There is no doubt about the fact that soft shadows make any piece of graphics stand out. It adds that extra touch of professionalism to any illustration and it makes the illustrations look and feel just right in any document or presentation (if properly used). I have been using Open Office for a while and after several hours of combing Google just to find a way to create soft shadows in OpenOffice, I only came up with this page which happens to be a page on the OpenOffice.org issue tracker requesting the same feature. This means that it is still a work in progress (and you can vote for it to give it a higher priority). In the mean time, while we wait for the guys at OOo to code this feature for us, we can actually play around with GIMP and open office to produce some rudimentary soft shadows which also look good.

Let’s start with this simple diagram drawn up in OpenOffice.org’s Draw package.

Assuming soft shadows are to be added to each of the rounded rectangles, fire up GIMP and draw a rounded rectangle (not necessarily up to the scale and size of what you have in your OOo drawing).

After the rectangle is drawn, add a little bit of Gaussian blur to it. This is what would actually give the soft shadow effect.

Next insert the shadow you created from GIMP into your drawing.

Send the shadow to the back of the drawing …

… and align it properly (as you like). And there you would have a beautiful soft shadow. You can use OOo to adjust the transparency of the shadow till you think its nice enough.

To make your diagram even nicer you can consider filling your rounded rectangle with a gradient.

You can also extend the effect to all the other elements in your diagram.

So there we have it. A few things you could do to this would be to:

1. Group all the elements so that when you resize or scale the group, the shadows and all their corresponding diagrams would also be resized.
2. Have a folder which contains already made shadows for the common drawing primitives that you use (e.g. circles, rectangles e.t.c). In the cases where your diagrams seem to be a bit more complicated, you can then go into gimp and create a specific shadow for your diagram.

Hope you enjoyed this one.

Happy Drawing.

Lots of things go on around me yet making the time to write them is quite difficult. Well now I have made it a point to share some knowledge all the time so this time I am going to do a little piece about how an MP3 player can be implemented in JavaScript with the help of Adobe Flash, through ActionScript 3. I noticed this trick was being used on several websites. It took me a while to actually figure out that they were using a flash object to handle the playback of the MP3. I thought it was cool and I am sure there are several people out there who want to implement similar ones of their own. So in this post I am only going to help you build a basic player so that you would at least get the Idea. I believe that with the idea firmly understood, you could extend this to do just about anything you would want it to. This sure promises to be fun.

Okay so without any more talking, this is how we are going to do it. We are going to use the Sound, Sprite and ExtenalInterface classes from ActionScript class library to implement a very simple flash object which has the capabilities to load MP3’s and play them. We would then use JavaScript as a medium to control the playback from this flash object by talking to it through the ExternalInterface class. In effect we are building a JavaScript wrapper around the ActionScript Sound class. I don’t really know if there are any security issues related to this but I would investigate.

Lets start coding. I am going to give you the full code for the ActionScript component then I would explain it later.

package
{
    import flash.media.Sound;
    import flash.media.SoundChannel;
    import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
    import flash.net.URLRequest;
    import flash.display.Sprite;

    public class JSMP3 extends Sprite
    {
        private var soundChannel:SoundChannel;
        private var sound:Sound;

        public function JSMP3():void
        {
            // Externalize our interface functions
            // for the load, play and stop
            ExternalInterface.addCallback("load",load);
            ExternalInterface.addCallback("play",play);
            ExternalInterface.addCallback("stop",stop);
        }

        private function load(url:String):void
        {
            // Create a new URLRequest for the mp3 file
            var urlRequest:URLRequest = new URLRequest(url);

            // Try to stop the sound channel if it already
            // playing any audio.
            try
            {
                soundChannel.stop();
            }
            catch(e:Error) {  }

            // Create a new sound object and load the
            // URL into the object
            sound = new Sound();
            sound.load(urlRequest);
        }

        private function play():void
        {
            // Play the sound
            soundChannel = sound.play();
        }

        private function stop():void
        {
            // Try to stop the sound if it is already playing.
            try
            {
                soundChannel.stop();
            }
            catch(e:Error)
            {

            }
        }
    }
}

You could copy this code into a text file and save it as JSMP3.as. To compile it you must have the Flex 3 SDK installed and from the command line you could execute mxmlc JSMP3.as. That should produce the JSMP3.swf file which would be used for the purpose of playing the MP3 files in your JavaScript program. Lets try to understand the code.

