Software that rocks

From the “Software that recently rocked my pants” department:

• Bitlbee: talk to your Jabber/MSN/Yahoo contacs with your IRC client. I was aware of its existance, never found the time to start using it. Shame on me! I run it on my laptop rather than on a server.

• Matplotlib: plotting library for Python, and I find the results very pretty. Looks quite powerful, though I had slight problems figuring out how to do certain stuff.

• Schroot with LVM: brilliant, particularly if you make use of sessions.

• KVM with libvirt and virt-manager: seems to work well, almost as easy as VirtualBox, and (tada!) thanks to VNC you get detaching for your guests (no more Windows reboots if you restart your Xserver).

I also thank Martin F. Krafft for helpfully updating the encryption howto I followed for my previous laptop to mention that using a single encrypted device and LVM on top of it is (possibly) preferred nowadays. And to Simon McVittie for his idea of a small unencrypted Debian installation for recovery purposes in laptops without an optical drive.

P.S.: I can’t believe this shit about blogging every day in November.