Playing .3gp and .mp4 files on Ubunut

I know, I know, I've been posting lots of how-tos but that's basically for me to find them and share a method that works with others.

The codec works for mplayer (not totem) so you need mplayer, and, if you want, gnome-mplayer so run the following command:

sudo apt-get install gnome-mplayer

It'll pull some dependencies, including mplayer itself.

Then you need to go here and download the tarball for your architecture.

It has a README file, just follow the instructions there, copy the files and your videos should play.

Source

Getting Prism firefox 3 extension working on Ubuntu

I've been trying to get it to work for quite some time now but never really bothered to look for a solution... Just now I decided to google a bit, and I found a solution.

To fix the problem, all you have to do is to open the .desktop file that the plug-in creates on your desktop and change “/usr/bin/firefox-3.0.3/firefox” to /usr/bin/xulrunner .

That's all folks!

Connectiyo, again!

Yes, I have worked on Connectiyo before... This time it's not going to be an all-in-one website, in fact, it's going to be exactly the opposite of that; It'll barely store any data, here's how it'll work (I think I've blogged about this before):
There are so many social websites today, each has its own profile, status, info, etc... There are websites that try to put them all in one place but they end up adding to the mess rather than fix it; they all have "what are you doing" and their own profile.
Connectiyo is different; it won't store any data of its own, it won't even have its own accounts: It'll use facebook connect.
It will allow you to gather all your contacts from everywhere (Yahoo, Google, facebook, twitter, etc) all in one place, merge the same contacts, eventually, you'll everything you need to communicate with your friends in one place, and the cool thing is that, unlike similar services, they don't have to use the site for you to see their updates.
I really think this'll work out 'cause I actually have a problem to solve unlike before.
I started designing the interface, and I started reading about using facebook's API with Flex, however, I still need to finish my final project (final changes), after that I'll be free to work on Connectiyo, I might even start a blog about it (Yey!).

PS: I had to choose between this project and another crazy idea I have. I might blog about that one soon.

God bless you all!

Linux's Desktop Environments are Failing It

Don't get me wrong, the current one (at least GNOME) is fine. Here's the whole thing:

Around a week ago I was thinking about Windows 7 and how much improvements to the UI it has and how innovative it is and I started wondering why Linux isn't as innovative. I was about to blog about it but good thing I didn't.

Just a few days back I came across an article about GNOME 3.0 and it said that they'll have a major UI change, it said they'll make GNOME Shell the main interface, I got excited 'cause I really like revolutionary stuff, so I started googling GNOME Shell, sadly, it looked awful and pretty weird!

That's when I realized that Linux developers ARE innovative, just not in the right path, there are some cool stuff (rather, a lot), but they're really screwing it with their desktop environments.

Don't get me wrong, GNOME now is awesome, just yesterday I was playing a video at the back, chatting on FB in firefox, and chatting with another friend in Pidgin, all at the same time; I reduced the opacity of both Firefox and Pidgin so I could still watch the video. Now that's cool!

The thing is that both KDE and GNOEME are failing, I used to use KDE 3.x and I was very happy with it (I used to even despise GNOME a bit), but after KDE 4 was released and I tried it, I just didn't like it, and after all major distros shifted to KDE 4, I had to shift to GNOME, now I like GNOME, it's fine.. But it looks like GNOME will screw things up with version 3.. At the same Windows 7 comes with a lot of improvements to its interface, I'm seriously considering shifting back to Windows once Windows 7 is released.

Productivity Script

I've seen the productivity script on Lifehacker for both Mac and Windows, so I decided to make a Linux version of it, here it is:

#!/bin/sh
zenity --question --text "Consider if this is really how I need to be spending my time. Continue?" --ok-label=Yes --cancel-label=No

while [ "$?" == "0" ] # while test "$var1" != "end"
do
sleep 12
zenity --question --text "Consider if this is really how I need to be spending my time. Continue?" --ok-label=Yes --cancel-label=No
done

Make sure you make it executable.

I hope you enjoy it.

What are you doing?

That sentence is starting to annoy me, every single website I join asks me what I'm doing, why on earth do they care?

Why can't they all just sync their status with facebook or twitter? Well, very few do but the majority just have their own field with no way of synchronising it with any other site.

As I've said before, the least thing the web needs today is another place to store your data and no site out there that aims at gathering all your information in one place does just that.

Every website that promises to "put all your social networks in one place" or "centralises your on-line identity", they all end up adding at least one thing: the net work part; they all ask you to add friends...

While I was thinking of this problem, I did come up with a solution that doesn't involve making friends to share things with your friends without having to make different friends... as a matter of fact, it even helps organize your contacts from the different places.

I might go for it one day, but I'm still working on Deskiyo and it's still interesting. So this is just a thought.

Stretching Images in Flex

I needed to do this today and I had to search a lot before I found the right article that explained it so I decided to share it.

If you need to put an image in your application and you want it to stretch/shrink to the size of the Image component, just change the image's 'maintainAspectRatio' property to false.

You can see the article where I learned this along with an explanation here.