Looking at the source code you see that it is a really simple one. The main package, the imports and the class are all standard ActionScript stuff. The JSMP3 class extends the Sprite class from the flash.display package. Although we are not going to be using any Sprite features, this extension is still necessary because without that our MP3 player cannot be embedded into an HTML page. The constructor uses the ExternalInterface class to expose three methods to the JavaScript. These are the load, play and stop methods. The implementation for these methods are below the constructor and they expect their parameters to be passed from the JavaScripts that are going to be calling them. Well now that we are done with the ActionScript, lets look at the JavaScript / HTML code.

var JSMP3Player =
{
    player : function()
        {
            if (navigator.appName.indexOf("Microsoft") != -1)
            {
                return window["JSMP3"];
            }
            else
            {
                return document["JSMP3"];
            }
        },

    play : function(url)
        {
            this.player().load(url);
            this.player().play();
        },

    stop : function()
        {
            this.player().stop();
        }
}

This JavaScript wraps around the flash object that would be embedded into the HTML page. From the code you can tell that the flash object would have an id or a name JSMP3. The function for doing this wrapping was actually taken from the Flex 3 SDL Language Reference.

<html>
<head>
    <title>MP3 Player Test</title>
    <script type="text/javascript" src="JSMP3.js"></script>
</head>
<body>

    <object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
             id="JSMP3" width="0" height="0"
             codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab">
        <param name="movie" value="JSMP3.swf" />
        <param name="quality" value="high" />
        <param name="bgcolor" value="#869ca7" />
        <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
        <embed src="JSMP3.swf" quality="high" bgcolor="#869ca7"
             width="0" height="0" name="JSMP3" align="middle"
             play="true" loop="false" quality="high" allowScriptAccess="sameDomain"
             type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
             pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer">
        </embed>
    </object>

    <input type="button" onclick="JSMP3Player.play('obrafour_nkaseibo.mp3')" value="Play" />
    <input type="button" onClick="JSMP3Player.stop()" value="Stop" />

</body>
</html>

This code adds the flash object to the html page. The object is given a width and a height of 0 so we do not see it. The two input buttons for play and stop actually call the play and stop methods for our JavaScript wrapper which also calls the flash object to either load and play an MP3 file or stop the playback if any.

So there we have it. I have tried to keep it as simple as possible. Several things could be done to extend this player. For instance you could add methods to detect when the audio is buffering, you could add methods to enable the controlling of the volume as well as seek through the playback of the audio. I wish I could have given some form of demonstration. All the same I think the picture should be clear enough if your coding skills are on point (as far as the technologies utilized are concerned). I stand to be corrected if any errors are detected in this post.

Happy Programming.

Why I did this?

Over the past few weeks I have been working on this project which in some ways uses MIDI. I have primarily been working in Linux  but I had plans of porting the finished application to windows. In order to convince myself after a while that my approach would work, I decided to try to compile the unfinished app in Windows.

My toolchain basically contains Autotools & GCC under linux. I however use Eclipse as my IDE and GDB for debugging. What I did was I set up MinGW under windows just so I could mimic the linux environment to some detail. I was able to get precompiled versions of most of the libraries I was using (GTKmm, SDL) except for portaudio and portmidi. So I had to get the sources and build them myself. Portaudio built straight out of the box without any problems but Portmidi sucked. I am pretty sure other people might have this same problem so I am writing just in case …

How do you do this?

Well I just want to assure you that we are not going to be writing any scripts so don’t worry about that. Before you start ensure that you have Eclipse and MinGW properly installed (such that you can actually compile your C programs in Eclipse with MinGW).

