Minggu, 30 Desember 2007

Would Ulteo help OpenOffice to beat MS Office ?

Openoffice is an open source software offering its users many desktop applications as text editing and spreadsheet application. Since its appearance it was the first competitor of Microsoft Office but has never been the number one ! Microsoft Office is still the best sold Microsoft product ever! This desktop suite alone is making huge revenues and still the most desktop suite used in the world. You may say that's because integrated with Windows but it doesn't. It's sold separately from Windows. IE is integrated in Windows and couldn't beat Firefox so it's time to OOo to have some wings !

Wings.. This is what Ulteo is offering to OOo. Ulteo will allow users to use OpenOffice desktop suite on line with no installation process required. May be it will give some lazy and curious users an opportunity to give it a try. It will also allow people who were making some economies to buy a MS office suite to give OOo a try and may be they will be convinced to download OOo.

How to ?
Make sure you have:
  • A high speed network connection
  • A recent Safari,IE( 6 or 7) or Firefox(1.5 or more) browser.
  • A virtual Java machine
  • An Ulteo free account.
The OpenOffice.org desktop suite is great and can satisfy all the users need but it wasn't well introduced to users. That's what the Open source community lacks! The ability to make people try their products. If Ulteo could reach many users I'm certain that OOo will get a great step forward. Ulteo is counting (until now) 15,000 beta users. If you want to be one of them visit this page.

Jumat, 28 Desember 2007

Best Free C/C++ IDE

The first question to ask is what does a programmer need ?
To create an application you have to make sure that all these tools are available.
  • A Text editor : To write the code source ( of any language). Basically a simple software as "bloc-notes" under Windows or "vi" under Linux is enough. The best thing is to have an intelligent text editor that make your code colorful and make your codes more comprehensive and easier to read.
  • A Compiler : to compile your source code to binary code.
  • A debugger : To help you to correct the bugs in your code.
Programming demands a lot of effort and concentration and you have to pick the tools that can make your life easier! You can look for these components separately but this will be like torturing yourself! You should pick 3 in 1 software called IDE : Integrated development environment.

Best Free C/C++ IDEsBoth of them are free and simple which make of them the best tools for beginners.
Note that both work on Windows and only Code::Blocks can run on Linux. And for Windows vista users you should follow some particular procedures to set up thes IDE or else you'll face many bugs with compiling. Nevertheless, Visual Studio Express work correctly on Vista.
For mac users, I recommend "Xcode". You can install it from the CD of Mac OS.

Kamis, 27 Desember 2007

Phonon : where QT and KDE meet

Originally posted and verified by bluestorm

Trolltech has recently announced that its graphic library Qt will be using Phonon, he new multimedia library created by the KDE developers. This is good news for Qt4 users allowing Qt to be better and simpler and it's a good sign of a great collaboration between Trolltech and the other Free software projects.

Qt is a library which allows programmers to write graphic application codes. Basically used in C++, it's also available with many other languages (Java, Python, Ruby...). Qt is Free software and can be used in many OS (Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux, BSD...)

Trolltech is the enterprise which has developed Qt. Founded in 1994 by students. It's counting about 100 developers in Norwich, Australia, California , China and Germany. Influenced by KDE, Trolltech has made of Qt a free software by using a clever double licenses : One Free ( and free of charge) license allowing to create Only Free software and proprietary software editors have to buy a commercial license. This politic is also used by MySQL, it allows to have a free library and have a good financial sources.

KDE is one of the most famous Free desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions and the first competitor of GNOME. Allows the user to exploit many features : Desktop, menu, control panel...etc. KDE has also some applications as File explorer, Browser, Text editor, PDF reader...etc. To that purpose, the KDE project builded (on top of the Qt librairies) a framework helping programmers to create desktop application easily..

KDE Screeshots:




Phonon is a multimedia library ( sound and video) developed by Matthias Kretz, a KDE developer. KDE4 developers intend to use Phonon so any developer will be able to add a video or a sound to his application.

There are many multimedia libraries dedicated to sound and video like Xine , Gstreamer and FMOD. Phonon doesn't make the whole library from the beginning but uses the existing ones and propose some unified functionalities for all developers.

Qt developers were so interested in the multi-platform aspect of Phonon. In fact, Qt uses the same ingredients and gives some features to facilitate software conception. ( It's easy to manage networks, SQL...etc).
Consequently Trolltech suggested to support Phonon development. Which was very convenient for KDE developers, because this will bring to them more programmers. Phonon will be integrated in the new 4.4 Qt version and the Qt developers are already improving the library
during their work time. Trolltech hopes to finish the backends early allowing to Phonon to use some multimedia systems of MacOS (QuickTime 7) and Windows (DirectShow 9).

