Wednesday, June 25, 2008

Rip music using Windows Media Player (Rev: 1.1)



My niece asked me on how to rip music from the music CD and store it as mp3 format in her (Windows XP OS) computer so that she can transfers the mp3 music to her handphone later. You can use Windows Media Player (free) to rip music and save it as mp3 format. You can download Windows Media Player 11 (24.5 MB) for Windows XP OS from Microsoft website.

Assume you are using Windows Media Player 11 in Windows XP computer and have placed your music CD into your CD/DVD drive:
  1. Kindly click Start -> All Programs -> Windows Media Player.

  2. In Windows Media Player, kindly click the Rip button. Click the CD/DVD drive that you have placed your CD. Your list of song tracks will automatically appear and are all selected by default. You can uncheck those songs that you don't want to rip by clearing the check box next to the song. You can also use the check box at the top of the list to select or clear all check boxes.

    Rip

  3. Before ripping, please click Rip -> More Options. You can change the rip music storing location, format (eg: mp3), audio quality, etc. Kindly click OK after you have changed your settings.

    Options

  4. Kindly click the Start Rip button to start ripping your selected songs.

    The first time you rip music, you are prompted to choose the format for the files being created. Please click one of the following options:
  • Keep my current format settings. This option keeps your current file format and audio quality level settings and immediately starts ripping the songs you selected to your computer. By default, Windows Media Player uses the Windows Media Audio (wma) format, which optimizes the balance between file size and sound quality.

  • Change my current format settings. Select this option if you want to change the format, bit rate, storage folder, or other options.

    After you click an option, click OK.

After the songs have been ripped, you can find and play them in your library.

Tuesday, June 24, 2008

"No flash video displayed" error in YouTube (Rev: 1.1)



Situation

In YouTube website, my niece's computer (Windows XP OS) running Internet Explorer (IE) version 7 browser cannot see the flash video displayed on her screen. The error message was

"Hello, you either have JavaScript turned off or an old version of Macromedia's Flash Player. Get the latest Flash player".

She had already installed the latest Adobe Flash Player version 9.0.124.0 for IE 7 from Adobe website but it still did not work.


Solution

1) Open the Window Explorer. Kindly navigate to C:\WINDOWS\system32\Macromed\Flash folder

2) Locate the file FlashUtil9f.exe and double-click to run it. This will reinstall the Adobe Flash player so that it will display the flash video correctly in YouTube website.

"Boot command is disabled" error in OBP (Rev: 1.1)



Situation

When the Sun Fire V480 server with Solaris 9 Operating System (OS) is power on, the screen is blank for a long period of time (more than 15 minutes) before it finally show the diagnostic result and an ok prompt. I decided to upgrade the OS to Solaris 10. I placed the Solaris 10 5/2008 (SPARC) DVD into the DVD drive.

From the ok prompt,
ok boot cdrom
-> boot command is disabled


Solution

Although the Sun Fire V480 server switch is turned to the normal power on position, I suspected the server was in diagnostic mode during power on because it showed the diagnostic result and the diag-switch environment is set to true. Hence, I tried the below steps:

ok setenv diag-switch? false
ok reset-all

The server will auto reboot itself and boot to the ok prompt. This time, the diagnostic result is not shown. I tried the below:

ok boot cdrom

and the server boot from the DVD normally.

After installing the Solaris 10 OS, I change the diag-passes environment variable in the eeprom from 1 to 0 in order to make the server boot up faster:

# eeprom diag-passes=0