Download a copy of the PortMidi library from here http://portmedia.sourceforge.net/.  Extract the archive and move the porttime folder out of the portmidi folder. We are going to compile the porttime library separately. It would later be used as a dependency when compiling the port midi library itself. To prep the folder for compilation delete the source files that are not needed for the MS-Windows platform (I know this sounds harsh but that is exactly how I did it). These files are ptlinux.c, ptmacos_cf.c and ptmacos_mach.c. Okay now fire up the Eclipse ide. Create a new C shared library project. Call it porttime or whatever seems right but make sure that you do not use the default location. You should rather point it to the location of the altered porttime directory (d:\blog\porttime in my case).

Creating the C Project

When asked about the type of configuration on the next page, just choose release. Your project should now be ready. But you cant start compiling yet. There are still a few things you have to do. You now have to setup the compilation parameters. Right-click on the project in the project explorer and select the properties option.

When the properties dialog opens, edit the C/C++ Build>>Settings options. Now this is what you do:

1. Under the Tools Settings tab select the MinGW C Linker>>Libraries option and add the winmm library, by clicking on the icon with the in Libraries box. This window should look like this after that:
2. Still under the Mingw C Linker node, select the Shared Library Settings option. Make sure the shared checkbox is active. Set the Shared object name field to libporttime.dll, set the Import library name to libporttime.dll.a and set the DEF file name to libporttime.def. This should also look like so:
   

That should do it for the configuration of the porttime library. That was easy right? You can now go ahead and compile the library by clicking on the build icon (the one that looks like the hammer). We now have the porttime library built.

The main goal of all these activities was to compile the PortMidi library so now that we have porttime we can go ahead to compile the portmidi library. Its just as easy as building the porttime library. The only thing is this time you have to spend repeating the steps.

Hope You Liked This?

So that’s all. Hope I helped someone out there. Happy Programming.

Introduction

I must admit here that one of the most annoying things for me when I was learning how to develop PHP/HTML applications was designing those HTML forms. Point blank, it sucks! It is very painful validating your data and doing all the other crap that comes along with that HTML chore. Don’t tell me about DreamWeaver and all those other WYSIWYG editors, they just don’t work for me.To solve my own problems, I decided to build a library to help me on the whole forms thing. This was actually inspired by the concept of the forms api in the Drupal content management system and the code igniter framework. I just didn’t use either because I wanted to be able to do something of my own so I could just extend it to do whatever I wanted without going through lenghty documentation. Trust me, the time invested is sometimes worth it. This forms library I am talking about has already been used in a couple of applications already (some by me and others by some very good developer friends of mine). This probably means that it has undergone some amount of testing already. I cannot stick my neck out that it is very secure and I can also not stick my neck out that it is very stable but one thing I can tell you is that it works.

Before we proceed to look at how the form library works and how it could be incorporated into an application, let’s spend some time to go through the features of the library. This library does the following things:

1. It automatically generates HTML scripts which represents your forms.
2. It validates you form data (on the server side).
3. It provides some form of framework on which complex forms could be built.
4. It also has some features which allow you to automatically dump the values collected from the form into a table in a MySQL database.

Creating your first form

Using this library is quite simple. All you really do is define your form and set a couple of callbacks to handle the data collected from the form. For a quick example lets build a small form which is used to collect data for an address book application. This form would later be configured to dump the data into the database. So here is the code (with the assumption that you have the fapi folder in the correct place):

require_once "fapi/fapi.php";

$form = new Form();

$firstname = new TextField("Firstname","firstname","The firstname of the person");
$form->add($firstname);

$lastname = new TextField("Lastname","lastname","The lastname of the person");
$form->add($lastname);

$email = new EmailField("Email","email","The primary email address of the person");
$form->add($email);

$phone = new TextField("Phone","phone_number","Phone number");
$form->add($phone);

$form->render();
?>

Putting this stub of php code anywhere in your application would cause it to render a form which looks like the form in the image below.