The most important detail in this news is that Phonon will be related the KDE project. KDE developers will continue developing the library and will discuss with Trolltech developers about its evolution. The whole source code of Phonon will stay hosted with the KDE code. Instead of working on Phonon alone, Trolltech engineers will collaborate directly with KDE developers.

QT
KDE
KDE announcing the integration of Phonon
Trolltech announcing the integration of Phonon with KDE

Arrange easy finance with unsecured personal loans

In the present scenario, getting a loan has become the toughest thing; though there are many financial institutions and banks involved in providing people with best loan services but often people find them incapable of taking advantage of these schemes. The only reason behind this is arrangement of security; as not everyone can manage to have high valued property to present against loan, their application get rejected by most of the banks. Does not it seem unfair when the major part of society is deprived from these finest financial schemes? Of course yes, it is injustice with those people who possess equal rights to live a financially liberated life. Probably, this is the reason why various bankers and financial institutions launched unsecured personal loans; the basic intention behind introducing these loans is to comfort those people who are deprived from various financial schemes due to unavailability of security.

Unsecured personal loans are the most convenient and easy way to arrange desired money; as these loans do not demand any security anyone can apply for a reasonable amount and can remove his or her financial blues at ease. No matter what your requirement is, with unsecured personal loans, you can now manage to arrange money to solve any of your purposes. Be it home improvement or car purchase, you can get finance for everything; all you need to do is to apply for this loan with a reliable lender and wait till they send you an approval information. Usually, the entire approval and verification process takes 3 to 4 days but in some complicated cased it may extend up to one week.

If you are planning to buy a new car or to make home improvements then you can simply go for secured personal loans to settle these expenses. For people, who are struggling to consolidate their previous debts, these loans are a sensible answer. With these loans, they can consolidate all their previous debts; moreover, this money can be used for paying-off personal pending bills. Since this loan does not require the borrower to secure the debt against an asset, documentation and approval procedure automatically becomes less time consuming. If you apply for an online personal loan you will get an approval mail within 15 or 20 minutes; for this you can browse the website of any online loan provider and can fill an online application form for further proceedings.

Having an unsecured loan does not mean that you will not need to provide any detail to the concern lender; the lender will check evidence of good credit history and income proof to decide whether you are capable to meet regular loan repayments or not. Since these loans are very liberal, lender charges a higher interest rate in return of all additional services. Since there is not any particular criteria for usage of loan amount one can use it for variety of purposes including car purchase, home improvement, debt consolidation and vacation management etc.

Source: http://www.ukunsecuredloans.me.uk

Sabtu, 22 Desember 2007

eZ Publish CMS 4th version : all the features you need


CMS are Content management systems created to make creating a website an easier task. Among many others, eZ Publish has some unique criteria. It's a flexible and extensible CMS created by eZ Systems, a Norwegian company was behind the PHP eZ Components Library, eZ Publish is an ECMS ( Enterprise Content Management System) distributed under both GPL and proprietary licenses.

eZ Publish offers a great number of features: document publication, as text and multimedia files, is possible once the software is installed. Integrated solutions gives you the possibility to manage : Web shop, news, a social website, a personal website, photo gallery, forums and polls...

Mainly dedicated to enterprises, eZ Publish included many features as : Product catalog, the caddie function, tax and promotion management, sells stats and sending management using a secured payment system.

For developers, such features are implemented in eZ Publish 4: Classes and object definition, parametred and programmable workflows, WebDAV interface and clustering..

Where hides the revolution !
After many bugs corrections, the fourth version is a revolution by being the first version using PHP 5. So many new features are available as autoload, DOMDocument...
Another new thing, eZ Flow. It's a new extension dedicated to media publication using the WebDAV technologies. The import/export communication with ODF you can stream Flash and videos in eZ Publish.

Ameliorations:
eZ is more efficient with ameliorated scripts and a reorganization to the XML. The new versions also allows you to use eZ Components Library in the extensions. A great importance is given to the famous Web 2.0 by giving many features to publish pages with tag clouds, photo galleries, blogs...etc..

The eZ Publish community counts about 25000 members, composed by 2000 reference clients, 2 millions downloads and a network counting 200 partners.

