Some of you might know LZMA as the default compression algorhythm of 7zip. *nix counterparts had support through LZMA utils. GNU Tar could be patched to support it, but there was no way for libarchive to support it - until recently. A new spec, a new name (xz) and a future change of license allowed for xz support in the codebase. Since pacman and makepkg rely on libarchive for compression handling, that makes it possible to build and install packages with xz.

For those unfamiliar with LZMA/xz, in the realm of compression formats it stands between gzip and bzip2 for compression and decompression speed, and it tops the list when you talk package size. Now let's have a look at how to get this going.

Red alert indeed! Kamikaze 8.09 hit the shelves on March 4th and comes with a quite impressive changelog. The most intriguing addition to this already feature-packed embedded Linux distribution is the LuCi interface.

I have to admit I have never been more baffled by an OSS product.

I have been wondering for quite a while why Vim was so hard to read. Although I am by no way proficient at Vim, I do like it (yes, I tried nano, thanks but no thanks). I like my eyecandy so my terminal does pseudo-transparency, but even with a full black background the comments are still hard to read - they're in dark blue by default. Recently, with setting up the VPS and things, I do spend a lot of time in SSH sessions, and there's no geany in there. So I had decided for quite a while to go hunting for a nice vim colour scheme.

I had this site open in Firefox for weeks (I have the 'Read it later' extension but somehow I still manage to pile up tabs that I don't look at for days, don't ask why). So I went checking out how the themes looked, pulled one in, only to discover it didn't work as advertised. I dropped it into ~/.vim/colors/ like instructed, but no. I could load it, yes, but it stubbornly refused to give me the same colours as the online previews.

That's right. This is a sequel. But unlike most it should be part of the good ones.

As readers of my previous article on encryption might know, I take my privacy at heart - even though it gets increasingly hard in this digital era.

But let's not lose focus here. I share the interest in encryption with a few friends of mine, Teran being one of them. He hinted at a design flaw that affects a lot of mainstream encryption schemes - Microsoft's BitLocker, Apple's FileVault, but also open source solutions like dm-crypt or TrueCrypt.

Yesterday I called a car rental agency in Hannover to book a car (part of my job). Since my German is completely shabby, I asked if the person on the other line spoke English - instead, she offered to speak French...

Now, there's nothing wrong with that. The good lady probably presumed he's calling from Belgium so he must talk French. Why yes, I do - but it's not my native language (and it turned out her English was excellent, probably better than mine). You see, historically, Belgium, when it became to be, was conceived by its ruling class as a unitary state with one official language - French. La Belgique sera latine ou elle ne sera pas. Now, that was the Zeitgeist - you really can't blame them. Everyone in charge pretty much thought like that back then.
Its proponents argued the local Flemish dialects were not similar enough to one another to be effectively used in administration - although they had been since the Middle Ages, and quite successfully. So for almost 150 years, Belgium was a state 'home' to two cultures - the Flemish one (Flemish dialects are closely related to Dutch) and the Walloon one (which originally did not speak French, but was gallicised thoroughly in the past two centuries).

I know mine does! 'Jungle Drum', a song by the Icelandic siren Emiliana Torrini - full name Emiliana Torrini Davíðsdóttir - has been getting quite some airplay over here, and its energetic nature forces you to make up your mind about the song - either you like it or you don't. I think it's a great song, and it got me curious, so I started checking out some other stuff of hers.

With the move to the VPS (finally) completed and it set up to my taste, it is only right to start posting again. Still on Drupal (version 6 though), with a new classy theme and some stuff under the hood changed for the better.

Digital life has gone on while the blog virtually came to a standstill. I have been promoted (not in real life unfortunately) to be moderator on the Arch Linux forums (which came as quite a surprise) and on the brand new Icadyptes forums. The latter came as less a surprise, given that the main developer and I go back a few years, being fellow Zenwalk users, and I already help policing Zenwalk's forum and IRC channel - an IRC channel that nonetheless periodically turns into organised anarchy, but then again: that's how IRC works, no?

Yes sir! The hope of British rock was so nice to perform twice in Belgium (February 12th and 13th). I went on the 12th, and it was simply awesome. Sound was great, the set was tight, and the band was clearly having a blast, just like the rest of us :-). It took a while for them to come loose (but then again, as they aptly said, we Belgians are always a 'difficult crowd to play for').

My server used to run NFS v3 so I could easily manage my multimedia collection from my local laptop. I found out a few months ago NFS v4 boasts quite some improvements over v3, so I planned to migrate. Unfortunately that never got further than the stage of building the required packages, and yesterday I decided to give SSHFS another go. Compared to v3, NFS v4 brings a more secure solution, but at the cost of slightly more complicated configuration. SSHFS, on the other hand, is childishly easy to set up.

Yeah you read that right! I got this fancy thing (TZ190N, pictures) a few weeks ago, but since I have to work too, it took some time to put the penguin on it ^_^. Sony was never known for its standard compliance and the Vaio TZ seems to be a prime example of that. None of the Fn keys work. In-depth coverage of the issues I have/had with this laptop are covered here. You'll find the specs there too. However, let's look at this marvel from the positive side :-).