Pranav's Blog

1. Audacity®: Audacity® is free, open source software for recording and editing sounds. You can use Audacity to:

   • Record live audio.
   • Convert tapes and records into digital recordings or CDs.
   • Edit Ogg Vorbis, MP3, WAV or AIFF sound files.
   • Cut, copy, splice or mix sounds together.
   • Change the speed or pitch of a recording.
   • And more! See the complete list of features.
2. BonkEnc: BonkEnc is a free audio converter and CD ripper which integrates various popular formats and encoders. It currently supports MP3, MP4/M4A, Ogg Vorbis, FLAC, AAC and Bonk files. BonkEnc makes it easy to convert your audio CDs to MP3 or Ogg Vorbis files which you can use in your hardware player or with your favorite audio software. The program supports the CDDB/freedb online CD database and CDText and automatically writes song information to ID3v2 or Vorbis comment tags.
3. DSpeech: DSpeech is a TTS (Text To Speech) program with functionality of ASR (Automatic Speech Recognition) integrated. It is able to to read aloud the written text and choose the sentences to be pronounced based upon the vocal answers of the user. It is specifically designed to quickly and directly provide the functions and improved practical usefulness that are requested by this kind of program.
4. Floola: Floola is an application to efficiently manage your iPod or your Motorola mobile phone (any model supporting iTunes). It's a standalone application that can be run directly from your iPod. Floola supports all common used iPod features including photos, artwork, podcasts and smart playlists! It automatically converts any incompatible audio or video file so that you can copy almost any file to it.It allows adding youtube and myspace videos with a single click. Now it even makes it possible to keep your Google calendars synched!
5. foobar2000: foobar2000 is an advanced freeware audio player for the Windows platform. Some of the basic features include full unicode support, ReplayGain support and native support for several popular audio formats (MP3, MP4, AAC, CD Audio, WMA, Vorbis, FLAC, WavPack, WAV, AIFF, Musepack, Speex, AU, SND). Also the user interface is highly customizable and it's functionality can be extended through 3rd party plugins.
6. LMMS: LMMS is a free cross-platform alternative to commercial programs like FL Studio®, which allow you to produce music with your computer. This includes the creation of melodies and beats, the synthesis and mixing of sounds, and arranging of samples. You can have fun with your MIDI-keyboard and much more; all in a user-friendly and modern interface.
7. Mp3tag: Mp3tag allows to edit metadata of common audio formats where it supports ID3v1, ID3v2.3, ID3v2.4, iTunes MP4, WMA, Vorbis Comments and APE Tags. It can rename files based on the tag information, replace characters or words in tags and filenames, import/export tag information, create playlists and more. Mp3tag supports online database lookups from, e.g., Amazon, discogs, or freedb, allowing you to automatically gather proper tags and cover art for your music library.
8. Tunatic: Ever thought 'what is this song?' Let Tunatic hear it and you will get the artist's name and the song's title within seconds. Tunatic is the very first song search engine based on sound for your computer. All you need is a microphone and Internet access.

Continue reading "100 great Freeware/Open Source Tools and Applications for Windows" »

Microsoft has introduced a new feature in Internet Explorer 8 called "Accelerators". These accelerators help you quickly perform your everyday browsing tasks without navigating to other websites to get things done. Simply highlight text from any webpage, and then click on the blue Accelerator icon that appears above your selection to perform the respective task.

How to create an "Accelerator"?

Well it's a pretty simple two step process: 1. Create XML file 2. Create accelerator installation link Let us create a simple accelerator which queries IMDB for movie titles and displays the result.

IMDB Accelerator

On closer observation, we find that URL for search page of IMDB is of form http://www.imdb.com/find?q=SearchString where "SearchString" is the string you are querying for. With this information, lets start making the accelerator.

Step 1: Create XML File

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<openServiceDescription xmlns="http://www.microsoft.com/schemas/openservicedescription/1.0">
<homepageUrl>http://www.imdb.com </homepageUrl>
<display>
 <name>Search IMDB </name>
 <icon>http://www.imdb.com/favicon.ico </icon>
</display>
<activity category="Search">
<activityAction context="selection">
 <execute action="http://www.imdb.com/find">
  <parameter name="q" value="{selection}" type="text" />
 </execute>
</activityAction>
</activity>
</openServiceDescription>

Step 2: Create accelerator installation link

To let users use our accelerator, we will create a install button. Users can install the accelerator using this link. Here the code for link:

Install Accelerator

Install Accelerator

That's it, you are done. Install the accelerator and start searching.

You will find your accelerator in "All Accelerators" context menu item.

$write username tty

$who
root     :0           May  7 03:51
root     pts/1        May  7 03:51 (:0.0)
root     pts/2        May  7 03:51 (:0.0)
user5    pts/10       May  7 04:17 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-74)
user8    pts/13       May  7 04:12 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-180)
user9    pts/15       May  7 04:12 (10.176.146.212)
user7    pts/14       May  7 04:23 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-118)
user12   pts/18       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-119)
user11   pts/23       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-31)
user1    pts/22       May  7 04:27 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-125)
user15   pts/24       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-65)
user6    pts/12       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-120)
user2    pts/28       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-60)
user7    pts/30       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-118)
user4    pts/31       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-72)
user10   pts/32       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-68)
user14   pts/33       May  7 04:14 (dhcp-dwf1-4-10-176-162-27)

$write user8 pts/13

Everyone knows that CPU utiization in windows can be found out from Windows Task Manager. But what about Linux? Well Linux has also got set of utilities to monitor CPU utilization. With these commands you can find out total CPU utilization, individual CPU utilization (for SMP machines), your system's average CPU utilization since the last reboot, determine which process is eating up your CPU(s) etc.

