Even with the volume turned off, if your PC has a system speaker, it can still emit a loud system beep. I was running some MySQL statements from the command line and every time there was an error…BEEP.

To fix this, I could simply run the MySQL commands with the -b, –no-beep option, which turns off the beep on errors.

But, I’m lazy and don’t want to type -b every time I run a MySQL command. Plus, there are other instances where the system beep can be triggered, and I just don’t want to hear it! So, I used this solution…and it didn’t require a reboot!

In summary:
1. Right-click on My Computer
2. On the Hardware tab, click on [Device Manager]
3. On the “View” menu, select “Show hidden devices”
4. Under “Non-Plug and Play Drivers”, right-click “Beep”
5. Click “Disable”
6. Answer [Yes] when asked if you really want to disable it
7. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot
8. Right-click “Beep” again.
9. Click “Properties”
10. On the “Driver” tab, set the Startup type to Disabled
11. Click [Stop]
12. Click [OK]
13. Answer [No] when asked if you want to reboot

When I changed jobs, my commute changed from mostly surface streets to mostly highway. I-80 is notoriously congested and I wanted to strategically plan my commute to avoid as much traffic as possible.

I started by watching traffic online and then found Traffic.com, where I could create custom drives and receive alerts, etc. Pretty cool…but I wanted a way to SEE traffic trends, so I designed a way to get data from Traffic.com and to then display that data in a graph.

Traffic.com offers a RSS feed, so my plan was to use data from that feed to generate the graphs. So, I signed up at Traffic.com and created two custom drives; “Home to Work” and “Work to Home”. Next I created a database and tables to hold the data:

Read the rest of this entry »