A few days ago, tbm invited me to join Orkut, Google's new toy. I wasn't too interested in the begining, but in the last hours it has caught fire. I don't stop getting new invitations (ok, I don't stop sending invitations myself), and this hopelessly looks like the next grand way of making your free time vanish.

In a few hours, orkut is telling me I'm quite trustworthy, quite cool and, take this, sexy. An obvious indication that this is just a toy. Oh, and I also have two fans. I love you too, Amaya :) (sorry DanielS ;) I have joined a few nice communities, and guess what, I'm now an Official Fan of Branden Robinson.

While discussing on IRC if the American meaning for "libertarian" is the same as the Spanish meaning (although what I knew about the American Libertarian Party and Eric Raymond being a declared "libertarian" made me think it wasn't), we came across The Political Compass, a fun tool. My result:

   Economic Left/Right: -9.12
   Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.92

Heimy and braindmg have been hacking on the l10n-bot for a while. Heimy rewrote it in python, while braindmg fixed some more issues in the old perl version we're currently using. Their plan is, I think, to open an Alioth project for the stuff so all the Debian l10n teams can benefit from a central installation. Oh. It has been PostgreSQLised too. :)

Last night Guillem finished setting up our new Debian l10n Catalan site at his box, and we're finally ready to go ahead with our plan to get Debian's Catalan translations a bit more organised. Tim said he's working on getting all of this setup globally for all the Debian teams who want it, but waiting for this to be operational would have probably killed the momentum we might have gathered with our announce. We're now ready to call for help on Catalan Free Software forums and start assigning translations.

On a related event, I was nudged again by bubulle about my lack of commits to d-i CVS. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, I have been busy setting up the foundations, but I started merging some of the files today already, I'll continue with the rest tomorrow and the following days, I hope. Also, the Catalan translation of APT was finally submitted.

In other news, exams suck, my right ankle sucks even more, yesterday night I could hardly walk and our first competition this season is on Sunday...

Oh, and that virus sucks too: my mail server is getting tons of it and it's very noticeable in the mrtg graphs...

The accidental JACK upload to unstable is very probably going to be the next "big blocker" for the unstable -> testing transitions. Not everything is bad: after discovering JACK is waiting on alsa-lib (and a big bunch of other packages that still need to transition to the new libjack-dev) to enter testing, ElectricElf and I decided to upload alsa-lib, alsa-oss and alsa-utils directly to unstable, after EE had filed all the needed bugs against the packages that will now fail to build with the new alsa-lib. Many of the maintainers affected by the API change have already acknowledged their bug report, so we hope the impact of this upload will be quite small.

daf, of Welsh translations fame, wants to join Debian, and I'll probably help him with advocacy and sponsorship. I learned about this when I asked him if a mozilla-locale-cy package would be interesting, and ended concluding that him doing the package is a much better idea :) He also has ruby-gnome2 packages which we plan to upload soon, as there seems to be demand for them on the (really) old WNPP bug. I'm looking forward to see more Welsh stuff around in Debian, as it already happens in GNOME.

I planned buying an ATI Radeon 9200SE to replace my old Voodoo3 (which works very well still: does DRI ok, etc., but it's going to break with the hopefully soon to be in unstable X 4.3), and casually learned that Joy was about to buy that same card. Joy has been having a few weird problems in his box since he installed that video card, so I'm probably waiting a bit to see what I do... What I am surely not doing is buying a nVidia card. I wish I would, the choice is quite easy to make with that brand...

After managing to get up more or less on time quite early, dressing up with the cycling clothes, having copious breakfast and preparing my bike, I rushed out the garage to join my teammates at the meeting point... to find out it was raining quite heavily. Oh well.

20 minutes later, I do my daily checking of Internet stuff and what do I I find?

