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It’s simple!

The modh coinniollach is not as difficult as it often seems (…) all you need to do is to delete the ‘dh’ from the aimsir fhaistineach and to replace it with ‘nn’.

My brother brought me those instructions out of an Irish paper; I’m sure it’s good grammatical advice, but I find I’m lacking the knowledge necessary to put the advice into practice.

The reason I bring this up is not one of Irish grammar (though you may consider it a shout out to my friend Shane in Japan), but one about context and documentation. I’m an IRC user. Since 1994 or so, and for most of that time I’ve been [ade] or adridg on the networks I use (Ade Lovett used to be without the brackets). For most of that time, screen + ircii or irssi have been my tools of choice — I never could get quassel to do anything useful on the operating systems I use, and konversation, while nice, doesn’t survive my KDE session. So it came as a bit of a surprise to need to use jabber; this is used for FSFE communications, so I started up kopete.

Suffice to say it’s been an extremely annoying three hours of futzing about.

There’s not much point in writing bug reports against kopete from KDE 3.5.10, so I won’t (scratch 20 minutes because a newline got into the server’s hostname when pasting it into the configure dialog); in addition I can’t always tell the difference between a bug and myself being stupid (groupchats are totally different from contacts). The only thing I can sensibly do is add some notes to the wiki for the congenitally IRCed. Now, having written a sentence like “use RMB on the systray, pick and identity and then ‘Join Groupchat…'” I realize that there’s an awful lot of context missing there as well (and it’s o-so-disrespectful of tablet users). I take my cap off for the KDE Userbase editors, for sure.

Sadly enough, this entire tale could be retold with “pdflatex” in the place of IRC and “OpenOffice” in the place of Jabber. I now have a working OOo on FreeBSD 7-STABLE without a JRE, but that too took a measure of doing. It’s just the price you pay when you start interacting with different communities with different tools.

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