Info Zone

Last Day For Blogger

2007-07-31T04:08:00.001Z

Thanks to my friend Ramon Thomas of Netducation for advicing and pointing me to the right source for documentation on why I should migrate to wordpress. I was really not in the mood to migrate to wordpress because I was quite comfortable with blogger until Ramon really hinted if I have my blog on my domain, I could bring more traffic to my domain and plus the numerous advantages wordpress has over blogger, in terms of a huge community behind it development because it is open source, large database of plugins, ability for myself to write plugins since I have the know how and the sweet of them all, the ability to migrate my blogger contents( that even pushed me more to head over for blogger ) which was something refraining me from migrating to wordpress, etc.

As you're reading this post now, my new blog is up and running with all my blogger contents and comments. If you keep track of this my blog, I advice you move over to the new one at addhen.org/blog. For this blog, I'm not going to maintain it anymore but will still be up for references.

On this note I say bye to blogger. I really enjoyed my blogging days with you. You really served me well and you still does but its unfortunate I have to say bye bye to you today. Bye blogger.

Vulnerability In Firefox 2.0.0.5

2007-07-24T07:53:00.000Z

Came across this post and would like to caution people who uses Firefox's password management feature. It has been reported that is has a vulnerability which allows malicious website to steal passwords.

According to the post, if you let firefox remember your password, you are at a big risk from the flaw. I always see that feature as a security risk, no wonder I don't use it. I better rely on my current means of remembering passwords than browser based password management.

To me, not only mailicious website can steal passwords but malicious users of your machine too can steal passwords.

There is a discussion on going as to if that feature should be removed or not. To me alone, it should be completely zapped or made as an extention to be downloaded and used only if the user want to take the risk.

Using PHP curl to fetch post from del.icio.us

2007-07-14T14:39:00.000Z

Been playing with del.icio.us's api to pull my del.icio.us ( very hard writing that ) post. php's curl made everything smooth. Below is the code. Feel free to comment on it.


$fetch_url ="https://api.del.icio.us/v1/posts/all?";
$curl = curl_init();
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_URL, $fetch_url );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_USERPWD,"your username:your password");
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 30 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT,5 );
curl_setopt( $curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1 );
$response = curl_exec( $curl );
curl_close( $curl );
header("Content-Type:text/xml");
echo $response;

Translating The Easy Way With Google Translate

2007-07-05T21:10:00.000Z

It amazes me anytime Google brings out a product, they just do a wow and impressive stuff. Today I got notified by a colleague of mine at the office if I know about Google Translate , my hungry for new products from Google, I quickly loaded the page before he could finish with his sentences, I was on the site already.

As traditional of Google, it was in beta. I played around with it to translate from English to French to test my lousy French. The most amazing of it all is that, it translates website too to all the languages available. It translated my site from English to French and it worked like a charm.

Now I feel, most translators will be heading for a new profession as this really works almost perfect. It amazes me how it just works and the most fascinating thing about it is, it is beta but so intelligent that, it just works. What I'm hoping for in the future is for it to have almost all the major local languages. I miss my Twi, Ga, Ewe, Hausa, Swahili etc and I know others too have missed theirs. Google you rock!!

Bill Gates Is No More The Worlds Richest Man

2007-07-04T07:40:00.000Z

For many years now, Bill Gates has top the world richest list but as of yesterday as reported by Techdirt and BBC, Bill Gates is no more the worlds richest man, he has been overthrown by Mogul Carlos Slim a Mexican's Telecom tycoon. Slim's fortune worth about $67.8bn (£33.6bn) and above, as against Bill Gates whose fortune comfortably remains at $59.2 billion. Slim is specifically into wireless telephones and this tells you that, the phone industry is about to dominate the world, as most people are fancy about getting a new feature rich mobile phones all the time.

This also shows that Microsoft's dominant days of the desktop are numbered and gradually counting down.

BTW, that is the photo of Mr Slim.

Upgrading Ubuntu The Shorter Way

2007-07-02T23:57:00.000Z

Today I decided to upgrade my system from Feisty to Gutsy the next release of Ubuntu.