    - meta-gnome2 is going in after 3 days (hinted by cjwatson)

I did some Debian stuff this afternoon. In the ALSA front, I had a go at updating alsa-modules-i386 to use the 2.4.24 kernel (for those who wonder where the packages are, they are stuck in the new/ queue). Sometimes, we ALSA Psychos seem to postpone some of our ALSA duties until we're struck with a RC bug. Then it's quite likely that we react in like 2 hours. ElectricElf has been working on getting a list of packages that fail to build with alsa-lib 1.0.x, due to its switch to the new API by default. The list is, luckily for us (and the release guys) very short, and we should be uploading the missing bits of ALSA 1.0.1 in a few days, I hope, after we file bugs against these packages warning about the API change and telling people what the (very simple) fix is. The most wanted part of the ALSA 1.0.1 final release, alsa-driver, was uploaded a few days ago and surprisingly we haven't got any new bugs about it yet.

Mozilla 1.6 landed in unstable last night, making me feel quite uneasy. Yeah, I'm still under the meta-gnome2 syndrome, as it still hasn't made it into testing (there were problems trying to remove the old gnome-core 1.x package), but it should be sorted soon. For more fun, the arm autobuilder surprised us with a successful retry of galeon, which should make it quite easy to have it in testing soon. I quickly warned Mark about not uploading galeon until it goes in (which will happen in a few days due to libbonobo) and he agreed, and uploaded to a private repository instead. Thanks! Galeon 1.3.12 is another nice step towards 2.0, it fixed many of the small bugs that annoyed me every day. Meanwhile, I quickly uploaded Mozilla Euskaraz 1.6, while I wait until the Catalan Mozilla team makes a final decision on translating or not this version (the guy in charge has no time to do this currently, and said he'd prefer doing 1.7; but who knows if Sarge will have Mozilla 1.7...).

I'm even more sleepy today.

In the last days, the facts have convinced me that GNOME Mud is officially out of the death spiral where it had got stuck in the last many months due to development inactivity. Some days ago I posted about my surprise seeing new blood coming into GNOME-Mud. In the last few months (where barely anything had happened with GNOME-Mud), Robin and I had been getting subscription notifications to gnome-mud-list, but everything was quiet, and we were considering posting a call for help to FootNotes. Suddenly, Aravi and Uranus started joining #gnome-mud regularly, and have posted a few interesting patches. Lately, Aravi fixed PyGTK support and wrote his first script ready for mass consumption, the typical health monitor for your character, which nicely attaches to your taskbar. Finally, a usable GNOME Mud plugin! :) Meanwhile, Robin should be finishing the first bits of the move to libglade, while Uranus finishes MSP support, using GStreamer to play sounds. I'm trying to identify the numerous places where the app needs HIG love.

I tried playing a bit with Sodipodi and Inkscape to create a small shield to be used as notification area icon. Hmm, I suck at those programs for now. :)

We finally sent in the proposal to reorganise Debian's Catalan team. There's not too much feedback yet, but at least it's positive for now. Looks promising though, I believe we can find plenty of contributors in the many Catalan LUGs around the territory. We'll see. Committed a bunch of new GNOME translations from Xavi, while we try to figure out what to do with the giant evolution translation.

Holliday tomorrow, which means getting up quite early for cycling...

Guillem and I have finally decided what coordination strategy we want to use for Debian's reborn Catalan l10n team. The Dutch and French teams have a quite organised method that works through e-mail, as we wanted, and provides a way of nicely tracking the status of all the translations that Debian translators need to care about. We have a proposal written which we'll mail to debian-l10n-catalan@l.d.o tomorrow, let's see if people like it.

Uploaded GTranslator 1.1.4 to Debian, after applying a patch to remove some GTK 2.3-only (I guess) stuff.

Yesterday I went to bed at 1:30AM, probably managed to get asleep at around 4:30. Excellent...