Well you would agree with me that this is ugly but with a bit of CSS styling it could go a long way. I took some time to write a stylesheet for the output. This CSS file is located at fapi/css/fapi.css. Include this stylesheet in your HTML header and you should have a form which looks like the one below.

You must have noticed that the input fields in the form extends accross the whole widht of the page. You could limit this by placing your form in a div, a table or any other HTML tag that would prevent its content from overflowing its boundaries.

Now let me explain the code. For this example we used the Form class, the TextField class and the EmailField class. The constructors of these classes (except that of the Form class) take a similar set of parameters. The first parameter is the label, the second parameter is the name of the field (which we would use for other purposes later) and the last parameter is a brief description you want to be displayed under the field when it is displayed. None of these are compulsory though so you could just instantiate the class without specifying any of the parameters. These type of fields are not the only types available in the library. You have similar stuff for radio buttons, check boxes, selection lists etc.

A More Advanced Form

Lets extend our form a bit. We are going to add a few more fields and containers. In this form we are going to have field sets (which are also containers just like forms) on our form and we are going to put the fields into the field set. The code for this form follows.

require_once "fapi/fapi.php";

//forms
$form = new Form();

//name
$name_fieldset = new FieldSet("Name");
$form->add($name_fieldset);

$firstname = new TextField("Firstname","firstname","The firstname of the person");
$name_fieldset->add($firstname);

$lastname = new TextField("Lastname","lastname","The lastname of the person");
$name_fieldset->add($lastname);

//internet
$internet_fieldset = new FieldSet("Internet");
$form->add($internet_fieldset);

$email = new EmailField("Email","email","The primary email address of the person");
$internet_fieldset->add($email);

$secondary_email = new EmailField("Second Email","secondary_email","The secondary email address of the person");
$internet_fieldset->add($secondary_email);

//phone
$phone_fieldset = new FieldSet("Phone");
$form->add($phone_fieldset);

$home_phone = new TextField("Home","home_phone_number","Home phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($home_phone);

$work_phone = new TextField("Work","work_phone_number","Work phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($work_phone);

$cell_phone = new TextField("Cell","cell_phone_number","Cell phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($cell_phone);

$form->render();
?>

If you haven’t already noticed, you should see that this time the fieldset objects are added to the form and the textfield objects are added to the fieldsets. This causes the fieldsets to be rendered on the form and the textfields to be rendered within the fieldsets. This is what the code above would output.

An Even More Advanced Form

Let us step things up a bit higher. We are now going to create a form with tabs. For the tabs to switch we may have to include some javascripts. The needed scripts are the fapi/jscripts/jquery.js and the fapi/jscripts/fapi.js. I guess we are going to fire on all cylinders now. Lets see the code.

require_once "fapi/fapi.php";

//forms
$form = new Form();

//category
$category = new SelectionList("Group","group","Which group should this address be stored under");
$category->addOption("Friends");
$category->addOption("Family");
$category->addOption("Business");
$form->add($category);

//tabs
$tabs = new TabLayout();
$form->add($tabs);

$contact_tab = new Tab("Contact");
$tabs->add($contact_tab);

//name
$name_fieldset = new FieldSet("Name");
$contact_tab->add($name_fieldset);

$firstname = new TextField("Firstname","firstname","The firstname of the person");
$name_fieldset->add($firstname);

$lastname = new TextField("Lastname","lastname","The lastname of the person");
$name_fieldset->add($lastname);

//internet
$internet_fieldset = new FieldSet("Internet");
$contact_tab->add($internet_fieldset);

$email = new EmailField("Email","email","The primary email address of the person");
$internet_fieldset->add($email);

$secondary_email = new EmailField("Second Email","secondary_email","The secondary email address of the person");
$internet_fieldset->add($secondary_email);

//phone
$phone_fieldset = new FieldSet("Phone");
$contact_tab->add($phone_fieldset);

