I went to the dentist on Tuesday and the doctor insisted on what I've been trying to ignore during the last two years: I need to have my four Teeth of Wisdom extracted.

A pitty, because I never had any kind of pain as they grew in 8 years ago or so and I thought I'd have no problems with them. Unfortunately, they never got to get out entirely, and now they are basically useless for my bite, and a potential risk area for teeth decay. They have pushed the rest of the teeth out of alignment, so I may have to get dental braces to correct this. I'm defering all of this until October, though. I don't want to be bothered during Summer with this...

Some weeks ago, I discovered I was included in the list of people who were going to do talks in this year's Campus Party, although nobody had asked me in advance. A few weeks later I did get a mail regarding this, which I answered, but I never heard anything else, so I assumed I didn't have to do it in the end.

Well, it actually seems like they still counted on me, apparently, as I was listed in the time table to do a workshop on Debian last Tuesday. So not only they didn't call me to give me details on dates for the talk, but they also didn't remove them from their planning. I imagine participants went into the room last Tuesday, waited a bit for me, thought I was a bastard for not showing up and went back to their computers to play some more of whatever the current 3D bloodfest game is right now.

In the case that anyone at Campus Party is reading this: sorry, I didn't show up because I was never informed.

On Saturday, I spent all day in Antella during the class B triathlon held in the town. I didn't run myself, but helped my teammates giving them food, water and of course, support. The triathlon is quite good because the swim is held in one of the biggest rivers around the Valencian territory, Xúquer, in a place where the water is a bit more calm and the current isn't so strong. The distances are double than in a normal Olympic triathlon: 2.500m swimming, 80km cycling and 20km running. This year, it started at 15:30 instead of 8:00, as last year the running segment turned out to be hell itself, at 13:00 or so, in the middle of the heat wave. This year the only people who really suffered the heat were assistants, so that's probably ok. :)

While the triathletes concentrated for the race two hours before, the rest of us had a nice bath in the river, and killed the time jumping down from a 10 metre fall and then climbing up again.

During the triathlon, we were quite busy taking pics and helping our team mates, and after 5 hours of competition and a few more of wait for the award ceremony (we were second in the team rank), we went back to València at 23:30 or so. We should to Antella more often, having baths in l'assut is a lot more fun than the beach.

There were no surprises in the Alps or the time trial, and Armstrong managed to win his 6th consecutive Tour de France. That I initially wanted Ullrich to win doesn't mean I acknoweledge there was no rival for him this year, and he's, without doubt, the best rider the History of Le Tour has know. US Postal is also with difference the best team around right now. Congrats!

Related to Lance, jfleck has been blogging about the Lance Armstrong Foundation and his LiveStrong initiative to help survivors of cancer. It's very nice to see people like Lance spending some of his time in helping others while they go through what he managed to defeat years ago. It's interesting, too, as he's a fierce competitor while riding (this year he has won in time-trials, sprinting, in mountain stages, just conceeding a victory to Basso one day), but is obviously another kind of person outside the cycling world.

During some of the mountain stages, and specially in Alpe d'Huez, you could see people booing at him as he flied past them. That wasn't good either. You might not like his fierceness or the fact that he is now the best rider, but if you don't like it just don't hail or clap. One Spanish diary translated his comments about the Basque spectators in La Mongie as if "they wanted to kill him". This probably wasn't what Armstrong said, but made many people here think he was quite idiot.

Congrats to jfleck, greg and others, too!

Chris Blizzard posted about Mozilla translation management. While I haven't been involved directly in Catalan translations of Mozilla, I maintain a few Debian packages of Mozilla translations to Basque and Catalan, and know now painful it can get to translate a Mozilla product.

The biggest problem, to the eyes of a translator completely used to gettext, is that Mozilla uses its own native i18n/l10n system and that's a very immediate barrier, as Chris points out. I think it would be very beneficial if Mozilla created an "official" bridge from their native formats to the PO format, which was integrated in the Mozilla build setup. Mozilla could distribute the POT file of their releases (alpha, beta, rcX), which translators could pick up, translate using well-known tools, and submit back to bugzilla. The po files would be integrated in upstream CVS, and could be available for the final releases. This would probably mean enforcing a string freeze of some kind in the final stage of the release process, so translations for rc2 would still be complete in the final version, like GNOME does already.

Right now, the Translate project is on the lead providing a suite of scripts that convert from mozilla to po and viceversa, but the process is still annoying enough and error prone to scare non-technical translators away. If Mozilla could take this and integrate it in their trees so that translators just need to care about translating the messages, and not about creating XPI files and so, I'm sure the translating effort would improve a lot in the mozilla world. MozillaTranslator is just not good enough anymore.