After going cycling on Saturday (when I discovered my cold is still alive and well), I had a looong lunch at house of some of my father's friends. We got back home at 18:30 or so, with a big headache, due to the critical need of sleep that I have been accumulating... went to bed for a "short" nap, and by accident I woke up at 23:30, quite confused... "Is it the morning? Why am I so hungry?". Since then, I haven't been able to get asleep at decent hours, and tbm is laughing at me because I very recently said I never go to bed at 2AM these days... well, 3 days in a row now, and counting.

In one of these long evenings and nights, I decided to upgrade the first of my servers to Sarge, and the upgrade went quite ok; only PostgreSQL and PHP4 gave me headaches. In the first case, the automatic upgrade of the databases failed (in fact, I think I have never seen it work correctly across minor releases, but that's probably due to some non-Debianish setup I have in my boxes). After that, the format change in pg_hba.conf confused me a bit. Got it straight in the end, thanks to the nice help I got from Isaac. PHP4 was tricky too. Apache would segfault if the PHP gd module (which gallery needs) was loaded. Got input from the two local experts. Fabbione said "blame PHP, remove it and it won't segfault". Well, thanks Fabio ;P When I tried harder on him, he said php4-gd sucks, and bingo, removing gd.so from php.ini made Apache happy. Vorlon suggested using php4-gd2, which I didn't even know about. Woops, unresolved symbols. Upgrading to the version of libgd2-xmp in unstable fixed it luckily (for those who care, that version of libgd2 is entering testing today), and all services are ok now. In all, the upgrade went well, having in mind many bits are missing from Sarge still.

As we feared, testing really insisted in having galeon built for arm before it would allow meta-gnome2 into testing. I have uploaded version 45 to unstable and this should hopefully be the final version that makes it in.

Oh, very important, I'd like to use the nice window that the Planets provide to state that weasel rules, and you should vote for him in the next Debian elections, just as I will. He has wild ideas for Debian if he gets elected. For example, he promises he'll get rid of the bureaucratic DPL elections starting next year, so we can concentrate more on releasing Sarge (and as a bonus, weasel will be DPL forever: as good as it can get). I'm a proud member of his campaign coordination team. I hope this will make him not remove my Debian account as he will do with tbm's.

Today I was prodded publicly on debian-l10n-catalan@lists.debian.org about the lack of Catalan translations for Debian Installer... looks like I had slacked for too long, although I had finally restarted my work on this during the last few days. Finishing it isn't a big problem -it's not that big-, what was slowing me down was my lack of experience to merge the big full ca.po into the little modules' po files. I don't know why, but I hadn't learned about msgmerge -C, which will do the trick (although it's still quite time consuming, at least for the first commits which will need changes to probably all the installer modules). Christian Perrier and Steve Langasek (the very famous Catalan-American ;) have offered help to handle this. I'll probably accept their kind offer tomorrow, when I finish putting my po more or less in shape. All of this makes me wonder something else, though. What is the status of the SGML installer and release notes docs for Sarge? Has work started on this? If so, I should probably find some minion to handle the Catalan translation if we want to have it ready in time.

In short, the Catalan World Domination Plan has been slightly delayed, but just wait... in 10 months or so you'll find yourselves saying "Bon dia!" every morning!

I need to find some time to do some GNOME commits I have pending, mostly Catalan corrections from Jordi Mas to a zillion modules in the extra and fifth-toe sections. I promise it'll be done by the weekend.

I also have to do my usual ration of studying, plus some cycling training, plus I have to be in a party in about 2 hours. This weekend is going to be short...

I tried to upload the new mailutils snapshot today, but found out it requires the new gnutls packages which are stuck in the new/ queue. I downloaded the packages from Ivo's web, but can't upload until the packages hit incoming. This started a discussion which made us find out a few packages still use gnutls5. Time to change that... On other fronts, StevenK fixed the remaining issues with alsa-driver 1.0.1, and it's ready for upload. Probably tomorrow. What we can't upload yet is alsa-lib, that's going to get hairy thanks to an API change in 1.0.x...

Now, off to cook some Spanish omelet...