The normal way to do an Ubuntu upgrade from an old release to a new release is to edit the "/etc/apt/sources.list" then replace all old release name to the new release name in the file. Quiet tedious if you ask me, because if you've a long list in your sources.list file, then it means you are going to sit for quiet long to effect the changes.

For me if I'm using vim to edit the file, I do this :%s /search_text/replace_text/g to quickly do the find and replacement. After, I save the file and do the normal "apt-get upgrade" and "apt-get dist-upgrade", then get some coffee, watch it as it upgrades.Seems shorter eh?

Now I suffer no more long and tedious process, all I have to do, is just type these at the shell prompt.


  sudo sed -e 's/\ssearch_text/ replace_text/g' -i /etc/apt/sources.list
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get upgrade

As I'm blogging now, the upgrade is in progress.It is just sweet.I'm hoping nothing goes breaks though. Thanks to this post

I did a "man sed" to find about the "sed" command. sed is a stream editor for filtering and transforming text. It is used to perform basic text transformations on an input stream. Notes taken from the man page. If you need more info about sed, then "man sed". If you know of any quicker way too, please include them as comment.

Googling For Specifics

2007-06-23T19:01:00.000Z

Searching for stuffs with Google is really easy. All you do is just type in the search keyword or phase but there are more to it to fine tune your search to get specifically what you want. This is why I want to show you the power of the colon :. It might be old stuff to some people but hey there are people who don't know yet.

Say you want to search for specific file type, the syntax goes like this


 filetype: extension search term
 eg. filetype:doc how to blog

The above example brings out files with .doc extention relating to a topic on "how to blog"

The next syntax let you search for specific search term on a particular site you know of


 site:URL search term
 eg. site:www.addhen.org social bookmarking

If you want definition of a word


 definition:word
 eg. definition:blog
       or 
 define:word
 define:blog

Being specific on the search term, just add double quotes to the search term


 "search term"
  eg. "How to blog"

Okay that is it. These are what I know. If you know of others please include them as comments.

IM in Yahoo Mail

2007-06-22T02:22:00.000Z

Today I discovered you could chat within Yahoo mail as you could with Gmail. It might be late news to some people but for me, I just discovered it. Yahoo is not my primary mail so I barely login to my inbox. I always use pidgin to chat with my yahoo's buddies.

Upon seeing that dialog box floating in my inbox after login, saying something like "Do you know you can chat within Yahoo mail" ( can't really remember the exact wording ) with a catching big button captioned "Continue" below it. My curious life got me to click on that button and with some few minutes of waiting, I saw a list of my buddies who're online in a pane which is sitting left bottom in my inbox.

I quickly clicked on one of them to initiate a chat with him to see how the chat goes like and how different it is from the Gmail one I'm used to.

Well, it looks good with eye-candy features, works as it's supposed to, packed with features of a normal IM client but I really didn't like the stylish callout that displays the messages and the avatars that displays at the ends of the callout, they just takes space and sometimes doesn't show all the messages typed to the receiver especially when they are long. Some of the characters get hidden to the right. You can't even break to new line as I normally do with "Ctrl+Enter". I must say, the whole thing is bloated and fat. If you really want to know want I mean, just check it out youself, remember to switch your mail to the beta. It works with it.

It's really nice to have Yahoo IM access within your mail but I guess most people will appreciate it much if Yahoo could keep it simple and lightweight. It is great though but just too fat for my likings.

This is going to be a good news for students especially those who can't use Yahoo's IM client in their school labs. Worry no more you can still keep in touch with families and friends right in your Yahoo mail but might not be a good news for students with Yahoo access blocked. Sorry for those of you in that soup.

Unlocking LG CDMA Mobile Phone.

2007-06-18T17:05:00.000Z

Thanks Fiifi for the background work on the image

A colleague of mine at the office had his CDMA mobile phone locked. He was thinking of going to decode it by these phone repairers but Google rescued him from sparing some hard earned ₵ ( cedis ).

