Convert YouTube videos to mp3 format in Ubuntu

Recently i wanted to convert a YouTube video to a mp3 file.(I'm using Ubuntu 9.04)
There were few options, but here is the process that worked for me.
first I installed the ffmpeg converter, as usual by,

$ sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

Then i downloaded the YouTube video to my home folder. Lets call it myVideo.flv (when you are watching YouTube video the flv file gets downloaded in to /tmp directory but i prefer DownloadHelper). Although DownloadHelper has a option of converting the video to mp3 format, it didn't work for me.

then convert the video by,

$ ffmpeg -i ~/myVideo -acodec copy convertedFile.mp3

Now listen to your new mp3 file using your favorite mp3 player.
cheers......

(make sure that you are not violating any copyright issues when converting media)

List Of Tutorials

This is the list of tutorials posted by me. I know this is too early to set up a list like this, but no harm done. I would update this page with links to my posts & other tutorials that got my attention. cheers.......

Axis2 Tutorials

Getting started with Axis2: setting up Axis2 in your local machine

Steve Jobs' speech at stanford - 2005

I know this speech is pretty old by now. But still it is one of the best inspirational speeches I have ever heard of.I have shared it with my friends over the years. I thought of posting it to my blog too.
Here are the three simple stories of Steve Jobs. Amazing....

Getting started with AXIS2: setting up AXIS2 in your local machine

In this post I describe how to set up Axis2 in your local machine. Axis2 is a free & open source SOAP processing engine by apache software foundation. You may visit projects home page for more information regarding Axis2.

First of all you have to checkout the latest Axis2 source from the trunk, using a subversion client. I'm working on a GNU/LINUX platform & I use command line client for subversion. If you are a windows user you may use tortoise for that purpose. Go to the place where you want the source to be downloaded, in my case its ~/myProjects/axis2. Then type,

svn co http://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/webservices/axis2/trunk/java

It will take some time to download the source files for the first time. After a successful download upon the source we have to build the source. Axis2 uses maven2 as its build framework. You have to install maven2 in your machine to proceed & for installation info refer to maven home page

Now navigate to the top level directory of the source structure, in my case its ~/myProjects/axis2/java & do a clean install using the command,

mvn clean install

You should see the build successful message upon a complete build. If you are getting build errors and cannot resolve them of your own, get help from the Axis2 mailing list. They are quite friendly and willing to help you.

After a successful build you will find snapshot jar of the Axis2 in the target directory under top level Axis2 directory.

All this is fine, but if you need to develop axis2 you should be able to run/debug Axis2 runtime within a IDE to get the maximum use out of it. In my next post I will describe how to run Axis2 within your IDE.

Installing windows XP & Ubuntu to HP proBook 4410s – some common pitfalls

few days ago I bought a hp proBook 4410s from the local market here in Sri Lanka. Initially I was having an idea of buying a hp dv4 pavilion notebook. But it is bit out dated at the moment and proBook seems to be a great deal. Below are the machine spec,

• intel core 2 duo 2.4 GHz P8600

• 4 GB RAM

• 320 GB hard drive

• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth

• LED back-lit display(14.1 '')

• came with Free Dos

thats all about my new notebook. I installed windows XP & Ubuntu 9.04 to my notebook. I rarely switch to windows, but it still handy to have windows with you in case of a need. This blog post will serve as a reference to me & to any other interested party.

As usual I started with Windows XP. After the initial file loading, the installation process hangs with a blue screen saying “something wrong with my hard drive & check it”(well, this is not the exact error message, but the summary :P). After some time I figured out that it something to do with my BIOS settings. I changed the SATA mode of the hard drive to IDE from the BIOS. After that th installation was smooth as usual.

As usual the sound is not working & the touch pad is not working properly either. You have to install some device drivers & can download them from the hp site.

Then I installed Ubuntu 9.04. Ubuntu installation is painless as always & make sure that you allocate double the size of your RAM capacity as your swap space. In this case I'm using a 32 bit OS & it will only utilize around 3GB of RAM. But still I'm generous enough to allocate 8 GB of swap space. :D

The most common problem with Ubuntu installation to the proBook is malfunctioning of internal speakers. The head phones works fine. To solve this,

open a new terminal & type,

cd /etc/modprobe.d

sudo gedit options

enter your password & it will open up the options file in the text editor.Now append this (or if the file is create by you for the first time just copy/paste this) at the end of the file.

options snd-hda-intel model=laptop

save & close the file, then re-boot the machine. Now you should hear that amazing drum sound of Ubuntu.... oh yeah, time to party.

For additional info refer this thread.

Install aome other useful software using apt package manager. Some of my favorites are,

vim editor

terminator – multiple terminal emulator

mplayer – movie player

cheers..............

How to view sites with IE from your Linux box.

I'm used to read weekend newspapers published here in,Sri Lanka. we can read most of them online. But the problem comes with some local news papers which is published using in native language(Sinhala). One such news paper is RIVIRA, which I love to read.But it only renders in IE, since it uses IE specific fonts. I was searching for a online IE rendering tool and found it. :D
It 's called the NETRENDERER and it renders the the webpage as it is seen in IE as a image.you can visit it here .
But it didn't solve my issue. :( . It only renders the page until the end of the current window. so if the rendering page is bit longer you won't be able to see the full page.Of course you cant click links in the rendered page since its a image.
Even thogh with this drawback , this site comes handy to web developers who want to cross-check for the browser compatibility of hteir site.
But for me this is not going to work. I have to look for some other ways to get around this.May be IE4Linux.