After days of annoying different people and mailing lists, meta-gnome2 is finally ready to enter Debian testing during Saturday's testing run. Yesterday, one of the two required browsers, epiphany-browser, finally made it into testing, while planner, libgda2 and libgnomedb got their missing builds. libxslt is ready to go in tonight, unblocking the way for abiword, too. The only missing bit was sound-juicer, which I demoted to Suggests: for now in the new version I uploaded yesterday. Two days of wait and, hooray, testing will have all the important bits of GNOME installed (for i386 and powerpc, at last). We'll have to keep looking for a few missing builds for a handful of packages for 3 architectures. Kamion and I are tracking the status daily at the DebianWiki. Many thanks to aj and Kamion for the nice help with most of this, specially with the big jack-audio-connection-kit hinting, and the s390 and m68k guys for not getting too pissed at me when I requested random builds. :) At last I'll be able to stop looking at build logs every 6h looking for the happy "maybe-successful" tag... not Kamion, who apparently has to nurse KDE in now, good luck. ;)

I also made a quick upload of mailutils, basically to link it against the new libidn11. In the upstream trench, Maildir support landed in CVS on Wednesday, adding to the already available support for mh, mbox and imap mailboxes in GNU Mailutils. Some people have been waiting for Maildir support for many months, and it's finally here. I hope this makes more people give mailutils-imap4d a go, even if there's a severe lack of good documentation right now. I'll upload a new snapshot to Debian unstable in a few days, just in case a mail-eating bug has crawled into the new code.

Thanks to the two persons that mailed me privately about my personal fight against IE's stupidity. It finally wasn't a transparent PNG issue, but IE not grokking position statements on the global body block of CSS, or something similar. Ross put me on the right track, and I have it nearly fixed now.

My cold is nearly gone now. I have been training since Monday and except that day when I couldn't breathe too much, the other sessions have been nice. Of course, I'm sleep deprived again, but that's a minor side-effect. :)

Last, but not least, tbm, I do not suck!

"No shit, Sherlock!", you guys are probably thinking. Well, of course I knew, but yesterday it was the first time I did a serious webpage with CSS and stuff that is aimed at Windows users, and after my teammate and I finished it, with some nice looking results, we discovered it's completely crap when viewed on Internet Explorer. This time, the "they lose" strategy won't work, because we don't expect duathletes visiting the site will be using Firebird, so we better fix it. It sucks that 90% of the browser market is dominated by this utter crap. Come on, it's 2004... it's about time transparent PNGs were supported by software that pretends to be serious... not to talk about the random behaviour of their CSS parser. I need to ask some GNOME webmaster how they get their header IE-happy. It probably boils down to avoiding transparent png's where possible, and using jpeg's instead. *sigh*.

To make this entry a bit less ranty, I'll add that as days pass, Debian's GNOME meta packages are nearer and nearer of entering testing. Today, another dependency of the five that remain is entering testing, and Abiword, one of the tough players, is nearly ready. Again all thanks to Kamion and aj doing magic. Now, if we could get epiphany-browser correctly built...

In the more GNOMEish front, it's been a nice week for GNOME-Mud. It has gone from mostly maintenance mode, due to lack of manpower, to, suddenly, having 2 or 3 new persons poking at it and submitting patches, some very nice which close TODO items that were years old. Big thanks to Nuno Sousa, who is on hacking spree, and has already coded connection status and activity for the mud tabs, removed some old annoying behaviours of the tabs, created a nice tray icon that informs of MUD stuff and is currently finishing some rocking MUD Sound Protocol, which will bring sound support for MUDs that support it. It won't be long before 0.10.5 is out. Nuno has more ideas, so stay tuned. :) (anyway, if you think GNOME-Mud has the potential of becoming "The MUD Client" for GNOME and want to help, please write to gnome-mud-list, as we still need help to get things going. For example, we have a plan to move to libglade and do HIG cleanups, help would be very welcome in those areas.)

