Play FLAC files on symbian 5th edition mobile phones

Referencing my old post about FLAC, and how i was fascinated by the great sound quality it offers. Also mentioning that i had the ability to play them in my old Nokia N70 using oggplay. Unfortunately, i have changed my mobile and oggplay is not supported !, so i have either ways to go, convert my existing FLAC files to mp3, or find another alternative to oggplay.

As for the first option

you can try this on Ubuntu,

flac -cd "infile.flac" | lame -h - "outfile.mp3"

But ofcourse, you must have both packages flac and lame installed, if not try this

sudo apt-get install flac
sudo apt-get install lame

as for the first command flac -cd

"d" to decode the FLAC file
"c" to write the output to stdout

and the second command lame -h ,

"h" defines the sound quality for the output file, and can be replaced by -q {0-9} where 0 is the best quality. and Afaik is not related to the bitrate !

"-" which refers to the other dash, talls lame to take the input from the stdin. This clarifies the need for the "|" piping.


And regarding the second option

Actually i tried to google for it a while ago but in vain, but while i was writing this post, i thought i might give it another try, and i found this post !! which mentions this open source project FolderPlay which enables you to browse your files and play them (*.FLAC included).

This not only eliminated the need to convert back to mp3 and sacrifice the sound quality, but also eliminated the need to generate a playlist for each album, as i had to do with Nokia Music Player and Symbian Oggplay.

Viva Open Source :)

Programmer Personality Test !!

I stumbled upon this test for programmer personality through Ramy Mahrous and here you can find the test itself and this was the result for me :)

Your programmer personality type is:

PHTB

You're a Planner.
You may be slow, but you'll usually find the best solution. If something's worth doing, it's worth doing right.


You like coding at a High level.
The world is made up of objects and components, you should create your programs in the same way.


You work best in a Team.
A good group is better than the sum of it's parts. The only thing better than a genius programmer is a cohesive group of genius programmers.


You are a liBeral programmer.
Programming is a complex task and you should use white space and comments as freely as possible to help simplify the task. We're not writing on paper anymore so we can take up as much room as we need.

FLAC ROCKS !!

I found out about FLAC a few days ago by pure chance.

What is FLAC?

FLAC is an acronym for "Free Lossless Audio Codec" which is a format for Audio files.

Why it rocks??

FLAC differs from other audio codec's in that it is lossless, so sound quality is great and nothing is lost. It is the same as if you are listening to the original audio source. Note that mp3 is lossy, some data is lost in the compression operation. I used to listen to mp3's in my car's cassette using my Nokia N70, FLAC files are a huge difference in sound quality.

By the way, Nokia Music Player does not play FLAC files, but oggplay does. It is a good music player that is faster to load, has more options, very customizable and is open source.

Drawbacks:

Huge file size, a single album which might take 70-100MB takes about 300-500MB, but sound quality deserves such increase.

Check those links to know more about it:
http://flac.sourceforge.net/
http://flac.sourceforge.net/documentation.html

In short, FLAC is when you realize that mp3 is a serious degradation in sound quality :)

How Many Germs Live On My Keyboard?

1,303,260How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard?

Meet California Singles

la2 kalam yetamen el 7a2ee2a :D

Got tagged: Five things you don't know about me

I have been tagged by Ramy to write five things you don't know about me. I didn't think i would have much to tell, but thanks to Ramy i have revisited some old stuff that i have almost forgotten. Thanks Ramy.

1. My current faculy (Faculty of computers and information, Helwan University) was the fifth in el tanseeq listing :) .
   
   
2. I love getting things in parts and assembling them again. Sometimes, i get my broken toys fixed. When i was very young i loved the Kinder Surprise because it has small toys in parts which i have to assemble.
   
   
3. When i was young, i didn't start to speak till i was 4 years old.
   
   
4. I have got my MCP certificate since 2001, when i was 14 years old. It was in networking with Windows 2000. I wanted to get to the MCSE, but my parents refused till i get the General Secondary Certificate. When i got involved with computer science and programming, i didn't feel the desire to complete this path, so i didn't.
   
   
5. When i was at school, i had an english teacher, who was interested in programming. His name was Hosam Negm. He has created a program that shows a butterfly that wanders around the screen. Although he didn't write it himself as he saw the code in VB6 bible, but he was interested that he had the burden to write the code. I remember that after i knew about that i made a simple dummy program in school with a dummy button that shows and hides a circle on an empty form. This is considered my "Hello, World" in programming.

Ofcourse, i wasn't tagged alone. Ahmed Essawy, Mohamed Nabil and Mohamed Gamal were tagged also. Ahmed has already written his five things and has tagged everyone i had in mind, So i am not sure if am going to tag anyone. May be it just has to end somewhere.

Well, i figured that i have someone to tag. I am going to tag Shady Mostafa.

And i found that i would like to tag Magdy also .

Update 30/10/2007 :
Joe wanted to be tagged :D . so, he is !!

MDC07: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly..... & The Best

Now, Middleeast Developers Conference(MDC07) is over & here is how i think about it.

The Good:
While doing mistakes is not a good thing, i must say that MDC07 is a lot better than MDC05 & 06.

• More sessions about architecture like SaaS architecture, Software Factory sessions etc.....
• More session about patterns and practices like MSF & Agile Development.
  
• Food wasn't Open-Buffet :D .
• Speakers were good.
  

The Bad:

• Registeration wasn't good at all. I had to wait for more than two hours to complete registeration, but i think it got alot better later(other than Day0)
  

The Ugly:

• Some folks in the JIT-ing session kept asking wierd questions which are related to PGO & Ngen. Some of them were completely off-topic.

The Best:

• More sessions about Internals of Microsoft products like Phoenix and JIT-ing.

At the closing session, they announced that conference will be Egypt Developers Conference (EDC).

See you later.

Solaris Express for free??!!!

I was checking the JDC (Java Developers Conference) web site, when i found a link to Roman Strobl's blog (as he is one the speakers in the conference). In this post, i found a screenshot of Solaris Express on his laptop.

This is how the screen shot looks:



Solaris Express codenamed Nevada is a program that lets you preview work in progress code base fully functional and tested. This way you can try and test new features only weeks after they have been developed. Solaris Express can be download for free from here. I have found also that part of the code base for Solaris has been opened for review by open source community through OpenSolaris project.

Enjoy it :).