software

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16
Oct 09

7-11 Jingle

ナナコで買お買お、セブンセブン！

Since I heard that 7-11 jingle about 2 years ago, the thing has been stuck in my head. Taking a break from studying for JLPT,  I decided to create a ringtonefor my iPhone. Hopefully in the process, I get to learn more about my Mac.

1. First, the searching for the clip

I thought this would be easy, but I couldn’t look for the exact one. The keywords I used were probably wrong. There’s this video of the nanaco commercial on youtube, but there’s a voice-over and the jingle is “nanaco de iko iko” instead of “nanaco de kao kao“.  The best I could find was someone playing the jingle (as well as the door-opening chime) on the piano.

2. Next, downloading the clip.

Getting the flv/mp4 source is as simple as a single-click with the  DownloadHelper firefox extension. Be sure to click the “HQ18″ one so that it’ll already be in Mp4 format.

Picture 6

3. Separating the audio track

I googled a bit and was surprised this can be done in GarageBand (GarageBand can handle video!?).

  1. Created a New Project and dragged the file downloaded in step 2.
  2. Then deleted the video track,
  3. clipped the sound here and there and
  4. exported it to an AAC sound file (.m4a) using the Share->Export Song to Disk….

To be usable as an iPhone rihgtone, the setting for the export should be : AAC Encoder, 128kbps.

Note: The exported song contained about 4 seconds of extra silence. Before deciding to edit it using audacity, I googled a bit and found this from a forum:

Before exporting, click the Loop tool. (2 arrows bent in a broken circle).
Drag the yellow line that appears at the top to length of the track. It should then only export to where the yellow line ends.

That solved the problem.

4. Now the magic: Making an iPhone Ringtone.

There are 3 steps to doing this  :

  1. Go to the folder where you exported the song
  2. Change the file extension from .m4a to .m4r
  3. Chuckle! There is no step 3!

(detailed steps with screenshots for created ringtones from any .mp3 file)

5. Placing it on the iPhone.

In iTunes, choose File->Add To Library and select the .m4r file you created. Sync. (You may have to edit the Sync settings for your Ringtones to include the newly imported one).

That’s it!

(I’m waiting for permission from the YouTube user before I post the ringtone files.)

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15
Sep 09

Acknowledging One’s Own Mistakes

I was plowing through the 800+ pages of the Windows User Experience Interaction Guidelines (UX-Guide) and found this gem on guide guestions for Group Boxes:

Are all the controls inside the group? If so, indicate the relationship on the larger surface, such as the parent dialog box or page.

Incorrect:
Aa511459.GroupBoxes03(en-us,MSDN.10)

This is the same dialog box that is currently in Vista. It takes guts to bluntly point out ones one mistake (although in this case, since Vista is not a complete re-design, the miss is understandable…almost), so ++ points to Microsoft.

There are tons of other examples using their own existing UI in the UX-Guide.

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9
Sep 09

“more reliable”

I’ve had this post in the drafts since August 6, but only recently catched up with my backlog of tasks enough to finish it. This was supposed to be posted before the new cat released.

Anyway, I was going to comment on how misleading clever Apple’s marketing is. One example: take a look at one improvement they did for Snow Leopard, one I recently had a problem with.

eject-reliability

I never had this problem with PCs as there was a hardware eject. Even when apps went haywire or CDs/DVDs went bad, there was an alternate way of ejecting a disk without having to restart. If you were really honest, you wouldn’t call what you had in Mac OS X ,”reliable”. (Perhaps that’s what people are used to?).

The KB from Apple says to do several things, with the final solution being:

If that doesn’t work, restart the computer, then hold down the mouse button.

Right. Something I’ll never be able to associate with disk eject in a million years (well, maybe a thousand).

I used lsof in the terminal when I encountered this problem. MacOSXHints.com recently posted a script to do this in one go ( which is why this post got out of the drafts folder ):

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#!/bin/bash
PATH=${PATH}:/sbin:/usr/sbin
dr=($(drutil status | grep -i 'type:'))
devtype=${dr[1]}
device=($(mount | grep ${dr[3]}))
if [ $devtype = "No" ]
then echo No disk found. Sorry! >&2
  exit 1;
fi
echo A $devtype is mounted on the device named $device
pids=($(sudo -p 'Please enter the administrator password:' lsof -t $device))
echo \nList of programs that may be preventing the disk to eject
ps -o pid,user,comm=COMMAND -www -p $(echo ${pids[*]} | sed 's/ /,/g')
software — 3 Comments
8
Sep 09

Source Code Test

Testing the syntax coloring plugin with the loop that pretty much runs most PCs on the planet:

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MSG msg;
while (GetMessage(&msg, NULL, 0, 0))
{
    TranslateMessage(&msg);
    DispatchMessage(&msg);
}
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15
Jun 09

Japanese Synonyms in Dictionary App

hattatsu

I love that the Dictionary App with Mac OS X comes with a very useful dictionary for Japanese. The 用例組み合わせ and the 使い分け sections are amazing.

Quick Tip : On almost any application, select some text and press Control-Command-D to look the selected word up in a mini-dictionary window.

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29
Apr 09

Outlook to Mac OS X

On my Windows laptop, I used Outlook to manage (well, strictly speaking, store) my calendar and contact data. This is for two simple reas0ns:

  • every device and most software you buy syncs with Outlook. Palms, Clies, all kinds of phones, iTunes, you name it. It was easy to have several devices (japan phone, roaming phone, web calendar) synced.
  • Office 2003 personal came with the Laptop. It was there.

It’s hard to get data out of Outlook unless you use some third party tools. Here’s how I tried migrating my Calendar and Contact data from Outlook 2003. I eventually used my iPhone  to transfer the data because of the issues with Contacts, but for those without an iPhone, read on:.

Continue reading →

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12
Jan 09

C# Resources for C++ Developers

Since I am currently leading a group of C++ developers on a C# project, I wanted to write a FAQ on C# for C++ Programmers. However, after searching the internet, it seems a lot has already been written on the topic. I’ll read through these first,  update this list  and, if I find it necessary, write a summary.