MPlayer: Failed to open LIRC support

Whenever I run MPlayer from my terminal, which is always when I am playing any kind of media, including Youtube videos, I get the following error.

mplayer: could not connect to socket
mplayer: No such file or directory
Failed to open LIRC support. You will not be able to use your remote control.

I do not own a LIRC remote control, although I have read it is not too difficult to build one yourself. I this message had become an eyesore. The fix is rather simple. Add a line "nolirc = yes" without the quotes to the file ~/.mplayer/config in your home directory. Given how customizable MPlayer is, it is possible to fine tune almost everything from the config file. The default configurations are listed in /etc/mplayer/mplayer.conf and are overridden by the config file in the home directory.

Resolving "murrine_style_draw_box: assertion `height >= -1'"

When using Emacs 23 and a few other applications on Ubuntu running GNOME, I often get a irritatingly cryptic error message ** (emacs:25074): CRITICAL **: murrine_style_draw_box: assertion `height >= -1' failed. Turns out it has got something to do with the theme I'm running.

Thanks to Alf, it is very easy to get rid of that by tweaking Gtk configuration. Modify the entry in /usr/share/themes/Ambiance/gtk-2.0/gtkrc from GtkRange::trough-under-steppers = 0 to GtkRange::trough-under-steppers = 1.