Good old "top" command

The top command provides dynamic view of CPU utilization. It displays system information as well as list of tasks currently managed by kernel. Is also displays uptime, average load, physcal and swap memory utilization. Syntax of top command is as follows:

$ top

To quit "top", you have to press Q key of your keyboard.

Using "mpstat" command

To use this command, you have to install a package called sysstat. For Ubuntu or Debian systems, you can install this package using apt-get.

$ apt-get install sysstat

Continue reading "How to find out CPU utilization in Linux?" »

I often use Notepad to open plain text files. If the extension of file is of unknown type then I have to browse a list of applications to open that file which is quite painful. Here is a small registry tweak which adds "Open with Notepad" to right click context menu for all file types.

Manual Registry Tweak

Go to start menu and in search or run box type regedit and press enter to open registry editor. Now browse to following registry key:

HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\*\shell

Right-click on "shell" and choose to create a new key "Open with Notepad". Create a new key below that one called "command". Double-click on the (Default) value in the right-hand pane and enter in the following:

notepad.exe %1

The change will take place instantaneously and you could see Open with Notepad option in right click context menu.

Disclaimer: Modifying the registry can cause serious problems that may require you to reinstall your operating system. I cannot guarantee that problems resulting from modifications to the registry can be solved. Use the information provided at your own risk.

ScribeFire Blog Editor is an excellent add-on of Firefox for drafting blog posts right inside your browser. ScribeFire Blog Editor enables users to easily drag and drop formatted text from the web into their blog(s), post entries, take notes, and optimize their ad inventory directly through the Firefox browser. In this post, I will tell you how to configure it for Movable Type.

1. Install ScribeFire from Firefox Add-ons website. Click here to go there.
2. After installation, start it by clicking it's icon in lower-right corner of your browser.
3. Click on Add button to add your blog.
4. Enter your blog's url. Click Next
5. Change the blog type from MetaWeblog API to Movable Type and API URL to http://blogs.oracle.com/mte1521/mt-xmlrpc.cgi. Select the Advanced Settings check box. Enter the API Key. Click Next.
6. In Login Details, put your username without oracle.com (e.g. pranav.prakash in my case). In password field, again put the API key. Click Next.
7. You can see your blogs in this screen. Click Next to go to next screen.
8. Click Finish to add blogs.

Note- Your API key is same as Web Services Password which you can find on your User Profile page.

Being a Java developer, I always compile and test my code on different Java versions. But switching between them is a huge problem. So finally I found an easy method to do this. You have to create following batch files and place them in directory you open your command line in or in SYSTEM PATH. You can use you favorite text editor to create these files.

jdk14.bat

@echo off
echo Setting JAVA_HOME
set JAVA_HOME=C:\j2sdk1.4.2_12
echo setting PATH
set PATH=C:\j2sdk1.4.2_12\bin;%PATH%
echo Display java version
java -version

jdk15.bat

@echo off
echo Setting JAVA_HOME
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_12
echo setting PATH
set PATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.5.0_12\bin;%PATH%
echo Display java version
java -version

jdk16.bat

@echo off
echo Setting JAVA_HOME
set JAVA_HOME=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11
echo setting PATH
set PATH=C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.6.0_11\bin;%PATH%
echo Display java version
java -version

Make sure you assign the appropriate JAVA_HOME value in batch files, according to your Java installation. Whenever you want to switch between Java versions, just run the respective batch file and you are done.

Note- JAVA_HOME and the path to java must always refer to the exact same version of the JDK. If you mix them up, unpredictable things will happen!

SyntaxHighlighter is an excellent tool for displaying code snippets with colored syntax highlighting, line highlighting and line numbers. Below is an example showing a Java code rendered using SyntaxHighlighter.

public class HelloWorld {
  public static void main (String[] args)
  {
    System.out.println("Hello World!");
  }
}

It's a purely client-side tool, as all the processing is done strictly within the browser through JavaScript. There is no server side processing. To include code in your blog post, just copy the code from your favorite IDE/Editor and paste it in your post. As of v1.5.1, SyntaxHighlighter supports C, C++, C#, CSS, Delphi, HTML, Java, JavaScript, PHP, Pascal, Python, Ruby, SQL, VB, VB.NET, XML, XSLT.

Setting Up SyntaxHighlighter with Movable Type

Download latest version of SyntaxHighlighter and extract the archive.You can see that there is a JavaScript file for each language e.g. shBrushJava.js for Java. These scripts use regular expressions to parse the text and classify them as keywords, comments etc.

Continue reading "Blog your code using SyntaxHighlighter" »

Hello World! Welcome to my new blog. I am Pranav Prakash, currently working as Associate Applications Engineer at Oracle India Pvt. Ltd. in Peoplesoft Enterprise Tools division. I have completed my B. Tech. in Electrical Engineering from IIT Kharagpur in May 2008. Since then I'm working for Oracle. Up till now, my stay at Oracle has been very much knowledge enriching. I would be posting tips, tricks and work-arounds which I have learned from my experiences in this blog.