Related links
Official eZ systems website
download eZ Publish 4.0
eZ components

Jumat, 21 Desember 2007

12 Megapixels video cam... and more !!

astonished! this is how I was when I saw this "supacam"! You can call it the video cam of your dreams! I'll try to be brief so you can get its fabulous criteria easily:
  • 12GB VGA Streaming video
  • Tapeless digital movie cam
  • HD photo W/face detection
  • 15 X Zoom. 30fps @ D1 720x480
  • 6 HR personal Media player
You can get some of these extra accessories:
  • Water-proof case
  • Tripod
  • Remote control
  • Extra battery
  • Fast charge
  • Memory ( high speed SD )
It's a 12 Megapixels video cam. It means that you can make a DVD quality videos and stream it directly to the web using this cam! This cam contains a face detector so you can use it as a security cam for your baby. The Tripod allows you to use it as a web cam and the remote control will allow you to manipulate it easily for family home videos. It contains Flash and night shouting video!!
The price is $349
You can find it here

Free international calling : The real deal !!


Imagine that you can call for free! Talkster givs you the possibility to do this. All you have to do is visiting their home page and fill the forms and your call will work. You can do this either from your desktop, your phone or via sms. If you want to get more informations about how to make your free calls work visit this page.
Actually, this service is free. You may be wondering "hmm.. free things doesn't exist anymore... there must be something in return..!" Let me be frank with you : You are right ! After doing this phone call you will receive some sms ads on your mobile. There can be some surprises on these sms (prices, coupons...)
How can they make it possible?
A
ctually, after filling the forms, the server will search for a local phone and will make the call for you then bridges you and your contact together. This will allow you to have a good quality phone call. It makes also group calls possible! After this call Talkster will send a ad for you and for your contact, an ad that suits each country. Consequently, this service is available in a limited but a great number of country around the world. If your country doesn't appear in the list, don't worry all that you have to is filling a form asking to add your country. Tell your friends about it so they claim to add your country too. The operator will send you an email once the service is available in your country.
Now visit Talkster.com

Selasa, 18 Desember 2007

How to run games on Linux (sweet links)

The most important thing that make youngsters so attached to Windows and reject Linux distributions is running games. To solve this problem we give those links:

How to install any game using Wine?
This question was asked in the Linuxquestions.org and largely discussed. It mainly deals with the best tools to run games on Linux such as Wine and VMware.

Linux games lists:
You can find here some Opensource games easy to set up. Those websites use lists sorted by the gaming type, developers and liscence.
Linux gamers' game list
Gnome files game list

Frank's Corner

Frank is a linux user. His blog is about how to run windows applications on Linux. In this website you can find how to run a huge list of games using Wine. Most of them need to be installed in Windows first then run them on Linux and this is his list of games that worked on Linux using Wine :
First person shooters

Call Of duty
Code Red
Counter-Strike
Delta force
Delta Force 2
Gore
Half-life
Half-life 2
Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
Jedi Knight: Dark Forces 2
Gunman Chronicles
Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast
Heavy Metal FAKK 2
Kingpin: Life Of Crime
Max Payne
Quake 2
Quake 3 Arena
Sin
Soldier Of Fortune
Soldier Of Fortune 2
Steam
Starsiege Tribes
Unreal
Unreal Tournament
Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory

Action

AquaPop
Billy Bob
Bomber Mania
Daiktana
Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project
Galaxy Invaders
Gem Mine
GeneRally
Grand Theft Auto
Grand Theft Auto: Vice City
Highway Pursuit
Jazz Jackrabbit 2
JBall
Lode Runner Online
Mageslayer
Mummy's Curse
Naval Strike
Onslaught
Pacmanic Christmas
Pacmanic Worlds
Sky Fire
Snowball
Starball
South Park Mario Bro 2
Tank Assault

RPG/adventure

American McGee's Alice
Avernum
Avernum 2
Avernum 3
Baldur's Gate
Blades Of Avernum
Blades Of Exile
Dark Earth
Exile: Escape From The Pit
Deus Ex
Diablo 2
Heretic 2
Icewind Dale
Nethergate
Planescape Torment
Rune
Wizardy 8
World Of Warcraft

Strategy

Caesar 3
Command & Conquer
Command & Conquer: Red Alert
Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun
Commandos - Behind Enemy Lines
Cyberstorm 2: Corporate Wars
Emperor
Europa Universalis
Final Liberation: Warhammer Epic 40,000
Pharaoh
Starcraft
Steel Panthers: World At War
Stronghold: Crusader
Sudden Strike
Total Annihilation
Warcraft 3
Warcraft 3: Frozen Throne
Zeus - Master of Olympus
This list is huge! If frank can do it you can do it. All you need is patience ... Now get back to work!!

