Joshua Dick and I have been putting work into improving the Irssi experience for Windows users. We made an installer built on NSIS and an USB archive made to be put on an USB stick and allow carrying your personal Irssi instance with you.

Welcome page Both packages offer running Irssi in two modes: either through cmd (the default Windows command line) or puttycyg (a Putty-based command line) which mainly looks better than cmd.

Puttycyg mode:

Cmd mode:

Have fun with it and report bugs please. Downloads

• Installer
• USB archive
• Related source files

GNU Automake 1.10.1 was released yesterday, finally featuring LZMA support, meaning you can now make Automake create .tar.lzma files. LZMA usually compresses better than bzip2 and also decompresses faster. To create .tar.lzma files for your projects you have to modify AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS in the related Makefile.am file:

AUTOMAKE_OPTIONS = 1.10.1 dist-lzma

Would be great to see Automake-based projects adopt this feature in the near future.

As with every major Free Software project there is always work to do in Debian, e.g. tasks related to packaging. I have been working on a new web view onto the "Packaging Todo List" in hope to better answer the question "How can I help Debian?". (I'm working on the third package myself now and it's getting better every time.) So the Debian Packages that Need Lovin' page has reached a first usable state. Please check it out.

I'm still not sure what made me want to check out this film. I guess I wanted to see Will Smith again. So the short version is it was boring on one hand and so crappy on the other that it actually made me angry. I probably wouldn't blog about this if I hadn't seen at least two other blog post recently of people actually liking this movie. If you are planning to watch "I Am Legend" in the future only do this if you need to know how bad it actually is. Otherwise it's a pure waste of time.

Herrie 1.8.4 just went into Debian testing. We have the 1.9.x package almost ready so with a little luck you have Herrie 1.9 in testing in two weeks.

I feel like sharing a script of mine. A script I wrote to split log files holding data of several sub domains into single files, and generate a separate report for each sub domain out of that. The script is used on a DomainFactory host so if you have an account at DomainFactory this might come in handy. The script is written in Bash, is intended to be run as a cron job and does the following:

1. Watch the logs directory for unprocessed files
2. When a new (finished) log file appears split it per sub domain
3. Feed the split log files to Geolizer incrementally. Geolizer is a tuned version of Webalizer, availabe as a patch.

That's mainly it but it took quite some time to make it run smoothly. DomainFactory copies log files in two steps: the first 6 hours on day k , and the last 18 on day k + 1 , both a few minutes before 06:00. So setting up the cron job for about 06:30 should be optimal. To not work with a log file that only holds the first 6 hours of the day the date of the file's last access is checked. The script is Public Domain but you still owe me bug reports if you use it :-D

• splitlogs_0_1.sh

I guess from now on you will not expect anything from my blog posts anymore... Anyway... I got a great new mug! :-)

You can order your own at the tazshop.

HydraIRC mis-uses the term "Open Source", Bersirc has been no fun to use in the past, ... Until a few days ago I thought there was no decent Open Source IRC client available for Windows. Great to see that Irssi has up-to-date Windows/Cygwin binaries now.

Boris Mikhaylov wrote a nice DSP effect some time ago called BS2B , or Bauer stereophonic-to-binaural for long. This effect applies a few tricks to make music better when listening through headphones. More (and quite interesting) details about the algorithm can be found on the official BS2B page. Boris wrote plugins for Winamp, Foobar 2000 0.8.x/0.9.x and the professional audio interface VST. I added an XMMS 1.x plugin to that list now. You can download it from SourceForge.

On my package journey I stumbled over... colormake!

Enter colormake instead of make now and that's what you get.