All he did is a google search with "unlock LG CDMA phone" as the search term and ka boom, this post here showed up with the solutions.

The solutions are:

Enter the last four digit of your phone number. If it doesn't work try the next

Enter 1234. or

Enter 0000. or

Enter 1111

What worked for my colleague is the "last four digits of his phone number" solution. I must say Google do help find solutions to problems.

Ugly Resolution Sometimes In Ubuntu

2007-06-17T08:33:00.000Z

Due to high cost of bandwidth here in Ghana, most of us don't have Internet at home so we do our Ubuntu installation where we have Internet( to get the latest packages ) and most of us uses Desktops.
In order for us to have Internet connection with our boxes, we have to carry them over to an Internet enabled environment, such as IT training institutes eg. aiti-kace, Internet cafes, etc and we don't carry our monitors along because they are too bloated and heavy to be carried over.

Due to this, we end up doing our installation without our own monitors but a different monitor. Installation at a different location goes very well and everything looks great. Now when we return home and fix our monitors to the boxes, we login and it happens that, our nice looking resolution on the other monitor has changed into a crappy resolution with our monitors. Everything on the screen looks so big and ugly that you can't even see some parts of programs opened. The zoom in level is too much to bear.

Okay story over, now to the solution. One will simply say, to solve such an issue you have to just go to Preferences->Screen Resolution to change to a different resolution but hey it's a big NO. You only see one resolution which means you've to stick to that resolution nothing else. Okay, we figured a way to solve it without tweaking the xorg.conf file, all you have to do is get a live Ubuntu cd, boot it, copy the xorg.conf file generated with the live cd, boot back to your installed Ubuntu, replace the xorg.conf file generated with the Ubuntu live cd with the xorg.conf file in /etc/X11/. After, restart X, login back and you should be smiling :-) again. I must say live cds are rescuers.

Now to the world, know of any other quick solution to this?

Backpack the different context

2007-06-13T18:47:00.000Z

Ever think of having all your todos, calendar,reminders, files,photos, ideas, thoughts, pieces of notes all hosted online and in one place ? Then backpackit.com is a place to own an account.

I sometimes wish to have all my thoughts,todos and other stuff all hosted in one location but no more wishing for me, backpack has all I wanted. I use to put all these stuffs in different location because these services are scattered all over, like my photo sharing is at a different place, my calendar with a different service provider, events hosted elsewhere making management a complex task.If you need a solution like mine, try backpack, is really cool.

Some Happenings at TEDGlobal2007

2007-06-06T13:45:00.000Z

For things happening at the moment its a whole lot I can't even put them all here, bloggers are at work blogging live on the sessions, others blog during coffee breaks, lunch, dinner. Below is a typical coffee break session where bloggers are busy blogging.

Some chit chatting, making new friends, connecting with people. See picture below

A typical lunch time. See picture below

Most bloggers at TEDGlobal at a round table having lunch together

TEDGlobal2007

2007-06-06T05:41:00.000Z

Its such a great feeling to be part of this year's TEDGlobal. Meeting all these great people with great backgrounds ah, its great. Loads of people are here, including software developers, great bloggers, Google teams, AMD guys, the GE guys,Media men, Advertising Agencies and a whole lots I can't list all here.

I personally don't want to blog on the sessions because there are more than enough people blogging on these I feel its the same story that is going to float around. Listed below are some of the live bloggers around blogging live on the sessions.
Ethan Zuckerman
Juliana of Afromusing
Ramon Thompson
Jennifer Breau

As for the talks, they're awesome, the one that really caught all my attention was the talk made by the Mathematician Ron Eglash about Fractals in Africa Architecture. When he was introduced as a Mathematician I thought his talk was going to be about numbers because that is all Maths is about but it turns out to be about fractals being blend with Information Technology. It about looking at Africa architecture closely to model a fractal using a transformation geometry.

Do you know you can model a fractal from a cornrow by using a transformation geometry? it was amazing when I saw it.

