Sprayfly

I recently wanted to test out Songbird on my laptop to see what all the fuss is about. I tried downloading the .deb file from getdeb.net and also tried the tar.gz file from the Songbird website but on both attempts I received the following error when trying to open the program:

*** glibc detected *** munmap_chunk(): invalid pointer: 0xb7f1a470

Underneath that error was a massive Backtrace with information about the problem.

Anyway, in the end I found out that the problem is related to an Ubuntu package called libvisual-0.4-plugins. I removed this package (sudo apt-get remove libvisual-0.4-plugins) and tried running Songbird again and it worked instantly. I don’t believe that this package was used by any programs on my computer but in case you have any difficulties after removing it, you can always reinstall it with sudo apt-get install libvisual-0.4-plugins and you are back where you started. I suspect that the .deb installer will also work now!

Good Luck - I’m off to try out Songbird now Hope this solved a headache for a few of you.

I decided my desktop was getting rather cluttered - and that since I have been using gnome-do as an application launcher I don’t really need all the icons and shortcuts anyway. Therefore I had a tidy up, built some shelves, hung a clock and a nice picture and chucked a trash can in the corner of the room - and voila the result.

After installing cairo-clock, I found that the clock would disappear every time I trigger Show Desktop to hide all current windows. There is a simple fix to this in CCSM.

First, in CCSM (CompizConfig Settings Manager), go to the General Options area and untick –> Hide Skip Taskbar Windows.

Second, in CCSM, go to the Window Rules plugin and edit the skip taskbar rules so that they include the windows you don’t want to disappear when triggering Show desktop. For example, you could add this:

class=cairo-clock

After years of fighting spam and vandalism on my WL-HDD site - involving making many complex spam rules and heavily restricting user’s editing permissions, I have finally found a more ideal solution to the problem - reCAPTCHA.

Many of you will already be familiar with reCAPTCHA via other websites - where it is often used to block spam comments on blogs or on user registration forms. Basically, it requires you to recognize two words in a picture and to type them into an input box as a means of proving that you are a human and not a spambot. You can see an example of reCAPTCHA in action in the screenshot provided.

I currently have the plugin setup so that it is activated on:

• New user registration
• Creation of new pages
• Anonymous edits that contain new external links
• Brute-force password cracking

If you are interested in implementing the plugin on your own blog, there is more information available here. It is a very straightforward and simple procedure.