Recently I got this error after installing VLC on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat. Not really remembering what caused the error to be triggered in the first place, it became very difficult to find a solution for it.
When I executed sudo apt-get upgrade to upgrade my packages, it told me there was some issues and I needed to execute sudo apt-get -f install to fix them. I did as advised but it produced the following error:

Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
Correcting dependencies… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
vlc vlc-nox
Suggested packages:
mozilla-plugin-vlc videolan-doc
The following packages will be upgraded:
vlc vlc-nox
2 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 198 not upgraded.
66 not fully installed or removed.
Need to get 0B/5,258kB of archives.
After this operation, 229kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]? y
WARNING: The following packages cannot be authenticated!
vlc vlc-nox
Install these packages without verification [y/N]? y
(Reading database … 206759 files and directories currently installed.)
Preparing to replace vlc 1.1.0-1~ppa1~maverick (using …/vlc_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb) …
Unpacking replacement vlc …
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/vlc_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb (–unpack):
trying to overwrite ‘/usr/lib/vlc/plugins/access/libxcb_screen_plugin.so’, which is also in package vlc-nox 1.1.0-1~ppa1~maverick
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Preparing to replace vlc-nox 1.1.0-1~ppa1~maverick (using …/vlc-nox_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb) …
Unpacking replacement vlc-nox …
dpkg: error processing /var/cache/apt/archives/vlc-nox_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb (–unpack):
trying to overwrite ‘/usr/lib/vlc/lua/playlist/anevia_streams.luac’, which is also in package vlc 1.1.0-1~ppa1~maverick
dpkg-deb: subprocess paste killed by signal (Broken pipe)
Errors were encountered while processing:
/var/cache/apt/archives/vlc_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
/var/cache/apt/archives/vlc-nox_1.1.0-1ubuntu1_i386.deb
E: Sub-process /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

After some time of googling and head-scratching, I finally found a solution and it wasn’t that difficult either.
To fix it just note down the path of files which are causing the trouble. From the above mentioned error, we can clearly see that there are these two files causing the error:
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To backup all or some of your MySQL databases, you’ll need mysqldump which comes bundled with mysql. If you have MySQL installed, you probably have mysqldump installed already.

To backup all databases use the following command:

In linux:

mysqldump -uroot -ppassword --all-databases | gzip > /media/disk-2/db.sql.gz

In Windows:

mysqldump -uroot -ppassword --all-databases > db.sql

This will backup all your databases from a single command.
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I had been wondering this for few days. I wanted a solution which could comvert first letter of text in some fields to uppercase and the rest to lower. I got time today and experimented a bit and found a very simple solution.
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I’ve seen numerous pages on facebook about changing facebook themes. Unfortunately, no user can change his/her profile theme because this data has to be stored on server. It can only happen if facebook starts supporting themes which I don’t see is a possibility anytime in near future.

Before following this tutorial, keep 1 things in mind:

This change will only be seen by you only on your computer and only on Mozilla Firefox.

This means that its only for people who would like to feel good seeing their own themes. It would not affect the look of your profile on others’ computer ie. other people would not be able to see your theme and instead see the default facebook theme.

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WordPress might give this error on uploading an image from media library. It means that wordpress isn’t able to save your file.

It is really easy to fix. However, this may not work for all:

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This is not a difficult task but people often don’t know what directory permissions are. While we need not go into depth, just know 0755 is the recommended setting for all directories.

For changing a directories permission from cPanel, follow the following steps: Read the rest of this entry »

Now that facebook supports XMPP protocol for its chat, any messenger which supports XMPP would be able to use facebook chat without much effort.

Follow these steps to add your facebook chat to pidgin:

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A friend of mine who has Asus 1005HA deleted his recovery partition to free up disk-space. He didn’t knew what the consequences could be. He felt the need of recovery just few days after it and he realised that he couldn’t use the recovery mode anymore. He gave me his netbook. It took me a while to figure out how to restore the partition.
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Firefox is getting very popular lately, mainly due to its customizability. I use firefox as my main browser and use all sorts of addons which help me in web-development. These addons make my firefox hungry but I can’t do without them. So, instead I tweaked around some settings in firefox which made it much responsive and faster than before.

To tweak those settings, follow the following steps:

1. Type about:config in your address bar and hit enter.
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Seriously guys, I got this error and I was laughing hard. The error is just too funny, don’t you think? Yes, it is but not for developers like me. Problem to this error is almost undetectable and there are more than a dozen reasons as to why this occurs and this often baffles developers.

This error generally comes when :

MySQL connection times out.

The MySQL server shuts down.

The connection is interrupted.

The query you are performing is too large for server to handle.

The query you are performing takes more space than allowed (default: 16MB).

While these are some common reasons, there maybe some unknown reasons to come across this error. I faced one of those unknown reasons. Read the rest of this entry »