If you have multiple soundcards in your system and have to switch between them regularly (e.g. laptop owners like me, who use an external soundcard while being docked to groove to the highest and the lowest of frequencies through those 7.1 channels and use the in-built sound card while on the move) you would definitely be under-whelmed by the less-than-stellar performance of ubuntu in switching between the sound cards. For me at least, ubuntu (fiesty 7.04 amd64) never seems to recognize that I’ve connected the speakers to my Audigy 2 ZS Notebook PCMCIA card, and merrily continues to huff-puff through the tinny laptop speakers until I manually go into the sound preferences, switch over to multichannel playback and vice versa. Well, I still haven’t found an automated solution for the switching, but here is a little cli-magic to do this in a click.

Motivated by Ronald’s ultimate wordpress plugin tutorial at devlounge, I decided that the best way to learn something is to use it in a live project. Armed with my laptop and multiple flasks of coffee, the marathon began on Friday night. My only experience with web-related development so far had been around 8–10 years ago as a kid when, just like everybody else at that time, I was fascinated by HTML and did a “read-through” of HTML 4.0. But I have always been a believer of the theory that a C programmer can program in any language quickly without having to go through the whole manuals. Thus that night bore fruit for me, and by 5:30 in the morning I had a working “Quote of The Day” plugin at my hand with all the features I wanted it to have in its first avatar. Did a bit of polishing last night, fixed a few bugs, and created a readme, and here it is, Mr. shantz-wp-qotd “1.0”, in all its glory, ready for general consumption.

Shantz WP QOTD is a plugin to add quotes to your wordpress blog in a few easy clicks. It adds quotes to your posts and your sidebars with a multitude of options for sources and customization.

== Description ==

There are many quotes plugins out there. This one has been started with a view to have the best of features and options, ease of use and multiple sources to get the quotes from.

As everyone knows, I’m an out-and-out Windows Mobile worshipper. It’s like a girlfriend, who is very difficult to manage and understand at first, but is a great source of joy if you know how to manage her. I don’t like any other phones now; the extensibility given by WM will do that to you.

I also “admire” Nokia because of the quality and reliability they provide with their phones. Having worked for them in a project (Nokia Networks/Nokia Seimens Networks actually), I know how much testing they put in before releasing something. That coupled with the recent crap-doings by even the largest of the WM Phone companies like HTC, have made me try to look elsewhere.

A few days ago, I had written about a wonderful blogging tool Blogjet. Now, if you host a wordpress blog, you’d be aware of the fact that for wordpress to be able to upload yor files (images, attachements in post etc) to the server, you have to make the upload directory writable by all. Now, this is a BIG security risk. Some people go to the lengths of CHMOD’ding their upload directory for a short while and after upload, restoring the apt file permissions back. Some upload their files separately through ftp. But Blogjet has a very cool feature. It supports uploading all your non-text content to your webspace not only by using wordpress APIs but also through ftp if wordpress doesn’t have necessary permissions to write files on your server. This saves you a lot of time, that you can then devote on writing the actual post instead of meandering around with the “technicalities”. But many a people have a heart-ache configuring the ftp with Blogjet, although it is quite simple really. This is basically due to conflicting and confusing instructions existing on the ‘net. So, here I present to you step by step, simplest instrutions to configure this. Read on.