Core of my setup is IRC. All my instant communication is mapped via IRC. Pretty old, but really well-working technology. Main reason here is that many of my friends and colleagues also communicate via IRC. I use irssi, which is a console client that can run within a screen session so it continues to run even when I am not in front of a terminal. The screen_away plugin takes care of setting the away status when screen is detached.

To connect my non-IRC services, I use BitlBee, which is an IRC proxy to connect to non-IRC protocols. BitlBee supports all my external protocols (ICQ & XMPP, that is). It also supports Skype via the fabulous bitlbee-skype plugin by Miklos Vajna. It requires a running Skype instance within a VNC server, though, but this is fine for me.

irssi is considered core of the setup, as it also provides the the irssi_proxy module, which enables other IRC clients to connect to this irssi instance, and when writing via this connection this is treated as if it has been entered directly into the irssi terminal. This mode is essential for my “centralized history / log file” requirement.

As connecting to the irssi_proxy module will only provide you with messages sent to you after you have connected, another layer is added: ZNC. I launch this IRC bouncer at the same machine as my irssi screen session. It connects to the irssi_proxy module and provides me with history if one of my external IRC clients connects, i.e. I am sent the history since the last time I connected to the ZNC.

My mobile devices connect to the ZNC bouncer via SSL whenever I decide to launch one of the clients. Due to my settings, I only get new messages. ZNC can be configured to send you the last n messages though, regardless where you last picked off, if you prefer that. But for me, it is primarily the “new” stuff that matters in communication (but this is of course personal taste).

On my iOS devices (iPhone, iPad) I use the Colloquy Mobile client. This is a clone of the GPL-ed Colloquy IRC client for OSX. In the App Store, it costs a few bucks, but I payed happily as this helps them in the development. There is a very nice plugin for ZNC, colloquypush, that enables push messages to Colloquy via Colloquy’s and Apple’s push servers. I have added a few patches to this open-source module, dealing with privacy (you can configure it to skip content of the messages when pushing) for sensitive communication channels (e.g. my work channel). Also I added an option that push messages are only sent while in away mode. This is where screen_away gets handy, as I only receive push messages when I am not attached to the screen session (or deliberately set myself to “away” mode in irssi). You can get colloquypush from the “official” maintainer’s github repository or mine (my “wip” branch is a few commits behind, as I am working on the Android improvements at the moment, see below).

On Android I use AndChat, which is a free (as in beer) client, but not open-source. Unfortunately there is no push functionality available at the moment, but I am working on an extension of the ZNC colloquypush module to work with a notification app I am currently developing (no estimated time of arrival, if ever).

For me, the setup provides the following benefits:

• Centralized approach with a single client which is “always on”.
• Single location for all logfiles, so I can search them using standard Linux tools.
• irssi is ncurses and I love ncurses interfaces. I get nostalgic about the old terminals.
• I can easily connect from any computer via SSH and attach to the screen session.
• I can catch up while on the go via my mobile devices.
• I receive notifications if anyone of my friends demands my attention (at least on iOS).
• Native clients on the mobile devices, they simply feel smoother than connecting to an SSH session from your slow GPRS connection.

• The OSX-like positioning of the close, minimize and maximize buttons on the left instead of the right of the window.
• The fade-out (invisibility) of other windows when using Alt-Tab for tabbing through the available windows on the current desktop.

As I tend to forget and need to Google every time I encounter a newly setup 10.04 system, I now jot down the settings to change.

For changing the window buttons:

1. Start gconf-editor.
2. Find /apps/metacity/general/button_layout.
3. Change its value to menu:minimize,maximize,close.

For changing the opacity of inactive windows during Alt+Tab window switching:

1. Start gconf-editor.
2. Find /apps/compiz/plugins/staticswitcher/screen0/options/opacity.
3. Change it to any value you like, where 100 is fully visible and 0 is totally invisible.

git config --global alias.add-commit '!git add -A && git commit'

After this, you can simply check in all new, modified, and deleted files with a simple

git add-commit -m 'My commit message'

I have aliased this command also to git ac in order to save further on typing. I never thought that this combination could be that useful, but actually I think it really is. Thanks to the questioner for bringing the idea up.

After setting up the alignment according to some tutorials I found online, I started the setup process. Shortly after starting the copy step of the installation, the whole process came to a grinding halt with filesystem errors. Looking into the kernel debug messages it seemed like SATA commands were causing errors. After checking hardware, cables and switching SATA ports, I began researching the issue and soon found that the issue might be fixed in the next firmware version of the drive. So I wanted to upgrade from 1.23 to 1.24, which could only be done in Windows…

After installing a trial of Windows 7, I finally wanted to upgrade the firmware, but the drive was not detected, but was accessible. The release notes indicated that I would need to switch to AHCI mode. After several attempts, includig a BIOS update, I realized that there was no way to do this with my old hardware, as my nForce 430 chipset simply doesn’t support it.

