Praveen's Blog

An Eternal Quest for Incremental Improvement

OpenSolaris 2009.06 was announced yesterday. You can download the live CD image (ISO) from here. Here is the set of instructions to create a live USB stick from the live CD that you have downloaded.

Install distro-construct

$ pfexec pkg install SUNWdistro-const

Generate the USB image from CD image

$ pfexec ...

One of the handy features in the latest Wordpress is the support to upgrade plugins in one click through the Wordpress administration interface. It needs FTP or FTPS access to the server where you have hosted your Wordpress installation. But turning on FTP for users (non-anonymous) is a bad idea ...


Since OpenSolaris started using Gnome 2.24, I started getting loud system beeps those were produced on the PC speaker device that by-passes the audio device. Gnome uses kbd to generate this beep. This beep is so loud that it is really annoying. Also it hurts one's ears when ...


For a while now, I was not happy with the speed my Debian GNU/Linux booted. It was taking approximately 1:10 minutes to drop me in the GDM prompt. Today, I decided that I will try to probe into what exactly is happening. I have already heard of bootchart ...


Since I started using Emacs, I started using the Control key more than I had used it before. That is when I started using my Caps Lock key as Control key. In the beginning, I swapped the Control key and the Caps Lock key. However while doing pair programming on ...


I have been using GNU Emacs for programming for nearly 9 years now. It is exciting to keep discovering new extensions to Emacs throughout. I have heard of Ange-FTP before that can be used for remote file editing using FTP. However, I have never tried remote file editing on a ...


Google is redesigning the search results interface. A set of IPs are chosen for the testing (may be alpha). But anyone can get the new interface by this easy hack.

  • Open Google search page (http://www.google.com)

  • Enter the following string in the browsers URL input box

    javascript:alert ...

I was using /opt/gnome2 as install prefix for my Gnome developement on my SuSE Linux 9.3 box. One fine day, the /opt/gnome2 folder disappeared suddenly. I didn't know how. I ran YaST update before that. So, I assumed that YaST probably done something with this. Moreover ...