ABC - The Blog

If you ever wanted to obtain the audio from a youtube video as MP3 on your hard disk, there is this efficient and convenient tool:

http://www.listentoyoutube.com/index.php

Fast and simple to use, with a few easy steps:

1. Paste the youtube url in the textbox below "Enter YouTube URL"
2. Click GO
3. Click 'Download MP3' below when the processing completes.

ze blog. of mykey: Bus Tour 2008

The beautiful sun and the clear sky now gone,
One last cold swim and November's ending.
Cold winds and wet roads now there is,
Black clouds gather and December's coming.

A child rides his bike along a thoughtful road,
Away from the cars and along the shore.
In that silence and at the pace of his cycle,
He thinks of his memories, wishes and more.

But the whistling winds against the flapping sails,
And the whispering of leaves and tightening of ropes.
They pull the child from oh such deep thoughts,
The child loses grip, so scaringly from the hopes.

So the child rides faster, and the trees fly past,
Straight ahead, a quick turn and an uphill.
The child cycles ahead uncertain of his way,
But he is focused with a long trip to fulfill.

It is only too soon that the child is tired,
Breathing heavily after so much he fought.
He stops and rests, certainly a merited break,
But only gains, the sorrow of a recurring thought.

Quickly the child gets back on his bike,
Tired he continues to cycle against the blow,
Hope makes one so vulnerable and so weak,
But deep inside, he fears letting it go.

Sometimes it is useful to convert a string to a value of an enumeration. It's extremely easy to convert an enumeration value to a string of course, with the ToString() method, however doing the vice versa of it doesn't seem as easy.

Searching on the net, you will find that most people create their own function, in which they will loop through all values in the enumeration, compare their string equivalent with a given string and if they are equal, the enumeration value is returned. But why do this when a method is there waiting for you on a sunbed? It is the static method Enum.Parse() which has 2 overloads.

The first overload takes the type of the enumeration and the string value, returning an object, which may often need to be cast to the type of enumeration.

Example:

enum Days {Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thur, Fri, Sat };


private void main() {
  string s = "Mon";
  Days day = (Days)Enum.Parse( typeof( Days ), s );
}

private void main() {
  string s = "mon";
  Days day = (Days)Enum.Parse( typeof( Days ), s, true );
}

Today we enjoyed the last of summer (which actually ended long ago) with a nice short swim in St. George's Bay. The next hours followed with unexpectedly heavy rain, so we sheltered until it stopped. At that point, we went back to the beach, simply to be the only persons on that sandy beach.



However, we definitely were not the only living things on the beach. Here are a list of existences that reigned on the bay:

Camouflaged Frog:


Small cockroach-looking bug:


Bigger cockroach-looking bug:


Biggest cockroach-looking bug:


Homo sapiens:

Finally I've uploaded selected photos of Austria. Unfortunately, there are no photos of our 3rd day (17.09.08) due to problems with the camera, but there still are two photos that were taken by a camera in the salt mines.

Austria (14/09/08 - 21/09/08)

Remember I had promised you a little talk about Mozart? Here it is.

Having returned from my vacation in Austria, I'll describe something interesting about Salzburg and Mozart. I’ll assume I have gone to Austria without the least knowledge on this person, Mozart (which I hope is not the case with any of you readers). Well, after having walked through the streets of Salzburg and having visited a number of shops, I can proudly say to have learned that this man, so adored by the Austrians, is the one to have created or invented a kind of...chocolates. But really, everywhere you went, you'd see these chocolates nicely packed in boxes displaying Mozart’s face, or Mozart holding the box of chocolates. How can you think otherwise? You can see for yourselves:

And while discussing this, I can also mention that I’ve seen a book called: ‘The Sound of Cooking’.

