browser. So now if you want to save your next streaming video, just identify where in your system does the flash player saves its movie temporarily before being played on your browser, and save that file to your videos folder, and possibly give it a .flv extension too.

Note: 

1. As soon as you close the tab containing the video, the temporary file is discarded.
2. Not all videos may be fully buffered before playing. Very long videos and webcasts may not be fully buffered.
   

Converting flash movies to other format (Linux)

And now if you also want to convert it into other formats, its very easy in Linux with the following commands:
FLV to WMV: 
ffmpeg -i /home/thomas/Desktop/infoq.flv -y -v 0 -acodec wmav1 -b 1000kbps -f asf -vcodec wmv1 /home/thomas/Desktop/infoq.wmv

FLV to MPG:
ffmpeg -i /home/thomas/dwhelper/Desktop/infoq.flv -y -v 0 -f asf -vcodec mpeg4 /home/thomas/Desktop/infoq.mpg

There are so many other options with this command, even up to video capturing your screen, but I am not very expert at those. So I leave it to you to experiment with those options.

---

Update

I could notice that actually DownloadHelper can download InfoQ videos, but just that you should have only this one tab containing any video to download. In other words, if you have multiple tabs with video contents, DownloadHelper seems to get confused, so you may not actually get a download link help. Also, getting the Slides on InfoQ is also easy. If you are a good developer, just see the source code of the page, and you will understand. Right now I see those videos and slides at my ease stored on my hard disk.

Configuring log4j with XML in OSGi

Sometime back, I had to make perf4j work on OSGi. It required log4j as the logging library and purely demanded log4j.xml (it would not take the .properties file since the configuration must attach downstream appenders). I assumed that it should be simple, but unfortunately it was not. In the rest of this post, I describe how I could get around this, and used log4j.xml to configure log4j logging in OSGi.