$home_phone = new TextField("Home","home_phone_number","Home phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($home_phone);

$work_phone = new TextField("Work","work_phone_number","Work phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($work_phone);

$cell_phone = new TextField("Cell","cell_phone_number","Cell phone number");
$phone_fieldset->add($cell_phone);

//address
$address_tab = new Tab("Address");
$tabs->add($address_tab);

$home_fs = new FieldSet("Home","The home address of the person");
$address_tab->add($home_fs);

$home_address = new TextArea("Address","home_address");
$home_fs->add($home_address);

$home_city = new TextField("City","home_city");
$home_fs->add($home_city);

$home_rsp = new TextField("Region, State or Provice","home_rsp");
$home_fs->add($home_rsp);

$home_country = new TextField("Country","home_country");
$home_fs->add($home_country);

$work_fs = new FieldSet("Work","The work address of the person");
$address_tab->add($work_fs);

$work_address = new TextArea("Address","work_address");
$work_fs->add($work_address);

$work_city = new TextField("City","work_city");
$work_fs->add($work_city);

$work_rsp = new TextField("Region, State or Provice","work_rsp");
$work_fs->add($work_rsp);

$work_country = new TextField("Country","work_country");
$work_fs->add($work_country);

//ims
$im_tab = new Tab("IMs");
$tabs->add($im_tab);

$im_google = new TextField("Google","im_google");
$im_tab->add($im_google);

$im_yahoo = new TextField("Yahoo!","im_yahoo");
$im_tab->add($im_yahoo);

$im_msn = new TextField("MSN","im_msn");
$im_tab->add($im_msn);

$im_aol = new TextField("AOL","im_aol");
$im_tab->add($im_aol);

$im_irc = new TextField("IRC","im_irc");
$im_tab->add($im_irc);

$form->render();

You can click here to have a look at this code in action http://fahodzi.paanoo.com/fapi_tutorial1.php

Elements, Fields and Containers

After we have done some forms lets see what more we can do. In case you haven’t noticed already, the whole library is orgarnized into fields and containers. There are actually three major abstract classes which serve as the foundation for the whole library. These are the Element, Field and Container classes. The Element class, which is the base class for most of the classes in the library is responsible for some html services. The Field class is a subclass of the Element class and it is responsible for producing and handling fields like (TextField, RadioButton, Checkboxes and the others). The container class is also a subclass of the element class. It is used for containing other elements. This means it can contain both fields and containers. Some of the contianers are the Form, the Tab, the Box and the Fieldset.

Validating the form data

There are several validations you can perform on your fields. First of all you can set some fields as required just by setting the reqired property of the field. This is done by calling the setter method as such:

$field->setRequired(true);

As soon as you call this method on any of the fields, it would be required for that field to contain data whenever the form is submitted. If there is no data a simple error message is displayed for the user to handle.

Apart from the required validation you can define custom validation functions which are called on your field whenever the data is submitted. The details of this can be figured out from the documentation. The TextField class has an inbuilt regular expression validation method which comes in handy when you want to do more complex validations.

Getting Using the Form Data

After you have collected your data you might want to perform some operations on the form data. In most cases you might want to save the data into a database. Every form has a property called the callback. The call back is a function which takes one parameter. The parameter of the callback function is passed the data that was captured in the form. Another thing that many people find cool about this form library is the automatic data insertion into the database. These are handled by the setDatabaseSchema(), setDatabaseTable() and setPrimaryKey() methods.

If you set the database schema and table and a connection exists to a database, the form class automatically dumps the form data into the table. The field names of your table must correspond with the field names of the fields in the form. If you set the primary key, the form is automatically filled with the form data on rendering so that when submitted, the data is rather updated instead of it being saved again.

Conclusions

There are so many things I had wanted to write about but time didn’t allow me to. I am pretty sure if you really want to use this library, you can go through the little documentation that comes with it and figure things out for your self. It is really not that difficult. All the same, I would like to comment a little about things I personally do not like about this library.

