If you are like me, using Pidgin as your choice of Instant Messengers, than you cannot do without the plugin below. Its the new Pidgin-Facebook plugin. Its get you connected to your facebook chats and checks your messages too! Cool!

Just download the plugins below according to your platform, then double click, simple as that!

pidgin-facebookchat-1.64.exe - This is for Windows platform.

pidgin-facebookchat-1.64.deb - This is for Ubuntu platforms.

Yesterday I spend the whole night tinkering around with my system to ensure my new sound blaster card works with ubuntu. The problem  is I 'm getting static sound in my machine although the sound card works perfectly well in WIndows. While browsing to various forum I discovered that this sound blaster card is known for having compatibility issues with most Linux distro. Many have suggested to initiate the card in windows first, before installing it in ubuntu, reason given was the firmware of the card can only  be initialised on a Windows operating system before running it on Linux. That is really peculiar, anyway is worth a try  to see if it works. Unfortunately it doesn't, some forums states that the sound blaster is not supported with ALSA drivers, instead they suggested using OSS drivers. So I switched to  the latter, although the hissing sound dissappear but now I have a bigger problem; "There is totally no sound". The site did mention that in some cases the OSS driver might failed to work properly with the card. Hence, I have no other option but to revert the sound driver to ALSA. I reboot my machine and to my surprise I was able to get a clear audio sound. I have traced my troubleshooting steps and conclude it below for future references.

Step 1 : Try initialising the card by installing it on windows operating system.

With its advanced features, Microsoft’s Windows 7 comes off better than Vista and the last generation Windows XP

If you have been holding off buying a new computer, then Windows 7, the latest operating system (OS) from Microsoft, will give you a good excuse to buy one. Windows 7, or Win 7, is largely believed to be better than Microsoft’s previous OS Windows Vista and way more advanced than the last generation Windows XP. But is it really all that?

First impressions
While it is easy to get infatuated with a new design and swanky features, the viability of an OS is only determined when you begin using it eight hours a day. We used a preview copy of Win 7 for over 12 hours and we have to admit that we do prefer it over Vista because it’s more stable and did not crash out even once.

We installed Win 7 on a desktop with 1 GHz processor and 4GB of RAM. The OS took a little over 30 minutes to install on the PC that had Vista Home Basic edition (time to install could vary depending on hardware profile and existing OS on your PC). Decisively, Win 7 loads faster than Vista, which takes hours to install.

Win 7’s minimum hardware requirements are roughly similar to those of Vista Home Basics — both require a 1 GHz processor and 15-16GB of hard-drive space, although Win 7 demands a minimum of 1GB memory, while Vista Home Basics needs 512MB memory.

Let’s be honest here. Win 7 is both a sigh of relief and breath of fresh air, after Vista. Built with a renewed focus on performance and ease-of-use, Win 7 is poised to succeed where Vista couldn’t.

FREE PEN DRIVE !!

If you're in the Gombak, Batu Caves, Selayang or Kuala Lumpur area, you can get a FREE Pen-drive. Download this form, fill it up with relevant information and fax it to us. Of course its only open to those working in Malaysia or Malaysian citizens.

Free Pendrive Promotion

WE ARE BACK!

After some time offline, finally our site is back. God willing, we've solved one of our greatest problems with Drupal at that was the Warning: MySQL server has gone away query: issue. You know.... that very annoying blue or white page filled with gibberish about error with MYSQL and then some.

At first I thought that Drupal couldn't handle more than say 8 modules before doing is error page on me, but then I found out from the Drupal forums itself that it was due to the short connection time to the MYSQL database that causes this issue. Here's the solution from Ilia Penchev, member at Drupal.org:

I am posting here the 2 possible solutions for anybody who has the same problem, I hope this will be of help to somebody :

1. Quick approach (not recommended since it will leave you with no module update information)
Just go to Admin -> Site Building -> Modules and disable the 'Update status' module. Voala :) No more nasty MySQL warnings and error messages.

Anyway you will be left without actual information on any new updates or new major versions for your Drupal and modules.

2. The real fix (requires hacking of 2 Drupal core files)
Here is the real solution, it will require you to get hands dirty, but will fix your problem.

First make a backup of these two files - just download them to some directory so you have them just in case:
includes/database.mysql.inc
includes/database.mysqli.inc