A few nice things happened in the meta-gnome2 front: yesterday, aj and Kamion kicked jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib into testing, clearing the way for a number of packages like gst-plugins and the packages that depended on it gnome-media, nautilus-media, rhythmbox, etc. Today, aj removed the remaining 7 days of wait for libbonobo, and this is unblocking a new set of packages; and Kinnison did a quick processing of libxslt, which was again stuck on the new/ queue in auric. This will fix the builds of most of the remaining meta-gnome2 problems, so if no new problems come up, it's should be mostly ready when a few of the affected packages get retried. When/if the "must have" packages are in, I'll consider doing a temporary upload removing the less important packages so meta-gnome2 can go in, making Sarge's testing a bit more realistic for people who are doing desktop installs. You never know, given our record of bad luck until now...

One of my Christmas presents was the British edition of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. I got it in English because I tend to enjoy movies or books more if I see/read them first in their original version. My sister, on a totally unrelated xmas present, got the Spanish version, just as a few friends did. They say it was impossible to find a copy of this book in Valencia the weeks before and during Christmas. Not surprising, as Bowling For Columbine has been one of the most seen (and discussed) films during 2003 in Spain, when all the Iraq war stuff was going on.

Anyway, I didn't know if I should start reading this first, or go ahead with Ferran Torrent's "Espècies protegides". I took "Stupid White Men", as I have very recently read the first part of Torrent's book, so it's probably time to switch a bit. While I travelled to Uni in the subway, I couldn't stop laughing at every single page of this book, and it was just the "introduction to British readers", where he tells the story about the book being printed on September 10, 2001, and after the 9/11 attacks, Harper Collins refusing to put it on the shelves if Mike didn't "rewrite 50% of it". A nice little story of how a bunch of librarians put so much pressure on the editor that they were forced to put the book out, without any media covering or anything, and the book literally dissapeared from book stores the first day it was out. I'm going to enjoy this read.

My cold isn't getting any better, and patience is not abundant anymore. Pills make me sleepy, and I can't concentrate too much to do Real Stuff when I sit down to do it.

Day 1 of the GNOME mini-freeze wasn't too successful. Abiword stumbled upon a new gcc-3.3 ICE, and while libxslt was fixed, it introduced another RC bug which makes builds using that package fail. The new libbonobo had newer shlibs, and the last buildd that needed to build libbonoboui picked that dep, so now both of the libs wait 10 days. Galeon keeps failing with a misterious "errno 3" when the buildd tries to execute gnome-autogen.sh, but just on two arches. I suggested the maintainer to stop autogen'ing galeon at build time, just to see, but it's weird anyway.

On the bright side, s390 compiled a few of the important packages that were missing like gnome-panel, gnome-applets or libbonoboui, and while they now depend on new libbonobo, it will solve some of the most important problems.

Did two uploads recently, one of them to fix an amusing bug in TWIG, which I have been trying to give away for ages now. Looks like the person in charge of taking it (hi Ignacio ;) is taking action, finally.

Some PlanetGNOME (I guess) reader mailed me a link on a blog entry by Seth Nickell just a few months ago, where he just talked about the same procrastination problem. There's a nice essay on this there. Thanks for the link, Colin & Seth!

I hate when I know I have something important to do, and I keep avoiding doing it by doing all sorts of other lower priority tasks.

For example, I just read Antti-Juhani's call for help on dctrl-tools' i18n/l10n. Instead of studying for the already too menacing exams, or at least translating Debian Installer, I suddenly felt the _urge_ to have a look at this package. The result is cool, grep-dctrl is now translated to Catalan for the next release, but the really important duties remain undone. Antti-Juhani just pointed out that I'm obviously not the only one, and I think I'm glad I don't have a cat, at least. :)

Let's see if I can get *something* done in the next few hours. After scribbling this stupid blog entry, things don't look too bright, though. ;)

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the "gnome-core" meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don't even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn't in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren't in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we've faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd's weren't running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that's also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I've been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can't upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That's our only pending issue, so if you're an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you're more than welcome. :)

Exams are near, so it's probably translation season again, that time of the year when I work hard on all those Catalan translations I have neglected during the last months.

