After a long time’s search over the internet for many days I finally figured out how to do this. Many may know this already but many may not too. And since I hate to compile programs from sourceI have found here a method that involves less of actual compiling. Since am a ubuntu user I only have tried this in ubuntu and not other distros.

STEPS

1. Install these packages:

compiz-bcop

compiz-dev

compizconfig-settings-manager

build-essential

libtool

libglu1-mesa-dev

libxss-dev

libcairo2-dev

git-core

2. You need a working directory say ~/compiz

3. When in your working directory, in terminal, execute this command:

git clone git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/fusion/plugins/snow

4. Download this file and extract its contents to your working directory

5. In your working directory now there will be a folder called snow. Change to that folder (~/compiz/snow in my case)

6. Execute these three commands one after the other:

make

make clean

make install

7. Now in your CompizConfig Settings Manager you can find the snow plugin and activate it.

This may sort of resemble a dreamscene on your desktop and i really like it a lot. A snowy wallpaper could be suitable.

A small variant of this plugin called Autumn Plugin is here (Thanks to Patrick Fisher and ubuntu forums)

Thanks to elgilicious and ubuntu forums for this

Ed’s note: Do we really need all of this ?  openSUSE, Fedora, Sabayon – all had Snow plugin without having to do any of this

By now, you must’ve heard of Ubiquity. If not, well read on!

Ubiquity is an add-on to Mozilla’s extremely popular Firefox browser. Ubiquity allows you to do things – say search for something, get the latest weather updates,  book reviews, so on and so forth, just by typing the commands into the Ubiquity input box – rather than by going over to address bar, typing the URL for each individual site, etc. Now most people fear by the word – “commands” – OHHH! will it be cryptic, confusing? Well, NO! Rather than me explaining, just have a look at video above

 

I use Lincr a LOT – for the uninitiated, Lincr is a URL shortening service, by Aalaap. So why Lincr? Well TinyURLs are no longer tiny, Lincr’d URLs are, and hey – the name’s catchy! 

Anyways, I use the Lincr bookmarklet prettty often, and while trying out Ubiquity I thought why not try it out for Lincr, and bingo, here you go! If you’re using Ubiquity, you should get a prompt asking if you want to subscribe to Ubiquity command. Accept if you want to

If you wish to Lincr, just hit Ubiquity shortcut key, and type lincr (<url to be lincr'd> ).

So if you find this useful just subscribe to it, and drop a comment here!

The good people over at WordPress released WordPress 2.6.2 today. And unlike the previous 2.6.1 release, this release is a mandatory release, to fix a loophole which occurs if your blog has registrations open.

From the horse’s mouth:

If you allow open registration on your blog, you should definitely upgrade.  With open registration enabled, it is possible in WordPress versions 2.6.1 and earlier to craft a username such that it will allow resetting another user’s password to a randomly generated password.  The randomly generated password is not disclosed to the attacker, so this problem by itself is annoying but not a security exploit.  However, this attack coupled with a weakness in the random number seeding in mt_rand() could be used to predict the randomly generated password.

Certainly seems a very important reason to update to 2.6.2. And if you find the process of upgrading WordPress blog a pain, here’s an effortless way of doing it.

WordPress follows the Open Source policy of release early, release often. While this is a pretty good thing – you get fast releases to security exploits and loads of new features – but updating can be a rather problem, especially so if its something as important as your site’s CMS.

Fortunately Keith D’Souza has written a VERY NEAT plugin – WordPress Automatic Upgrade Plugin which makes it a painless affair to upgrade your WordPress installation. WordPress Automatic Upgrade updates WordPress installation in a step by step manner. 

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Recently, Facebook introduced Facebook chat – which allows you to chat with your Facebook friends in realtime similar to IM, as compared to post-message-on-wall-and-wait-for-replies kinda communication that Facebook users endured so far. A slight problem would be that to use this feature, users need to be logged in and be on Facebook’s site.

Not any more. eionrobb and Saturn2888 have coded a plugin for Pidgin which allows you to chat with your facebook buddies using the Facebook Chat IM service. Just grab the plugin (.deb installer for Debian and its derivatives like Ubuntu, .exe installer for Windows, and sources available), copy the the .dll file to your C:\Program Files\Pidgin\plugins\ (or equivalent) directory and restart Pidgin, if you’re on Windows.

For Linux users copy one of the .so files to either /usr/lib/purple-2/ (for 32-bit Linux), /usr/lib64/purple-2/ (for 64-bit Linux), /usr/lib/pidgin/ (for Nokia/Maemo) or ~/.purple/plugins/ (if you don’t have root access) and restart Pidgin.

Don’t forget to grab the icons too. Just Extract the facebook_icons.zip file to the pixmaps/pidgin/protocols folder. On Windows this is generally C:\Program Files\Pidgin\pixmaps\pidgin\protocols and on Linux, /usr/share/pixmaps/pidgin/protocol and enjoy chatting.