SIBI Online Music Player : Concept

SIBI Online Music Player (Alpha):

1) What is SIBI?

SIBI is a new generation Online Music Player. The main concept lies in its portability and user friendly aspects.

In SIBI, users can upload their own mp3s on the SIBI server, create their own SIBI playlists, manage their uploaded files and listen it through the SIBI online player from their home PC or Mac, PMPs such as the Ipod, or through their mobile devices which supports the required platform.

2) Why SIBI?

SIBI is different, or in fact the first of its kind. It is NOT an online Radio Player.

It is different because users can upload their own music collection on the server and access it from anywhere on this planet (of course when you are connected!!). It can be imagined as the Winamp combined with your hard drive online.

Many people usually have a wide collection of music in their PC or Mac, which usually of course, exceeds the capacity of a common PMP (say of 4gb or 8gb, I myself have a collection of more than 90gb!!) and almost everyone hears music while on the travel, on the way to college, on the way to his friends place and so on; but none have the time or the patience to choose out his favorite ones to be uploaded in his 4g or 8gb PMP. No one likes to sit down and make a new collection of his mp3s which will squeeze in his PMs Memory capacity and at the same time includes all his favorites. As a person’s music collection grows over time to time, he may have a lot of albums that he may like to carry around with him but which is not possible because:

• Low Memory capacity of PMPs (Large Memory PMPs cost a fortune!)
  
  
• Doesn’t have time to sit and pick out the ones he like; or to be precise, hardly if anyone is asked what are their favorite ones, he’ll be able to say just a few out of his huge collection. The truth is, the brain doesn’t give out like a printed list saying, ‘Here’s the list you would want to put in your PMP’… pardon us, we are HUMAN!!
  
  
• But when you are on a journey, say a cross country tour, you won’t want to carry your laptop or PC over to everywhere you go, but the PMP, sure is meant for that time and moreover, you won’t know which type of songs you are going to listen during the journey; it depends on the place you visit, or the people you meet or it could be anything.
  

Bottomline: You do not know which one to put around. You just want to listen to it when you feel like listening to it.

3) Challenges to bring SIBI into production?

i) Users have to be provided a large online storage area, say 50gb for the start.

4) Purpose for SIBI?

SIBI provides users the ability to listen their favorite music anywhere, everywhere without any unwanted extra efforts, provided he has a supported connection on his PMP.

5) Monetization. 

SIBI is targeting to grab the music market. On the SIBI main page, ads for new album releases or monetized services related to music can be displayed so that users can buy them. (refer the UI design section). To increase sales, displayed new album should be displayed by finding out the user’s favorite band or music which can be known by checking out the most played songs in his or her playlist. By checking what type of songs the user uploaded, such as which bands, which region of the world the user belong, displayed new album info can be on the basis of user interest which increases the chances of sales.

SIBI USER INTERFACE: Updating.

© SIBI Music Player, 2009

Windows: Generic Win32 Service Error

I've come across this problem myself and I tried googling a lot and found out a few methods to fix this problem but, the interesting part is that NONE works. 

With this error, your audio, your networks, the graphics; all are affected. Your audio devices will not be shown in the devices section, your internet will not work and one thing for sure is that, you'll be really pissed! The error seems to be caused by some old version of HP printer drivers. Microsoft has release updates for Windows XP sp2 but the problem still continues with SP3. (Haven't tried with Vista)

I read about a few other methods other than the WORKING one I've given here, and that includes software updates or patches from Windows and HP; but as I'm using a new enough software, the patch didn't work. 

Anyway, here's the steps for Manual fixing, which is by far the best:

1. Open Registry Editor: Start>Run and in the box type: regedit and press OK.

2. Find "TransportBindName”. (Edit>Find or Ctrl+F) It may take a few mins to search. (You can look for it yourself at the location HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Services\NetBT\Parameters)

3. Double-click on that value and delete the default value in the box and press OK.

4. Find the value “EnableDCOM”, located at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Ole

5. Double-click on that value and set the value in the box as ‘N’ which currently maybe set as ‘Y’.

6. Close the Registry Editor and restart your computer.

I think this will solve your problem.