Jumat, 14 Desember 2007

Preserve your independence with the help of a Florida reverse mortgage

A house is one of the best things that you can possibly gift to yourself, during your entire work life. It not only provides you with a sense of security and independence but it is also your biggest asset in times of need. When an individual reaches the age of retirement, he is plagued by financial worries. It is natural for a person of sixty-two years or above to be worried about their financial stability. If an emergency situation arises or there is need of cash to maintain the day-to-day lifestyle, often the most common options are to ask a friend or family to help you out. However, asking for financial help from another person can feel demeaning to most individuals. In this case, if he is the owner of a house, then Florida reverse mortgage can come to his help.

A Florida reverse mortgage is a financial option available to house owners of a senior age, wherein they can put up their property as a security in lieu of a lump sum of money. The major advantages of such a loan is the fact that, if one applies for a Florida reverse mortgage the ownership still remains with the real owner. He is free to sell off the property or re-mortgage according to his wish, but needs to pay off the mortgage under such circumstances. Otherwise, the owner not only gets a sum of money against his property but can also continue living in that house until his death. The mortgage does not have to be repaid during the lifetime of the borrower, as long a she keeps paying the regular house tax and other expenses.

Many senior citizens of the United States have greatly benefited from the Florida reverse mortgage loan option. The mortgage amount has helped them to independently run and manage their household expenses and emergencies without having to seek the help of others. The only drawback of taking a reverse mortgage is the fact that one cannot leave his house for his heirs after him. However, in today’s day and age when everyone is determined to create their future themselves, this kind of a condition should be no problem for the house owner or his family.

All our lives we spend something or the other on our homes. Be it for purchasing it in the first place, decorating and redecorating it, modifying and rebuilding structures, house painting, etc. A Florida reverse mortgage is the opportunity for the house to pay you back. The security of the house can indeed help you to lead a dignified life in a self-sufficient manner, where you create your own rules. As the rates of interest, value of the property, your age and whole lot of other factors affect the terms and conditions of your reverse mortgage; it is always advisable to seek the legal advice and guidance of a financial expert. Once you have done your market research well, then you can safely reap the benefits from a Florida reverse mortgage.

Source: http://www.reverse-mortgage-seniors.com

Selasa, 11 Desember 2007

Every video fan must have : A free and full featured DVD ripper

Once we install the Linux on our desktop, the first thing we want to make sure it works properly is our media files : music and video files. We talked too much about music tools. It's time to have a clue about some powerful video tools.

DVD::RIP is mainly written in Perl, made to provide users an easy way to rip and transcode dvd. What makes this tool so special among others is the huge number of features:
This tool is able to support almost all major video codecs : Divx, Xvid, mpeg1, mpeg2,ffmpeg. That means that you can rip your DVD to any video type you want. It also uses Divx/Xvid multipass encoding. The transcoding process uses video filters with realtime configuration and a live transcoding preview window so you can make sure that your video is doing alright. You can also adjust every possible parameter of your zoom manually. The resizing modes are two : the fast one and high quality one.
The best thing in this tool is its manipulation of the audio data while the transcoding. It's able to rip as much audio tracks as you want to AVI/OGG/SVCD file. It also allows you to encode MP3, to maximize audio volume and range compression, to create WAV file form a selected audio track,render subtitle and create vosub... It supports OGG/Vorbis. It's easy to use your CD burning facility with this tool and much more other features
Dvd::rip home page

Jumat, 07 Desember 2007

Say good bye to financial blues with cash advance loans

Financial crunch is something that nobody wants to face or even imagine; however sometimes sudden crisis crop up and there is no one to help you in those testing times. Well, with the help of cash advance loans you can cruise smoothly and wade of those financial blues easily. Thus do not worry as these loans are specially tailored for crisis situations.

Cash advance loans are a good option and trouble-free way to get out unscathed from a temporary financial problem. These loans are also known as quick cash, fast cash and payday loans, these loans have carved quite a niche amongst the providers as well as borrowers for their easy qualification terms and quick turnaround times. These types of loans fall under the categories of personal and unsecured loans. However, cash advance loans are although expensive in comparison to normal loans but still going stronger and popular too. In fact, these loans can be acquired via online services too. Hence, if you are short in your budget and need money to complete tasks that had been long ignored because of the shortage of money, then taking the help of cash advance loans is good option and intelligence too.

