Happy New Year

The scraps have already started appearing on orkut and a few messages posted on my Wall on Facebook. It is only a few hours since I start moving towards the beach – where most of the town along with a few from all over the country and some foriegn tourists – for welcoming the new year, I thought I would write the last post for this year. A lot has happened this year – good and bad. I learnt a lot of new stuff, did somethings that I have never done and much more. At this point, I would like to thank my readers once again for all the support in the form of comments, hits :D, references etc.

Lets hope for a new year with lots of goodness, love, peace and prosperity. I am not going to make any new resolutions. I never made any resolutions ever. But I have a few wishes which I think I could make come true. A lot of good, useful posts here would be one among them 🙂

Happy New Year

Disable beep during Shut Down/Restart on Mandriva 2009

My Mandriva One 2009 GNOME system gave out a rather annoying beep from the PC speaker whenever I clicked on Shut Down or Restart. The same behaviour was seen noticed when I press Backspace continuously in the Terminal while there was nothing to delete. Today I found out a solution for these problems.

Step 1: Disable alerts from Sound preferences dialog

Sound Preferences Dialog

1.1 Go to System > Preferences > Sound

1.2 Click on Sounds tab.

1.3 Uncheck both boxes titled “Play sound effects when buttons are clicked” and “Play alert sound“. After this, the dialog box would look something like this.

Step 2: Blacklist the PC Speaker

2.1 Open Terminal: Applications > Tools > Terminal

2.2 Login as root by typing “su –” and press enter. We add a “-” because we are going to launch a GUI app from the terminal.

2.3 Type the password and press enter

2.4 Type gedit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat and press enter. gedit would open the file

2.5 Go to the end of the file and add the following lines and save it.

# PC Speaker
blacklist pcspkr

The first line is a comment. Add whatever is appropriate so that it reminds why that entry has been made.

2.6 Reboot – The beep would be heard this time but would not be heard once the system restarts.

If there is a simpler way to do this, without fiddling with the config files, please leave a comment 🙂

Trying Zooomr after a year

About a year back there were lot of problems with the photo sharing site zooomr.com and it took help from Sun and Zoho. Today, more than a year later, I thought I would revisit the site and check how things are.

A lot of features like the Zipline – something like Twitter – has been added. Users can now purchase PRO accounts and such.

But the site is about photo sharing and my interest was only in checking this feature. Uploading and viewing photos worked perfectly. Even from Linux I was able to upload photos but was not able to use the flash uploader. Thats ok, I was able to do all the other stuff on the site without problems, except just one.

One thing that did not work correctly everytime was creating Sets. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it did not. Sometimes it listed the number of photos incorrectly which later got corrected to the right number.

Other features like labeling, tagging people, geo tagging, privacy settings, licensing, and sharing on social networks worked just fine. Overall, I am happy with the way things are working on the site.

I used this post as an opportunity to test Windows Live Writer. Though I have used it in the past without much liking, I wanted to see how it fared now.

Bluecurve Classic

About 8 years ago, this time of the year, I used Linux for the first time. I had read about how stable, versatile, open, configurable it was. I tried my first Linux distro. It was not one of the biggies. It was PCQLinux a derivative of Red Hat Linux. Fedora was still sometime in the future. I installed the distro on the same machine that I still have and use. My old and reliable P3.

The first thing I was impressed was the looks of Linux. Belive me or not, I liked Bluecurve, the theme and the window decoration more than Windows look and feel. And here is a screenshot of how Bluecurve looked then. It changed a bit in Fedora Core 1 but I still like the classic look.

Bluecurve

Times have changed and today we have a lot of new themes and styles, but the “curve” has its special place in my heart. It is a great feeling to look back and see how far Linux has come 🙂

Key Figures of this blog

Didn’t you think this one was coming? Of course, when reaching some important milestone, it is always satisfying to turn back and have a look at how we progressed and what we have come across.

Here are some key figures of this blog.

Blog Stats

Lifetime: Since July 25, 2006

Hits: 50020 as of yesterday

Posts: 133

Comments: 178

Top Post: Dell Inspiron 6400 – Part 4 – Installing Ubuntu 7.04

Most Active Post: Draw regular shapes using The GIMP

Other Stats:

Here are the stats about Operating Systems, Browsers and where my readers are located. These statistics have been taken from Sitemeter

1. Operating Systems: No surprises here. Win XP has a clear edge over others. The best part was the runner up. Linux at around 34 % just says a lot of people are currently using alternative operating systems. Have a look at how this graph looked was the last year. Readers using Linux have increased by 20%. Cool isn’t it? I am just curious what OS falls into the Unknown category.

2. Browsers: Again, Firefox is the clear leader. A vast majority still use IE too.

3. Reader Distribution: It is great to know that I have had atleast one reader from almost every continent on this planet. I am also more than eager to know what makes up “Unknown”. Antartica? Maybe. Maybe not.

Yet again, Thank you readers.

Graphs created using Zoho Sheet

50,000 Hits and counting

Dear Readers,

Yesterday, this blog reached a milestone. 50,000 hits. It has been two and half years since I started writing here and and it feels great after all the posts and comments. I agree, this is nothing compared to most other mainstream blogs who have as many hits a day. But, this is a personal blog and to have reached this milestone without knowing even one reader in person, makes me very happy.

At this point, I would like to thank each one of you.

I am planning to do a post on the statistics of this blog more like the one I did sometime last year.

Cheers.

~B