Shristi.org: the Series of hurdles

I've been approached to build and launch the the website for the Techno - Management Festival of my university. I've designed and developed a couple of websites on my own and so it wasn't a big deal, or at least i thought so, for me at FIRST. Things however, have been going pretty weasy and confusing with various hurdles and problems i've to face which are quite unexpected and uncool.

The very first hurdle was when znetindia.com took 3 days to process my domain registration order. The second one came when i found out that znetindia doesnt bundle DNS control with the domain registration; and for which i've to activate an extra addon for the domain paying extra money. The third was the unfriendly user interface structure of the znetindia account manager area (if you are a starter, i bet you won't be able to find out where you should change your nameserver if your are changing your hosting service to some other service provider!). The fourth was when i realise that the TTL values for the DNS at znetindia was quite huge, which means any update in the DNS, A, MX, CNAME, NS, TXT etc will take time for its propagation. This happened when i mistyped the NS records and then i realise i mistyped it, i had to change it and for the change to propagate, i had to wait the whole day.

Later when everything from the domain point of view is working, unfortunately, my PC breaks down... or at least i thought so, coz later on i found it was my wireless modem problem. As an engineering student, and in the CSE branch, i use to do a lot of stuffs on my PC and it is not uncommon that i install a fresh copy of Windows a couple of times every month. This time, i'd already formated my PC 4 to 5 times since my semester starts, and that would be from the 1st week of Jan and i've already made it by heart the serial number to my copy of the windows. For development purposes, i've created a lot of complex structures, programs and databases that i don't want to lose but i'd to compromise some to make my PC working again.

Now, everything is set, the site is up (www.shristi.org, though still under active construction) and i'm using joomla cms for a quick built. A problem which i'd never faced before arises to my joomla hosting then. At the same hosting company, with the same apache, php and mysql configuration, i'm hosting another joomla website and it's not showing any problem but however in this website, problems after problems showered. I'd the problem fixed temporarily although it's not the best way to fix the problem.

The Joomla problem was that, whenever you try to upload/ install a component/ plugin/ module/ template etc, you got an error message "Warning! failed to move file".

This happens because of certain settings and file permissions on your joomla host. There are methods to overcome this problem but they are not the best yet known. For some, setting CHMOD to 777 for the" public_html/tmp" file seems to work but for others it's far from solving. Some solved it by disabling the FTP layer at joomla, but some solve it by just changing the temporary path "public_html/tmp" to "public_html/temp" or the vice versa. Other ways to solve includes giving the php file more space changing the php.ini, which requires contacting your hosting company. The best method, however, seems to be disabling the php "Safe Mode", which also require you to contact your hosting company.

For now, as my works need to be completed in a short period, i'd changed all the files/folders concern to 777 giving permission to change and execute to all while making the installation and then changing back to the normal CHMOD file permission after the installation is over; leaving no ways for hackers to poke their nose in. If you are having this problem, u can do it as i've done as it is the simplest and will always solve it regardless of the FTP, php.ini, apache or any other settings.

NovaTechNetwork has done a great job with there hosting servers. I prefer them.

Anyway, let me see if there're any other problems that are gonna pop up in front of me..

How to Install Adobe Flash Plugin for Google Chrome

The Adobe Flash player plugin is widely used all over the Internet, so it’s almost crucial that you install the Google Chrome Flash plugin if you wish to maximize your browser experience. If you’ve been prompted to install the Flash plugin but nothing happens, then you’ll need to manually install it yourself by downloading the Flash plugin from Adobe and playing a few tricks to install it into Google Chrome. No need to fear however because the installation procedure is pretty straightforward and you’ll have a Chrome Flash plugin enabled browser in no time.

