Category: Technology

I work in technology sector. And I do round a clock, not only from 9 to 5. It is my bread and butter, it is my hobby, it is the fascination of my life. And with the current rate of change particular in information technology (IT), there is always something new to learn, to try, to talk about. I often post news, thoughts, and reviews. And when I do, this is the category I use.

Extreme Perl

Extreme Programming is one of those subjects on my TODO list that I want to know about, but never bother to read anything about. If one day I will kick myself in the lazy butt and actually start learning about it, one of the books I will want to flip through is Extreme Perl, which is basically Extreme Programming applied to Perl programming language.

Mark this day in the calendar

I am writing this post to mark today in the calendar forever. Today I have intentionally opened the second browser window. Pre-multi-tab-browsers times don’t count.

I use web a lot, but until today I managed to squeeze everything into a single Firefox window with a bunch of tabs. No problem what-so-ever. Today though, I felt the need for a second window, since I was doing something that required a number of tabs related to this task only. Closing my other window with plenty of miscelaneous tabs didn’t seem like a good idea, so I ended up with two browser windows. Multitabbed. This is the place where 13-year olds usually say “OMG!!!”. :)

Linux LiveCD Roundup

It’s been a long time since I’ve linked to Slashdot, so here you go…

There is this discussion about LiveCD which started with this review of 18 LiveCD distributions. I myself never tried LiveCD for I had no need so far, but I’ve heard plenty of good words for it.

Do you use LiveCD? If so, which distribution? Maybe you are using a few of them, then which ones?

Multiple sound carding with Linux

Yesterday and today I have been trying to solve a little problem o’mine. Since I started using the single computer for everything, there was a small dillema with sound. The thing is that I wanted to use the speakers to listen to mp3s and ogg, while use TV sound when watching movies. Having two sound cards in the same computer looked like a logical solution.

Luckily, both sound cards (Creative and Intel) were detected and configured by system-config-sound. Test sounds played nicely on both of them and I could even select the default sound card.

The question was how to use one card with some applications while using another with others. The answer was pretty simple – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture also known as ALSA.

aplay -l will show a list of detected sound cards. From than on it’s a breeze. Here is an example for mplayer to use a non-default card:

mplayer -ao alsa:mmap:noblock:device=hw=1.0 -fs dvd://1

The key here is the “device” argument and substituion of “:” with “=” and “,” with “.”.

Now, let Google cache this post for me to never have this problem again.