Disclaimer: What you will find mostly in this post is - RANT.

I have been using Evolution email client for more than three years from now. I have moved my mails stored in the .evolution folder from computer to computer. Evolution has handled literally millions of emails for me in these years. On the flip side, I have suffered many agonies with Evolution. After every few days Evolution would download all the messages in my POP account again and mark them as unread. The re-downloading thingy has strained my bandwidth several times. Sometimes the password prompt for the email accounts would appear for no reason I could ever imagine. Any password I typed in those prompts would always return an error message followed by another two prompts to type in the password. I swear I had typed the correct password. Oh my, Evolution was supposed to remember my passwords as per my saved preferences. The "summary mismatch" error message is another frequent troublemaker. After restarting the application few times it seemed to correct itself somehow.

Mozilla Firefox is indeed one of the best browsers available today. Firefox web browser is my favorite too. Tab browsing and pop-up blocker have won the hearts of many avid Internet surfers. Spell checking, session restore, integrated search, phishing protection and automatic updates are some of the widely used and popular features. Firefox can be immensely personalized by installing Add-ons.

I have compiled a list of Firefox Add-ons that I frequently use. It takes several days to explore all the Add-ons. Start your journey by clicking on Tools>Add-ons>Get Extensions from your Firefox browser window. Or visit the Firefox Add-ons page directly.

Password Exporter: You know how hard it is to remember thousand and one usernames and passwords. Every other website has a registration and login system. I have seen people writing down the passwords and usernames because their memories are not as much reliable. Some people even use password management software. It is very convenient to store all your website passwords and usernames in Firefox browser. Firefox remembers the form data including the usernames and passwords. When you upgrade your operating system or when you move to a different computer you can use this handy Add-on. Install this Add-on and export your passwords to a file. On the other computer, install the same Add-on and import the file. All your usernames and passwords will be magically retained.

Jack is a GNU/Linux and free and open source software pro and uses OpenOffice. Joe uses Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office suite. Joe does justice to his name and is an average 'Joe' when it comes to computers. Joe creates a document using Microsoft Word and sends it to Jack. Jack opens the document and has absolutely no issues with it. Now it's Jack's turn to create a document. Jack saves the document in Microsoft word, .doc, format and sends it to Joe. Absolutely fine.

Jack tells people that there is a beautiful office suite called OpenOffice which can be downloaded from openoffice.org for free. Using openoffice.org one can open documents saved in Microsoft Office format. One can also save documents in Microsoft Office formats. Many users have realized that OpenOffice is superior to Microsoft Office.

.doc, .xls and .ppt are proprietary file formats of Microsoft. Microsoft does not provide information for other office suite software developers to read and write to these file formats. When you create a document in any of these file formats you are locking yourself to Microsoft. You are depending on Microsoft Office application. Microsoft decides how your documents will be displayed in the future versions of their office suite.

There are thousands of websites that tell you how to make money on Internet. There are thousands of people who actually make money everyday by selling information on the Internet. Selling software online is as old as the Internet itself. What is surprising is people sell free and open source software to those who are technically less qualified. There have been numerous cases where people have sold information and commodities freely available for general public. People who don't know how to obtain free software and information are exploited very often. In the information age ignorants are taxed.

On the openoffice.org user's mailing list there are few reports of such incidents. Johhny goes to Microsoft site or contacts some Microsoft reseller and gets to know the price for Microsoft Office suite. He thinks the price is way too much and currently not affordable. Johnny now looks for alternatives. Spends some time Googling around and finally visits ebay.com. A quick search for office suite gives him few interesting links. His eye now catches the cutting edge software with a price tag of only $49. He finds another item with similar specs for only $10. After weighing pros and cons of the two competing software he decides to buy the one with the price tag of $49. He completes the transaction by paying from his credit card.

Yesterday, I had to upload a table and a paragraph of text in one of our websites built on Drupal CMS. I prepared the content in OpenOffice.org Writer. I quickly inserted a table and typed the text in a paragraph in OO Writer. I also added some colors to the table to enhance the look and feel of the document. I thought I could easily replicate the design in the Drupal CMS.

I logged in to Drupal and inserted the post with the table and text content. This post defaced the ambiance of the whole web page. The table was displayed in the extreme right and I had to use the horizontal scroll bar in the browser to see the content. The post needed CSS to fix the problem.

I am developing a solution to add a custom CSS file to Drupal from several days. Due to stringent deadlines of the existing projects I'm unable to spend much time on it. The idea of WYSIWYG editor flashed in my mind. I quickly downloaded the TinyMCE software from Moxicode and the TinyMCE module from Drupal. Installed them on the local copy of the Drupal site. The WYSIWYG editor never turned up in the content posting area. I had to spend some more time to fix the installation issue. I did not have enough time to fiddle with WYSIWYG editor installation.

I looked at other alternatives. I exported the OO Writer file to HTML which gave me only 800 lines of XHTML. Inserting 800 lines of XHTML markup was really not worth for a small post.

Finally, I copied and pasted the table from OO Writer to OO Draw. Exported the table as a jpeg image. Uploaded the image and inserted the text in the Drupal site. Added a one liner markup to float the image to the right of the text paragraph. That gave me what I wanted.

How to convert ogg theora(ogg video) file to flash video format(.flv)?

This is a sequel to the "Screencasting With gtk-RecordMyDesktop" blog post. This post answers the question - "How to convert .ogg video to .flv?". gtk-RecordMyDesktop saves files in .ogg format. The screen cast is exported into Ogg Theora format. I wanted to upload some of the screen casts to Youtube. They don't accept video files in Ogg Theora format at Youtube. I had to convert Ogg Theora file into Flash Video format to upload it to Youtube. I did some research on audio and video converters. FFmpeg was the solution to my problem. FFmpeg is a command line tool to convert one video file format to another.

I used the below command to convert Ogg Theora file to .flv format.

How to record audio(from Mic) and video(from screen) from the desktop on Linux(Fedora Core 6)?

I was looking for a screen recording software. I wanted the software to capture video from the screen and audio from Mic. I had heard about recoding audio and video separately by using tools like Audacious. I knew there was a software which could do it simultaneously. I googled around and found out gtk-recordMyDesktop was what I needed. As usual, I clicked Applications->Add/Remove Software to launch Package Manager. I searched for "recordmydesktop" and selected gtk-recordmydesktop-0.3.3.1-4.fc6 from the search results to install it.

gtk-RecordMyDesktop did a great job by recording video but not audio. I started the troubleshooting process. I clicked Advanced on the gtk-recordMyDesktop window and then clicked Sound tab. There was an option to use Jack for audio capture. I selected Jack for audio capture and it only gave me error messages stating jack_lsp returned no ports. It also asked me to make sure jackd is running. I tried various commands to start jackd but I couldn't. I gave up using Jack with gtk-recordMyDesktop.