The paramount thing is the one that has to do with form data being saved automatically. This is really not very good and although I liked it initially really do not use it much these days. I rather extracted the code that does the magic and used it to implement some form of active record system and it is even much more simpler (I may write on that in my next post).

Another thing that I would really like to add in future is proper javascript support so that the forms could be submitted through AJAX. Now that would be cool. When I do that I do not want to break the library signatures so that it would be very portable to existing code. But for now this is all I have and unless I really feel the necessity to do that, I am really going to keep this one. Anyway I have added the whole library and a little documentation to this post. You can download it from here http://fahodzi.paanoo.com/fapi.tar.bz2 (please bear with me if you find any strange things in the documentation. I made the that one for a client) . Hope you enjoy it. Happy programming.

For a long time I had always wanted to develop for the flash platform but the huge cost of the authouring suite always put me off. I tried a couple of open source ways to develop for the platform but none of them really worked well for me. Earlier this year during a random escapade on the Internet I came accross Flex.

I realized I had been left behind. I personally decided to get into this but I couldn’t really get a suitable editor. The Flex Builder is expensive and most of the options out there are targeted more to Windows than to Linux. So I had to make do with what I had and I stuck to one of my personal favorites GEdit. I like to use GEdit a lot because for some reason the Oblivion colour scheme seems to be very friendly to my eyes. Well this article is intend to help you configure GEdit so you could write codes for flex or ActionScript.

Asumptions

1. I am assuming that you have installed a copy of the Flex SDK and it is accessible through your PATH.
2. I am assuming that you have some basic understanding of bash sell scripting.

Configuring Gedit

In GEdit locate Tools >> External Tools. On the dialog that opens select New Tool. Give the tool a name and go ahead to give it a shortcut (Try to figure those out). In the commands section paste the following:

#!/bin/bash
if (/opt/flex-3.2/bin/mxmlc "$GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH")
then
/opt/flex-3.2/bin/flashplayer "`echo $GEDIT_CURRENT_DOCUMENT_PATH | awk -F.mxml {'print $1'}`.swf"
fi


Be sure to replace /opt/flex-3.2 with the correct location of your flex SDK and you are good to go. Anytime you hit the shortcut for your external tool your flex compiler would be invoked.

For syntax hilighting you might want to use XML for the MXML files and JAVA for the ActionScript files.

I must say that its been quite a while since I expressed myself on this blog. I know this sounds like the regular cliche excuse but I have been busy. I have also been very broke. Sometimes it feels like I am living the broke but almost rich lifestyle. So now that I am done with the excuses I would like to continue with my post. In the past month, I have been working on this crack down of a project with some software development company. Through this project I have had the opportunity to meet a few of the developpers who actually turn the IT wheels here in Ghana (although there are technically three people working on my project and the other two are not related to this articvle). I am trying hard to learn a lot about this “IT business” as it is called in Ghana but my first lessons have not been pleasant ones.

I guess I have seen everything from unneccesary deadlines to poorly developped applications but one thing that I realized in general is that everybody is constantly in search of an easy way to finish something quickly and move on. It might be true that this is how everybody is working around the world (I mean with all the talk going on about rapid application development and all that), but I feel down here most people just have it wrong. We go around trying to find a way that works fast and better yet we end up working with something that is obviously not up to the task in any way. It might sound like I am just trying to air my frustrations on this blog but it is not so (although that is what blogs are for). The real truth is that it is difficult finding a relationship between what one is taught in school and what you meet in the real world. Things are much more different and I guess there are only two choices for me. Either I adapt to the industry or I try to influence it. The first option sounds like the best because the second one is very ambitious. However, the second one is worth giving a try. Well for now I think I just have to shut up and keep all my worries to myself.

