Pidgin 2.6.1 is here !

A major upgrade of the favorite universal chat client 'Pidgin' has been released.
Detailed instructions of installations or upgrading can be found here. Some of the major upgrades are the new Voice and Video support for XMPP !! Hurray ! Apart form that, the general icons have also been changed and they now look much more decent. Check it out for yourselves !

Apt-get: Cannot initiate the connection to 8080:80 (0.0.31.144).

I've seen this problem sometimes cropping up! One of the reasons this problem can occur is when your http_proxy variable is not set properly!
The $http_proxy variable in your terminal overrides the http::proxy variable in /etc/apt/conf file and the connection is not established if the http_proxy variable in the terminal is set to [proxy]:[port] instead of http://[proxy]:[port]. To check this out do the following:

1. Type: echo $http_proxy in the terminal
2. If it is something like this: 10.1.1.30:8080, then type: http_proxy="http://10.1.1.30:8080" . (we're just adding the 'http://' before the content of the variable)

If the problem was because of the overriding variables, it'd be solved by now .. try typing sudo apt-get update and see if it works.