We are both console lovers. But it is annoying to have a few tty's open with chat things in them. IRC, ICQ, MSN, Jabber... For X there is Gaim, which supports many chatprotocols. Why wasn't there such a thing for the console? The idea to port Gaim was easily thought of, of course. But we liked our IRC clients. And we used it the most, so we used it best. Importing it into the IRC client was a nice idea. But what if someone liked a different client. Then (s)he had to duplicate our work. That's a shame, we thought. Doing work twice is pointless. So when Wilmer got the ingenious thought in his mind while farming, to create an IRC to other chatnetworks gateway, we were both so excited, that we started working on it almost immediately. And the result is BitlBee. This package comes with support for MSN, Jabber, Oscar and Yahoo, as well as enabled flood protection.

Spindown is a daeemon I've written to spindown idle disks and so saving energy and giving the disks a longer lifetime. It works by checking how many blocks are read and written from the disks. When no blocks are read or written the disk is idle. When a disk stays idle long enough spindown uses sg_start to spin the disk down. It also works with usb disks and hotswappable disks because it doesn't watch the device name (hda, sdb, ...), but the device id. This means that it doesn't matter if the disk is swapped while the daemon is running.