Find Music by Singing or Humming

This morning I was browsing through the ads (using the Google Adsense Preview Tool) of Sling & Stone Music and noticed an interesting ad which had the title "Find Music by Singing".

I've seen this ad pop up in our site before but this morning I decided to give it a try.

The results were astounding. Out of 10-15 songs/hums I did, only two of the results were incorrect.

Among the correct results were for Do-re-mi, ABC, Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Voice of Truth, Flood, Complicated, Love Song for a Saviour, Tom's Diner, Voltes V theme and a few others.

The two incorrect results were Bahay Kubo (unsurprisingly because it is a Filipino nursery rhyme) and Elvis' Blue Suede Shoes (which I probably didn't sing right).

It looks like a very promising site.

This is even better than Karaoke/Videoke!

1st Filipino Online Casual Game

MANILA, Philippines -- Over five years in development and with only about a dozen people to develop it, Bangu-Bang Mania has finally been shown to gaming journalists in a simple ceremony at GameFrog at Metrowalk, Ortigas Center.

Bangu-Bang Mania, developed by VITAS, is considered as the first fully Filipino made online casual game.

You can visit this article for more details.

Great job Vitas chaps!

Excited to see your game in action.

Mapping IP addresses to locations

From the August issue of the JavaRanch Journal:

Have you ever wondered how some websites are able to determine where you visited from? It all begins with the IP address that you belong to when you connect to the internet. Every time you log onto the internet your ISP assigns an IP address to you. This IP address belongs to a specific range that is allotted to regions around the world.

So how do you find out which IP address belongs to a particular location? There are a couple of ways to do this. Solutions include commercial web services as well as free databases which you can download, import and use.

This is exactly what I've been looking for.

Thanks JavaRanch!

The Story of IDM (UltraEdit)

I got this link from a friend from church earlier this week. Their story is truly inspiring...

What should we do?

In early 1996 we were convinced that a change was necessary, but what? I had a good job, good salary, good benefits and generally I was happy with my job - but I had always wanted to go into business on my own.

We prayed about this, and we felt more and more as time progressed that we should make a change - surely God had not blessed our efforts with the editor for us just to say it's too much, but dare we take the step and make it our full time occupation?

I hope we can all learn from their experience. Proverbs 16:9 states:

9 In his heart a man plans his course,
but the LORD determines his steps.

Last February, I moved to a smaller company, with smaller pay, fewer benefits but with bigger challenges and opportunities for growth.

The main motivation was so that I can focus more on developing applications for our church's needs (and hopefully make them full-fledged products in the future).

A friend asked me recently, is it easier to develop your own products?

Without thinking so much about what to say, I replied, it's more exciting.

As the Quit your job article puts it: Life is too short not to love what you do.

An Eclipse Shirt For Me!

I got an email this morning (well it arrived last Friday but I read it just today) telling me that I won a free shirt.

Thank you for submitting a review of the Eclipse release to the Ganymede Around the World contest. We have an Eclipse shirt for you! Please send me your:

1) Name

2) Shirt size (men’s small, medium, large, X-large, 2X-large or women’s small, medium, large)

3) Mailing Address

4) Phone Number (Fedex requires this for deliveries)

The contest closed yesterday, so all blog entries have been passed on to a panel of judges and we hope to have the winners of the Eclipse jackets and conference pass announced in a few weeks.

Thank you for participating and best of luck in the contest.

Hope my blog entry gets included for the other freebies!

Thanks Eclipse!

Failed Apache Startup (Skype Conflict)

For the past few days, I've been puzzled why there are times when my Apache Server would not start up properly.

Below is the message that I've been getting from the Windows Application Event Log:

The Apache service named  reported the following error: (OS 10048) Only one usage of each socket address (protocol/network address/port) is normally permitted.  : make_sock: could not bind to address 127.0.0.1:80.

As it turns out, my Skype installation was conflicting with Apache (thanks to this post).

You can resolve this conflict by going to Skype's Tools > Options > Advanced > Connection settings.



Make sure to un-check the "Use port 80 and 443 as alternatives for incoming connections".