Please not that blogs are for self expression. Not everything is written for people to read. But if you read through this and it didn’t make any sense then …

I was recently working on a web content management system with a friend and we made a very surprising discovery. We were actually using PHP to include content from another page on our local server unto the page that was curently being viewed. This thing worked perfectly when I was using the Eclipse editor but when I moved to my friends office and we started using Expression studio (which obviously doesn’t seem to support PHP), the include statement started introducing unwanted characters. Although most of the browsers on which this was tested (Opera, Safari and FireFox) skipped these characters, IE of all browsers displayed them and messed up our template. Well we started to panic because we didn’t know what we had done wrong and IE is one browser you don’t want to mess with because everybody uses it.

So we started digging on the Internet to find out what was actually wrong with the system. The first hint of our real problem was sensed when we saw a large number of newsgroup posts which described problems similar to what we were facing. Then we realized we were actually playing around with encoding problems. We figured out that saving the files we wanted to include with ANSI encoding saved the day.

The previous encoding format we were using was the UTF-8 format. This format is preceeded with a Byte Order Mark (BOM). This Byte Order Mark is obviously supposed to tell the reader of the format about the byte order of the file it is reading. When the PHP include function was called to include this file it also included the BOM characters which IE decided to display and mess up the template.

To graduate in my school one has to work on a graduation project. For my project I decided to build a TV broadcast automation system. What exactly was this system supposed to do? Well, the whole idea was to build some sort of media player which played video’s as it has been scheduled to. It was also supposed to keep a log of the media files played. The system I came up with was quite interesting. It did all that was required of it and even more. It had the ability to place logos on the screen, scroll text along the bottom of the screen and also automatically give information about the currently playing media file such as flashing a tag saying “Now Playing” as the video is playing. Cool eh!

Architecture of the System

Well the system was very simple by design but extremely difficult to implement. It featured a database backend which allowed the storage of the schedules and other related data. This database was powered by either MySQL or SQLite. It also had an FFMPEG based library (that I wrote) which allowed for the decoding of the media files and its playback. As far as operation was concerned it had simple user interfaces through which the user could configure the system. In order to compose the video I used SDL and took advantage of its overlays for some acceleration. I think using openGL would have been a better choice here but I was way too deep in development when I realized this. I also used SDL and PortAudio for the audio access. There was a simple DSP engine put in place just for audio mixing. I wrote that one too. It featured a plugin system so that the DSP engine could be expanded. Well so that is pretty much all you need to know about the internals of the system.

What next

For the future, I am planning to release the code as a basis for a new open sourced project. I am just cleaning out the code and removing some shortcuts I had to put in place just so that I would have a working system for my presentation. Although these shortcuts work, they would be a huge hinderance to development in future as I can forsee that they would make the code very difficult to maintain. I must say that this release could be any moment from now. I have a few things on my hand I want to complete then I would give this thing full attention.

For now you can just enjoy the screen-shots and fantasize.

Almost a year ago a new set of bank notes and coins were released by the government to replace the old bulky and cumbersome notes. I mean who wanted to carry a bank note worth 20,000 cedis which is equivalent to just 2 dollars. This move was embraced by everybody and I think one year down the line we are all still getting used to it. At least my parents cannot laugh at me that our generation didn’t spend pesewas. For me when these new notes and coins were released I was happy because we were now going to be able to pay arbitrarily any price for anything. It was the end of the era where everything was increased by 500 cedis when the prices of fuel shot up.

As part of the new coins and bank notes was the 1pessewa coin. This coin was to be the smallest unit of payment making any arbitrary payment amount possible. However a year down the line the 1 pessewa coins are almost non existent. I surprised the other day when I took a tro-tro and saw one. The mate gave it as change to one of the passengers and she refused to take it. Nobody took the coins in the car so I took it. I was then asking myself why don’t they want the 1 pessewa coin. And also come to think of it we still increase the prices of things by 5 pessewas as soon as the prices of petrol shoots. So what I am really worried about is where are we going with all this? If we don’t accept these coins then I think we are just going back to the era where everything increased by 5. This 5 pessewa logic would kill us.