This evening I've restarted my work on GNOME 2.6, due on March. The number of new strings or strings to update is long, but I normally make it. What worries me is that the proposed modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.6 will add 6000+ strings to the list, and I'm not sure we'll be able to cope with that. There's an ongoing thread on gnome-i18n discussing this.

While doing updates and assigning modules to other translators, I've noticed that our gal translation was quite outdated, but I remember Aleix had updated it recently. For some months, Evo folks have asked to translate evolution 1.4, and recently they switched their focus to 1.5. All the translation work on evolution-1-4-branch hasn't been ported to HEAD, so the gal translation was temporarily lost. Of course, I watch for these things for my team, but I wonder how many translations get lost during branch transitions at GNOME's CVS. Another example, with the libmrproper -> planner transition, we have lost our last update to libmrproper's ca.po. I need to merge them back manually using msgcat or whatever.

Besides GNOME, I had also promised Debian Installer translations for December 28, but never got near finishing it. It won't take long though, that's #1 priority right now. On the Debian Catalan l10n front, Guillem and I are planning a rebirth of the Catalan team, as the current model didn't scale too well: I was the only person reviewing what needed committing, and some of the translations that came in needed hours of correction work, so I ended burning out. Now there are other Catalan-speaking Debian developers, and hopefully we'll be able to work more efficiently in the future.

My dad rented a Terminator 3 DVD tonight, and I decided to watch it with my brother. After 20 mins of playing, the DVD player started to do weird things and the display would click and bounce forward randomly. The player must be dirty or something, and everyone gave up, except my brother, who wasn't too happy about what was going on. He proposed watching it on the DVD drive in his computer. First try: Windows Media Player won't grok DVD's. Fine, I see it's WMP 8. Windows Update has version 9. Install, reboot, click on "I agree"... same result; "probably it needs some CSS module too, the MPAA is a pain even on Windows", I conclude. I go to the Windows Media site. WTF!! They want me to _buy_ DVD support for their player. Booting to Linux. I install Totem, but it refuses to play the DVD. I find out about libdvdcss, and download Marillat's .deb. OMG, Totem is playing the DVD, but it is *so slow*. Of course... nVidia card and using the "nv" X driver. Oh well. We move to my desktop. I quickly install libdvdcss2, and Totem starts playing, but I see no image, I just hear the music, or sometimes it just crashes. Xine crashes with some cryptic X error, and mplayer just complains about the video driver. Finally, some GNOMEr tells me I need X 4.3, even if I thought we had the patch that Totem needs backported.

Finally, after upgrading to xserver-xfree86 4.3, Totem starts playing the DVD very nicely, and we continue watching Terminator 3. The sad thing is this movie sucks so much, it made us laugh in a few moments. The best one is when the T101 deactivates itself crushing a car in front of him. After a while, it mysteriously restarts. At least on this one, the bad terminator is hot, and better, I'm now able to watch encrypted DVD's.

Yes, I had been procrastinating about doing this for a looong time already, but never sat down to do it, basically because I didn't know what software I should use, or anything.

I have been an Advogato user before, but gradually stopped posting there, even if I liked participating in that community. Now, with Keybuk very recently opening PlanetDebian, IRC appears to be full of people that just stopped procrastinating about building their own blog, so here I am.

Of course, this site needs a lot of work, and it'll get there, but for now it'll be using the simple 1993 look that comes with the pyblosxom Debian package. Pyblosxom is quite neat, I must say!

I plan talking about my Debian & GNOME stuff here, and hopefully less about my triathlon stuff. For that, I tend to use my Drupal-based blog at my team's website.