Fractal model of a lady's cornrow | Actual cornrow

More pictures of fractals can be seen here

Ghana Cedi Converter

2007-05-25T02:00:00.000Z

Ghana is re-dominating her currency( yet to be started. It begins July of this year ) to make it more portable and valuable. Converting from the old currency to the new one is something which most people are finding it difficult to grasp. It took me a while to grasp the whole conversion. It can be confusing at times.

For a quick conversion, I created this small web application to do the conversion so, it saves time and the confusion airing around.

Currently, it works as I understand the conversion. I got quiet some few friends to help test and they all said, it works correctly. So at this juncture, I present to you the Ghana cedi converter. Feel free to post comment about how it works and better way of improving it. If you think it doesn't work correctly, feel free to comment on the proper way of how the application should do the conversion. I'm ready to learn and accept new ideas.

There is a Joomla module available, feel free to click on the link below.
Joomla extention

To embed it into your webpage, just copy the code below

<iframe src="http://www.addhen.org/webmark/gh_cedis" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="300"></iframe>

I hope it helps people. Thanks

The Dynamics Of Digital Text And Web2.0

2007-05-19T18:56:00.000Z

Check the dynamics of digital text as opposed to manually written text and the amazing web2.0. Cool video enjoy

Running Away From Debian

2007-03-31T16:07:00.000Z

I had one week, four days Debian experience and I must say it was interesting and a pain.

I got bored with Ubuntu because it wasn't fun anymore nothing really breaks for me to fix, so I decided to switch to a different distribution, Gentoo and Debian came into mind but I chose Debian because it was easy for me to get ( a friend had already started downloading it ) than Gentoo that I have to start afresh.

After installation of Debian, the fun started, my wireless card wasn't detected, sound card nope :-( , ugly looking font, boring theme then I had the feel, I had really switched to a different distro.

I began to solve the issues one after the other, I started with the sound issue, few googling got me the way now sound card was detected but still I can't play any audio files but I can hear the system sounds so I felt I'm some how through.
I went on again to hunt for solution for my inability to play audio files, then one of my google hits hinted me about user groups, then it clicked me to check if my account belongs to the sound group. Upon checking I realized my account doesn't belong to that group, so I added my account to the group and boom, I solved the sound issue.

The next issue was the boring theme, I went to gnome-looks to get some few themes, I got one that I was happy with.Tango-green and Tango icons, now my system was appealing to the eyes.

The next issue( ugly looking font ) made me say bye bye to Debian because it was rendering me unproductive . The time I have to work, I will be fixing problems. The font issue really screwed up everything, it made me loose GDM. The more I try to solve it the more the problem increases, so I decided to switch back to my old friend because I was really unproductive and I had loads of work on me.

I must say I had fun but I wasn't patience enough I would have stayed with it. Debian is great, it has huge repository of packages. Voluminous of documentations.
I will visit it again after I have off load most of my heavy work. Now I'm back on boring Ubuntu.

Online Bookmark Manager

2006-10-07T23:32:00.000Z

At last my bookmark manager aka webmark is back online again and this time forever. I lost my previous webspace and it has been offline all this while. Now I managed to get a new hosting space for it again. The url to is webmark. It sad for me because the domain doesn't match with the software's name, the name webmark has been talken by someone already.

webmark is a free service, just sign up and start saving all your favourites websites.

Free Online Programming Books

2006-08-24T20:53:00.000Z

I have been surfing for a while and been looking for free online programming books.
These books are scattered all over and not easy to find. So i'm blogging on this so i can have a central location of all the online programming books i come across on the web. Hope it helps some one some day. Additions to the list are welcome. Just let me know and i will include them. Most of these links where taken from Programming ebooks

Java

How To Think Like A Computer Scientist
http://www.oopweb.com/Java/Documents/ThinkCSJav/VolumeFrames.html

Java Programming Tutorial: Introduction to Computer Science
http://www.oopweb.com/Java/Documents/JavaNotes/VolumeFrames.html

