this weekend nina and i paid a visit to my brother, his wife and my nephew in graz. since it's christmas time, we went to the christmas market[01-06] on the schlossberg[07]. Additionally the ride with the "Schlossbergbahn"[08] was for free this day, so we decided to not walk up the hill by foot, and rather enjoy the view from the funicular. later my nephew enjoyed rides in a little fun park[13-24], and afterwards we all enjoyed hot beverages in the cafe[25-29] situated in the Kunsthaus Graz, aka the "Bubble".

yuhu! i finally found some time to manage to include skype to my command line world, using Skype4Py, skyped and bitlbee. in order to get it running on my freebsd server, i had to do a few modifications. biggest, and most hurting one, was to install a full X11 environment on my server in order to get Xvfb running. also it needed a linux-emulation for the skype-gui-client, so i installed linux_base. i chose the fedora 10 ("linux_base-f10-10") version. then upgrading from python-2.6 to python-2.7 ("python27-2.7.3") was another necessary step, otherwise Skype4Py ("Skype4Py-1.0.32.0") wouldn't have compiled. furthermore some small modifications to the freebsd-ports Makefile of bitlbee ("bitlbee-3.0.6") to include and build the skype-plugin, and finally the skype-gui-client ("skype-2.1.0.81") itself, again from ports. next following the installation howto from the skype-plugin author miklos vajna i created a certificate necessary for the communication between skype-daemon and the skype-gui-client. then i started the skype-gui-client on the Xvfb server, and tried to attach the skype-daemon to it. this did not work in the beginning, as the skype-gui-client wanted to make use of dbus communication which i did not want. i preferred X11 communication, as i had just installed a full X11 environment and did not want to have the overhead of dbus. so i modified the skyped python script to use "Transport='x11'" instead. after launching both skype-gui-client and skyped again i got a pop-up asking for permissions to access the skype-gui-client API. i accepted and had a working communication between gui-client and skyped - yippieh! fine, now it was time to configure and launch bitlbee, and attach to the server with an irc-client. i chose irssi, since i am already used to it and made a bitlbee-specific config file for that too. after registering to my bitlbee-server, which will generate an xml file with the registered user's configuration, i added my skype-account, configured separate channels to show online and offline users from my skype-account. one last thing that cost me a few hours of trial'n'error was to get bitlbee to join my existing group chats automatically, as at my current and my last workplace people love/d skype-group chats for internal communication. automatic joins are achieved by "bookmarking" the chats in the skype-gui-client - but it has to be the right client. stupid me did bookmark the chats in a different client - argh! so for bookmarking, and also for other configuration matters like auto-connect on startup and notification settings in the gui-client, i redirected my display once more to my ssh-X11-tunnel. but... finally i have all the comfort of an irc-client in my skype-chats. i'm happy!

^C: efterklang (peter broderick), arena hollow mountain apples sedna step aside frida found a friend told to be fine i was playing drums black summer dreams today between the walls monument raincoats cutting ice to snow the ghost modern drift alike