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  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

It is nice to see that Ubuntu Linux was found to be the most difficult system to crack in the pwn2own “hack contest”, when Vista gave in on the third day when 3rd party apps were game. OSX fell first, on the second day due to a Safari bug.

Not so nice to see breaking systems called “hacking”. Again, hackers build stuff, they don’t brake it. It makes me extra sad to see so many Ubuntu and Linux-loving bloggers happy about the failure of other systems. Calling your system good is good marketing. When you laugh at failures in other systems it is laughing at their users, which does not make them interested in you or your offering.

My experiment with replacing irssi with Jabber clients is over for now. There are a few reasons for this of course.

• Mobile Jabber clients simply are not there yet. There is no way they can compete with a screened irssi over PuTTY. Notifications are nice, but the cost in RAM usage (for Java apps) and usability (for native clients) is too high.
• 24/7 connectivity is too hard to achieve with Jabber clients.
• I like being available on IRC at all times without people having to find out my Jabber ID or email address. This is for making myself more available, not to keep my contact information  more private (that’s not my cup of tea anyway.)

Bottom line: old school server/client solutions still rule in chat, just as I’ve found with email (IMAP) and PIM data (SyncML servers).

I still love Jabber though, and my Bitlbee session is open. Running Jabber over my irssi session may make my Jabber presence less exciting and featureful, but it also makes it client-independent and more reliable.

Currently, the CCSM (Compiz Config Settings Manager, a horrible name to begin with) looks like this:

My humble proposal for the next-generation version that would fit well into GNOME:

Thanks for your attention :)