Java AWT Reference

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javawt/book/index.html

Enterprise JavaBeans
http://www.computer-books.us/java_1.php

Exploring Java
http://www.computer-books.us/java_4.php

Java Servlet Programming
http://www.computer-books.us/java_9.php

Java Look and Feel Design Guidelines, Second Edition
http://java.sun.com/products/jlf/ed2/book/index.html

Sams Teach Yourself Java 2 in 24 Hours
http://www.samspublishing.com/library/library.asp?b=STY_Java2_24hours

Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in C#
http://www.computer-books.us/csharp_2.php

C# Language Specification
http://www.computer-books.us/csharp_1.php

C# - The Basics
http://www.computer-books.us/csharp_0004.php

C++

How To Think Like A Computer Scientist with C++
http://www.oopweb.com/CPP/Documents/ThinkCScpp/VolumeFrames.html

Teach Yourself C++ in 21 Days, Second Edition
http://www.cs.montana.edu/%7Embauer/wwwback/c%2B%2B/index.htm

Data Structures and Algorithms with Object-Oriented Design Patterns in C++
http://www.brpreiss.com/books/opus4/html/book.html

An Introduction to C++ and Object Oriented Programming
http://www.kcl.ac.uk/kis/support/cit//fortran/cpp/ch.htm

C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3
http://www.phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1
The Function Pointer Tutorials
http://www.oopweb.com/CPP/Documents/FunctionPointers/VolumeFrames.html

Cross-Platform GUI Programming with wxWidgets
http://www.phptr.com/promotion/1484?redir=1

C Programming
http://www.oopweb.com/CPP/Documents/CProgramming/VolumeFrames.html

Writing Bug-Free C Code
http://www.duckware.com/bugfreec/index.html

Learning GNU C
http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/programming_books/learning_gnu_c/index.html

The C Library Reference Guide
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmonkeys/book/c_guide/index.html

Programming in C: UNIX System Calls and Subroutines using C
http://www.cs.cf.ac.uk/Dave/C/CE.html

Ruby

Programming Ruby - The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide (First Edition)
http://www.ruby-doc.org/docs/ProgrammingRuby/

Why's (Poignant) Guide to Ruby
http://poignantguide.net/ruby/

Pragmatic Programmers Guide
http://www.rubycentral.com/book/

Perl

An Introduction to Perl
http://www.linuxtopia.org/Perl_Tutorial/index.html

A Perl Tutorial
http://www.civeng.carleton.ca/Courses/Grad/1995-96/82.562/perl/

Perl for System Administration
http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/sysadmin/index.htm

XML processing with Perl
http://www.xmltwig.com/tutorial/perl_xml/mtb04_01.html

Perl in a Nutshell

http://www.unix.org.ua/orelly/perl/perlnut/index.htm

Perl Regular Expression Tutorial
http://virtual.park.uga.edu/humcomp/perl/regex2a.html

Python

Thinking in Python
http://mindview.net/Books/TIPython

Dive Into Python
http://diveintopython.org/

A Byte of Python
http://www.ibiblio.org/g2swap/byteofpython/read/

Python Short Course
http://www.wag.caltech.edu/home/rpm/python_course/

Python Cookbook
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python

Python GUI Programming
http://www.metaslash.com/brochure/tutorial/

Python for Java programmers
http://www.razorvine.net/python/PythonForJavaProgrammers

PyGTK 2.0 Tutorial
http://www.moeraki.com/pygtktutorial/pygtk2tutorial/

Socket Programming HOWTO
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/sockets/sockets.html

Regular Expression HOWTO
http://www.amk.ca/python/howto/regex/

Php

Practical PHP Programming
http://www.hudzilla.org/phpbook/

PHP 5 Power Programming
http://www.computer-books.us/php_2.php

PHP Cheatsheet for Beginners
http://books.iuniverse.com/viewbooks.asp?isbn=0595354548&page=fm1

PHP articles and tutorials
http://www.melonfire.com/community/columns/trog/archives.php?category=PHP

Developer-roadshow( August 08 )