So my only remaining option was to simply try the kernel arguments I read to be the fix for 1.24 with the 1.23 hardware.

So, if you add the following kernel option during installation and afterwards for every boot, the disk seems to work quite well (source):

libata.force=norst

Actually, this forces the ATA driver in Linux to not issue any reset commands on the bus. I really don’t understand why this improves/fixes the problem, but it seems the device has issues when being reset on my chipset. I can also notice this that in 2 out of 3 attempts if I reboot the PC the disk is not recognized any more before I reboot again.

Despite these issues, the SSD now runs with astonishing performance with the suggested 32 head / 32 sector alignment, and a 512kB partition alignment scheme. After an initial TRIM with hdparm‘s wiper.sh I enabled -o discard for my ext4 partition and could also verify using hdparm that this results in the sectors being trimmed. Please note, that you need to manually compile and install the latest hdparm version on Ubuntu 10.10, as the included version fails with the very long free block list and doesn’t handle splitting the sectors in multiple requests. The latest version doesn’t have this issue any more.

If you tend to forget the number of times you already reset the counter, you can easily check for yourself: simply run

slmgr -dlv

to get detailed licensing information, including the number of remaining re-arms and remaining grace time.

If you want to know when exactly your grace period runs out, use

slmgr -xpr

Note: This simply gives you more time, it won’t prevent you from having to buy and/or activate Windows. Re-arming is not a bug, it works as intended and is an important tool for use in corporate environments.

The telephone number you have to set is *99#, which should be provider-independent.

The following settings are for yesss.at only:
Username: web
Passwort: web

Remember to set the APN as part of the driver’s connection string in Window’s “Device Manager” as described in the PDF.

Again, for yesss.at this is: AT+CGDCONT=1,"IP","web.yesss.at"

For this to work properly, the SIM must not have a PIN set, as otherwise the SIM will be locked and the dialer cannot dial out. For me this is ok, as it is a pre-paid card which can hardly be abused if it gets stolen, but your situation might be different, so please consider the security implications. (I suspect that it should be possible to unlock the SIM card somehow using the AT+CPIN=1234 command, but I did not research how to separate several initialization strings, as it did not work immediately.)

The solution works quite well for me, even under Windows 7. Disadvantage is that there is no way to tell the signal strength and exact mode of operation (despite the color-coded status led on the Merlin U740).

This is the first time I am aware of actual knowledge/data-loss which will occur due to the shutdown of such a service.

Update: tr.im announced that they will stay in business, due to an overwhelming response. But still, the final shutdown of such a service sooner or latter can and will happen. And even worse would be the continuation of such a service where all the URLs would be redirected somewhere else…

Given the huge amount of information hidden behind such shortened URLs, and given the popularity and number of these links, especially nowadays on Twitter, these services could see themselves being under permanent siege of hackers/crackers. Being able to manipulate hundred of thousands if not even more vastly distributed and popular URLs to point to a given site could be used for both, generating (lots of?) ad-revenue, or as a new form of DDoS-attack.

At the moment there seems to be no way around using these services (especially with services like Twitter), but in the medium/long run a solution has to be found if we don’t want to lose lots of valuable information.

• Open the Control Panel
• Select “Programs”
• Select “Turn Windows features on or off”
• Scroll through the list, select “Telnet client”
• Press OK
• Wait (for surprisingly long)

That’s it, voila, the telnet client is now installed on your Windows Vista Non-Ultimate.

PostScript files are almost plain-text files, and if you set core.autocrlf and core.safecrlf, they might cause problems with the EPS binary encoded parts, as they might be detected as text-files and therefore remove any CRLF and replace it with single LF, which can mess up the whole image.

To force Git to consider a file binary which it would consider as text-file otherwise, the easiest way is to add a .gitattributes file to the directory containing the file or to any parent directory. In my case, I normally add a .gitattributes file in the root of the repository, containing

*.eps -crlf
*.jpg -crlf
*.png -crlf

In the file you set attributes to a path (or a pattern), or unset them (with the minus sign).  The crlf attribute is the attribute which tells if a file is affected by the core.autocrlf options. If you unset it, Git won’t mess with the line endings in the file.

More details can be found on the gitattributes man page.