1. Download the Flash player xpi for Windows.
2. Add a .zip extension to the file. It should now be: flashplayer-win.xpi.zip

Extract the contents and copy two files “flashplayer.xpt” and “NPSWF32.dll” (indicated in the screenshot below) over to C:\Documents and Settings\user\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\Plugins in XP orC:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\Plugins in Vista (thank you Derek), making sure to change ‘user’ to your Windows login name. You can avoid having to unhide hidden files in Windows Explorer simply by copying and pasting the directory path provided above into the path bar.

Restart Google Chrome, then see if you can watch a YouTube video to see if it worked. Or just come back to this page.

Web Design Tools

Software

Just in case if you’re curious about the tools web designers use, here’s the Mac softwares many designers prefer to keep on hand for design, web development, organization, productivity, and other miscellaneous playing around:

CandyBarPanic	CocktailMaintain
CodaPanic	Creative Suite 4Adobe

FontExplorer X ProLinotype	KeynoteApple
LaunchBarObjective Development	LittleSnapperRealmac Software
Snapz Pro XAmbrosia Software	TinkerToolMarcel Bresink
TransmitPanic	xScopeIconfactory

I believe you like this list too.

Bresenham's Line drawing Algorithm

As with the "Computer Graphics" programming holds, the Bresenham's Line Drawing Algorithm is one cool algo to play with. There's no pixel overlapping and it's kinda easy too. Here's the C codes for the program, just copy it out and see for yourself.

#include
#include
#include
#include

void main()
{
clrscr();
/* (x0,y0) and (x1,y1) the end points of the line,
dx = difference of the x co-ordinates,
dy = differenc of the y co-ordinates
p = descision parameter */

int x0,y0,x1,y1,dx,dy,x,y,xend,p,gd=DETECT,gm;
initgraph(&gd,&gm,"C:\\TC\\BGI");
printf("Enter x0,y0,x1,y1 :");
scanf("%d%d%d%d",&x0,&y0,&x1,&y1);
dx=abs(x0-x1); //Calculating the difference of the x co-ordinates
dy=abs(y0-y1); //Calculating the difference of the y co-ordinates
p=2*dy-dx; //descision parameter

/* The if-else statement puts the left coordinate out of the two ends in x0,y0 */
if(x0>x1)
{
x = x1;
y = y1;
xend=x0;
}
else
{
x=x0;
y=y0;
xend=x1;
}
putpixel(x,y,1); // puts the pixels on the screen
while(x< xend)
{
x++;
if(p<0) // for p<0
{
p=p+2*dy;
}
else // for p>0
{
y++;
p=p+2*(dy-dx);
}
putpixel(x,y,1);
}
getch();
}

Blog Advertising

If you own a business, whether small or big, your primary target is (if not, it should be..it must be!!) the maximized income you generate from your business. The umpteen numbers of product and service providers had made it really hard for anyone in the business to hold the market by itself. The only thing you should be doing is to increase your sales and increase the number of customers.

Talking about increasing sales, blog advertising is one effective way for even a very small size to a large size company to promote their products or services. Blog advertising is effective in terms of the amount of money you spent on advertising purposes as well as reaching specific potential customers. The former is minimized while the later is maximized; which in turns leads to a growth in your business. Through blog advertising and blog marketing, many companies had already reached their targeted customers, which is possible as most of the bloggers are the customers themselves or are people who need the services or products and their blogs are read by the people in their niche, which results in your product getting known to them, which obviously is the good start to increasing your sales. If you want to know why blog advertising is regarded as the best promotion method, check out the "22 reasons why blog advertising is the best promoting method/" .

Blog advertising has become prominent with the growth of blog marketing plateforms where advertisers meet bloggers and the vice versa. If you are a blogger or own a business, you probably should try out registering as a publisher or advertiser in one of those plateforms. As a blogger, you earn some extra dollars each month; if you are an advertiser, you reach the people... the potential customers!!

For a start, check out at www.payingpost.com