2006-08-10T09:42:00.000Z

Developer-roadshow was offically declared opened by Vice Chancellor of University of Education Winneba. Host and Co host were introduce after which Tim Tucker gave a talk about the mission and background about the traveling developer-roadshow. Mission was to bring software developers and educators together to meet educational needs of the society, share skills and ideas and in the future work together on a project.He elaborated on those points for a while, after which participants where asked to voice out their problems they face with ICTs. Some issues raised includes:

a. Language barriers among the west africa sub region
b. Iliteracy rate in west africa is too high
c. Inadequate ICT infrascture
d. Connectivity is very expensive
e. Environment not good for computers
f. Accessibilities to computers
g. Lack of right skilled people to impact knowledge
h. etc

after, a presentation was made about The Spirit Of Free and Open Source Software Movement( FOSS ) by Gideon Chonia. He started off with the reason why there is FOSS, the reason being to collaborate and share. He made participants understand free in FOSS is freedom, the freedom to temper with the software's source code, make changes as soul wish, freedom to redistribute and copy and not free as in cost.He went on to let us know how FOSS makes money. Making moneyFOSS includes,

a. Providing end user training
b. Providing support
c. Donations
d. rendering of services

After the presentation we had coffee break for about 15 minutes.After which we came back and the various tacks for the event were introduced which we were to sign up for any of the tracks you're keen to sign up.

At about approximately 12:10pm lunch was ready. After lunch presentations where made about the various tracks available. These tracks include

a. User Interface design of education out of the box( Track 1 )
The first developer road show which was orgainsed in South Africa identified various educational tools and put them together into what is now refer to as Education-out-of-the-Box. The user interface for the package lacks in finesse and proper navigational scheme.

subscribers to that track are to create a better user interface design for the package.

b. eXe tool localization and modification( Track 2 ):
eXe is a simple, off-line authoring environment that enables teachers and academics to author web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup. eXe enables users to create their own devices like objectives, case studies, reading activities, etc. Users can manipulate the look and feel of their published content as well as export for different display or delivery technologies

subscribers to this track is to localize the eXe tool into Twi and
Ewe-Ghanaian lanuauges.

c. Data Resource Bank( Track 3 ):
I didn't really pay much attention to this track. IIRC subscribers were to collect information to a central place which is the internet.

d. School Management Software( Track 4 ):
For this track subscribers were to come out with a school management software. After the week event subscribers came out solution which it will finally be deployed by 2008.Pilot project start here in ghana.

After long presentations on the tracks. The day's event came to an end and after dinner we were all conveyed to our various hotels.

script to convert mp3 files to ogg files

2006-08-08T00:12:00.000Z

I was a bit bored and not in the mood to do some real work and to refresh my python skills i came up with this small script that converts mp3 files to ogg files using the mp32ogg tool. The script depends on that tool.So it should be installed first before trying to run the script.
This script is really not fancy enough. Modification and additions are most welcome.

#! /usr/bin/python2.4

# script to convert mp3 files to ogg files this
# script depends on the mp32ogg tool for the conversion
# is just a script that accept path to mp3 files then 
# calls the mp32ogg tool to converts

import os

# to collect vaules

def mp3Convertor( directory_path ):
    #path to directory containing the mp3 files
    source_directory = directory_path+'/*.mp3'
    
    #directory to contain the ogg files
    #the same as the source directory
    
    #using the mp32ogg tool to convert the mp3 files 
    # ogg files
    oggtool = "mp32ogg %s" % (  source_directory )
    
    if os.system( oggtool ) == 0:
        print 'The mp3 files has successfully been converted'
        
    else:
        print oggtool
    
#get path to the mp3 files from the user
source_path = raw_input('Enter path to mp3 files')

if len( source_path ) == 0:
    print 'Please enter path to mp3 files'
else:
    mp3Convertor( source_path )

My first post

2006-08-06T23:16:00.000Z

I should have started this earlier on but i don't know why i haven't done so anyway , I have started it today. Today is myfirst blog post on my new blog account. Keep track of my blog for more techies info. :D