As you must be aware with the fact that these loans are very short term loans and are offered for only two to three weeks or at the most for a month till the borrower gets his next pay cheque. That is the reason they are also called as payday loans. The biggest advantage of this loan is that it provides instant money to the borrower. Moreover, cash advance loans are approved instantly and the loan amount comes in the borrower’s account within 24-hours of applying for it. Hence, you can relax, as the loan is here to solve your problem without posing any hassle for you. Well the good thing with the services of such loans is that they do not require a credit check and are handed over to the borrower without any collateral. Here, the lender bases the loan decision instead on a few criteria that most people meet.

For the eligibility criteria, a person has to be employed, with at least a minimum monthly income of $1,000 and should be above 18 years of age. The applicant must also have a checking account in good standing that can accept direct deposits. However, the lender usually asks for post dated cheques from the borrowers. God forbid, but if because of any problem the borrower fails to repay the amount back, then the lender submits the cheque in the borrower’s account for getting back the loaned amount. Although borrowing money may seem wonderful, but keep in mind that you have to pay back the amount at scheduled time. If however, you are not able to do so then you will fall into even greater financial difficulties that may be very tough to get out of. Hence, to avoid such things, it is better to repay the amount back on time and live debt-free life.

Source: http://www.cashadvanceloansuk.co.uk

Selasa, 04 Desember 2007

Edit sounds like a pro !

You're a music fan and Linux user. the combination was a little bit hard to satisfy because proprietary sound editing software are expensive now let's find a solution. I'm trying to cater to music lovers as I did with Gnormalize now let's get a bit more professional and find some useful sound editing tools.
I'm suggesting Audacity: The Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor
Audacity is an OpenSource software which allows you to manipulate digital audio data. The Audacity author is Dominic Mazzoni, an ex-NASA engineer and a Google engineer. Now he has a crew of 20 developers and 30 translators to help him.
The most important feature of Audacity is the ability to record digital sound via micro/cd... and treat it by manipulating and exporting using multiple filters and extra effects like pitch, tempo, noise reduction, equalizer, Fourier filters, increasing precise frequencies, compression, amplification, normalization, echo, phaser, wahwah, inversion. It also allows you to convert CDs and tapes to a digital support.
Audacity is considered as an alternative to some professional proprietary software like sound edit of Macromedia! It's also an Award winner from sourceforge.org considered as the best multimedia project of 2007 ! It works on Linux/Unix, mac OS X and Windows.

Now what are you waiting for to get your Free copy ? ... and let us see some of your art pieces !
All you need to do is to visit the Audacity home page and you'll find all what you need to install it properly.


More screenshots here

Minggu, 02 Desember 2007

Playing MP3 on Linux have never been that easy !

Let's Imagine this situation : " you're a Linux newbie and you have just got the ubuntu CD. You were so happy about it , after some hustle and bustle you could install it properly on your PC then you opened your music directory looking for an old MP3 file you want to play it loud so you can celebrate your new achievement... And BING : " Cannot open this file !! " you click over and over again, you change the song and the same thing occurs. Finally you find out that your Linux can't play MP3. You curse the linux and maybe you'll blame who told you about it."

You could prevent that if you come across this article before. Maybe you should send it to your Linux newbie friends so they won't hate Linux for preventing them from playing their music because we will show you how to play all music file type.

All you need to do is to set up gnormalize. It's an audio converter and it allows you to decode these MP3/MP4/MPC/OGG/APE/FLAC file to WAV so you can play it on your PC. With gnormalize you can also extract an audio CD and output as other audio format (MP3,MP4,MPC,OGG,APE,FLAC,WAV).

This software requires some programs to be installed first. Not all of them it depend on what you need gnormalize for. We will put only what you need to play MP3 on Linux :
  1. You need perl-Gtk2
  2. You need lame
  3. You need normalize
To download this software:
RPM package ( mandriva, Fedora, RedHat...)
Debian package ( Debian, Ubuntu...)

gnormalize-0.53.tar.gz or http://www.gnomefiles.org/ (release notes).

With root privilege, execute the bash script commands to install gnormalize:
tar zxvf gnormalize-version.tar.gz
cd gnormalize-version/
./install

If you need other optional features on gnormalize you can check the Gnormalize profile on sourceforge.org and here are some screenshots of gnormalize

the author of gnormalize
Source of information
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