19th – 20th September
Hellbrun & the End

18th September
Welfen

17th September
Hallein

16th September
Liechtensteinklamm (Liechtenstein Gorge)

15th September
Salzburg City

The highlight of the day was the fortress protruding on the top of a high hill. Being too lazy to walk it upwards, we rode the funicular which lifted us up straight into the castle. Although we spent most of the day there, I have to admit I can’t think much about what to mention on this place. There were some spectacular views of course, and the museum inside was interesting as well, showing some antique objects used in those times (11th and 12th centuries), such as torture objects (there’s no reason at all for mentioning this first), swords, guns, rifles and so on. I have a photo of their cutlery taken from my mobile, and from that photo, (in a (somewhat) random thought) I realize that the people of those times did not know the efficiency of forks with three teeth...

14th September
Departure from Malta

This day is the day of travelling. I must admit it started out quite well upon seeing the efficiency of Air Malta’s new feature – Web Check-in. Everything’s going online now. The check-in is mostly done on the web, choosing the seats yourself, printing the boarding tickets yourself, (or better, “tickets”, as it is a little unusual to see boarding tickets on a piece of normal paper, black and white), and no needs to wait in long queues at the airport. What can I say? Air Malta is a serious company.

Air Malta took us to Vienna in Austria, were we had to wait for about three or four hours before our next plane leaves to Salzburg. After careful analysis and exhaustive thinking, we decided to remain at the airport before the next flight. At that, I chose to take a look at some cameras, in hopes of finding one that is relatively good and that’s not any more expensive than €200...it turned out that the cheapest one was €235. Pity.

Past those four hours, we headed for the next plane, which was a propeller plane. During the course on this plane, I can say that I have learned something. Air hostesses offering hot coffee during a flight on such a plane have a good sense of humour. It must have been the laugh of the day watching my mum spilling coffee all over her (logically, due to the shakiness of the plane). I’m also assuming that the pilot was just dumped by his girlfriend. You’d understand if you experienced the landing yourselves, or if you had the honour (which I had) of seeing the aircraft’s wheel smashing onto the ground.

Finally we arrived in Salzburg. It was a strange feeling after having been swimming just the day before, and now shivering in the cold. It must have been around 11°C at that time (in contrast to the 30°C and higher in Malta). After 50 minutes on the taxi, we arrived at our dear Alpenland Sport Hotel, at around 11:30pm. We thought our room was 137, and we spent about 10 minutes inserting the card repeatedly, each time being rejected. In fact, it was not our room. I can imagine the people inside there, shivering in fear after hearing weird noises at the door at that time of the night. But anyhow, we then made it into our (correct) room, and had a good night sleep.

• Chuck Norris never retreats. He fights in the opposite direction.
  
  
• Chuck Norris was able to win Connect 4 in three moves.
  
  
• Chuck Norris can punch a cyclops between the eye.
  

When using a DataGrid or a DataGridView control, have you ever had mouse events such as MouseDown or MouseClick, where you wanted to know in which cell (or part of the table) is the pointer pointing to? You have the X and Y coordinates passed in the MouseEventArgs parameter, but how would you translate them to column and row indices?

One way is to apply a long formula involving those coordinates, the size of the table, sizes of cells, headers, etc... But obviously, that's tedious for a C# developer. That's the primitive way (or the C way) of handling it.

Thanks to a workmate, I discovered the magic of the HitTestInfo class. An instance of this class will give you the row and column indexes amongst other information. To create the object, say in a MouseDown event, you do the following:

private void dataGridView1_MouseDown( object sender, MouseEventArgs e )
{
  System.Windows.Forms.DataGridView.HitTestInfo h = dataGridView1.HitTest( e.X, e.Y );
}

if ( h.Type == System.Windows.Forms.DataGridViewHitTestType.ColumnHeader )
  MessageBox.Show( "You clicked on a column header." );
else
  MessageBox.Show( h.Type.ToString() + '(' + h.ColumnIndex + ',' + h.RowIndex + ')' );

ze blog. of mykey: Bike Road Trip

These are gonna be my longest rides so far:

Friday - San Gwann to Hal Far (and back)
~ 13.86 km (x2)
(Done in 1 hour 5 minutes)


Saturday - San Gwann to Cirkewwa
~ 22.85 km
(Done in ~5 hours due to wrong path taken and tire problems)


Saturday/Sunday - Around in Gozo

Sunday - Cirkewwa to San Gwann
~ 22.85 km