Four years ago, when I first entered the university, I really wanted to learn a lot before I was taught so I decided to try the new craze everybody was talking about… LINUX. It sounded very cool to tell someone that you have Linux on your computer (and trust me it still does). There was however a problem getting started with Linux. I didn’t have the bandwidth to download any of the major distributions and I even didn’t know anyone who could physically give me a copy, so I decided to try some minimalistic Linux distributions. The first one I laid my hands on was muLinux.

It was a very small download and I just couldn’t wait to get home and try it on my 200Mhz Pentium powered HP Vectra which had 128MB of RAM and a very small hard disk. I had printed out the booting instructions so that I could work faster. I booted my machine in Windows 98’s MS-DOS only mode and then I used the batch file supplied to start the Linux kernel. I was so happy, my face lit up and then I started feeding in diskette after diskette of packages to get the system properly set up. When I was done, I tried to get myself acquainted with the shell. It was a lot of fun and it was very difficult. After weeks of trying to get the system to be cool I was convinced that muLinux was not what I needed. I just couldn’t do anything with it. The only thing I remember doing which I enjoyed was actually compiling and running the rapidq example programs for Linux. I knew it was time to move on the next distro I found was SLAX.

I remember sitting at the cafe for about 4 hours just waiting for the almost 200MB SLAX download to finish. When it was done I burnt it unto a CD and went home to test it. It booted fine but I wasn’t satisfied. My computer just couldn’t take the stress. It was then I figured I needed a new computer. After all it was 2004 and what was I doing with a 200Mhz pentium. I did my best and got a PIII 700MHz with 256MB ram and trust my the SLAX was just flying. Boy! I was just living the Linux life. A beautiful KDE desktop with all the nice applications you can think of. I was trying to do almost everything in Linux. I download a large number of the SLAX modules and I was remastering my SLAX CD almost every weekend. My problem with SLAX was the live CD aspect. I mean it was slowing me down. I prayed for a solution and I had one. I figured out how to get SLAX to boot off my hard disk but this was still not very fast because it was like copying the live CD unto your hard disk and telling a boot loader to load it when the machine starts. It was still compressed so I was still bound to get some performance set backs. In search for a better alternative I found Ubuntu. The Ubuntu CD was given to me by a friend who had just ordered it on the internet and didn’t know what it was used for. This CD was like an answer to my prayer.

For the first time in my over one year experience with Linux I was now going to install Linux unto my hard disk, the proper way. I erased everything on my hard disk and I installed my shiny new ubuntu system. When it finally boot I was happy but that was short lived. I found out that I couldn’t play MP3’s and videos. I thought the was a mistake in the installation so I did it again. Still the MP3’s didn’t play. Well I then found out that the system was not supposed to play MP3’s by default. I had to install some extra stuff. I didn’t have an internet connection at home so I had to carry my computer to the internet cafe and install all the needed files. Now I was happy but the question was; am I going to go to the cafe anytime I needed extra software…well the answer was yes. It was however not a problem.

After a few months of using ubuntu, I discovered Linux From Scratch a project which teaches you how to create your own distribution. Well this sounded like what I had been waiting for. I downloaded all the needed packages and then I started building. It took me almost two weeks to get the base system up. During this period I had to restart the project over five times. After I had the text only environment, I started adding my gui’s and other stuff. The Beyond Linux From Scratch project was even bigger it allowed me to add all the extra stuff. When I bought my new computer, I rebuilt the latest LFS and I added the following:

1. XFCE for the desktop
2. MPLAYER and XINE for videos
3. Audacious for audio
4. OppenOffice
5. Eclipse for devt
6. Adobe Reader (Not Open Sourced but who cares. It is still the best PDF reader)
7. Gimp, Inkscape, Blender for Graphics
8. FireFox (I only use this for offline stuff)
9. XAMPP
10. Many More.

Enjoy a screen shot of my current configuration. I would also advice that if you really want a Linux system you would be passionate about. Build an LFS. It is fun and educative at the same time. Trust me I really don’t fear downloading source packages anymore. But you would need a lot of patience if you are going to get it right. Screen shot is below, have fun!