There are other minor problems, like some Mozilla dialogs having an apparent fixed size. For example, the account creation helper in the Catalan version of Thunderbird just shows half of the "Cancel" and "Ok" buttons, probably because the Catalan text is one or two lines longer than the original, and the dialog doesn't resize to fit correctly or so; you get a scrollbar instead. In other cases, like the About dialog, you don't even get a scrollbar. In some cases, the translator can define the size of the dialog, but this is just another problem in the translation process. GTK apps, for example, do resize and wrap text as needed. I don't know much about XUL, so I'm probably saying nonsense here.

(In a GNOME desktop, really)...

The other day I was looking for some easy-to-use GNOME frontend for GNU parted, but all I could find in Debian was QtParted, which isn't quite GNOMEish at all. So I started thinking on the apps GNOME is missing and I'd like to use, besides the parted frontend.

I'm still using EPIC4 as my main IRC client, although I've started to explore irssi-text to see if I end up switching, given I still don't find the perfect epic script that makes me comfortable enough. These days I wouldn't mind switching to a graphical IRC client in some cases (ie, all except when I'm on a remote link), but XChat is too complex, and I'm used to HIGgy GNOME software now. I haven't tried gnomechat, but it seems to be a bit stale lately, and I really need Jimbob to work on other fronts. ;)

I'd like to manage some stuff like my CD collection, but GTKtalog is still using GTK+ 1.2, but it seems they've been working on a GTK+ 2.0 version. I really want to avoid dealing with GTK+ 1.2 apps at this stage, and it seems the porting work is a bit stalled in CVS. For books, I want to explore Alexandria, but haven't had time yet. It looks promising. I'm not sure what the state is for Photo managers. It seems GThumb is the natural choice (as suggested by gnome-volume-manager), but as my camera isn't supported by the "Import photos" thingy, I can't say how good or bad it is.

I had thought of a nice list of programs that I would like to see born in the GNOME world, but I've forgotten of most of them. It's lovely to be underslept.

It's not a secret that in Spain, most of the people following the Tour, and cycling in general, prefer that Armstrong doesn't win his 6th Tour de France in a row.

Unluckily for us, during the stages across the Pyrenees, he has proven to be the strongest rider once again. We had hopes that after last year's very difficult victory, this year Mayo, Ullrich, Heras and others would be able to beat him in the mountain. All the contrary... Mayo seems to be about to quit, Heras hasn't been seen anywhere near the first groups in the important summits and Ullrich just doesn't seem to keep up with Armstrong. If nothing extraordinary happens in the Alps, Armstrong will set a new record in the Tour, which will be probably unbeaten for decades. Too bad for Miguel's mark...

I know a few gnomies at the other side of the Atlantic will be happy about this, though. ;)

While all the critical bits are in Sarge now, there are some packages like gnome-applets that still need to transition. All of the remaining stuff is waiting on gst-plugins0.8, which should be ready to enter testing tonight. The only thing preventing this is that it needs the new version of libxml2 as well, and libxml2 isn't being built on hppa due to a binutils/gcc/whatever bug. Hopefully this will be corrected soonish and gst-plugins will finally be able to get in testing, allowing me to stop these stupid posts on the matter. ;)

I got back from Vinaròs, from our second Olympic distance tri. I couldn't have gone worse for me...

Instead of waking up at 4:45AM this morning, Gabi, Pelúo and I decided to go in the caravan the day before, sleep there and have plenty of time to prepare stuff in the morning. The rest of the team came by bus at 6AM, to arrive pretty tight on time at 8:00. So, the three of us went to Vinaròs, got there at 20:00 or so. We looked for some place to park, which wasn't easy as most of the streets near the triathlon area were going to be cleared of cars to setup boxes, and the others would probably would be packed of drunk, noisy people in a few hours. So we found a nice place 1 kilometre away, near the beach. It had been a long time since the last time I went to sleep with the sound of the sea so near, it was quite relaxing. When 4 drunk youngsters sat down outside the caravan at 2AM and started to laugh and talk loudly, though, it stopped being relaxing. Happily they went away when we kindly told them to and could continue sleeping until 7 when we entered triathlon mode and didn't stop until we crossed the finish line.

During the race, all sorts of stuff happened to me... In the swim, someone managed to remove my swimming goggles entirely, and I had to stop and look for them around me before the sank. My orientation sucked and I had to correct my course several times. Then, when I got my bike in boxes, the chain got off the plate and despite me trying three times, I couldn't put it back in without getting of the bike and doing it by hand. Finally, in the running segment, my quadricep problems were back (just in my right leg this time), and I had to stop a few times. Again, I didn't abandon, but I probably should have. I ended with a very discrete time. Pics of Vinaròs are already up on our site.

I really hope my luck changes for Oliva. I have one month to prepare, as I didn't qualify for the Spanish championships in Valladolid and I'll be away for Cuenca's triathlon, which would have been good.

This morning I got an ecocardiogram done at the hospital. The good news is that the potato in my chest isn't exploding anytime soon.

Why I got my heart checked is a longish story. I started triathlon training last year, and these two years are by far the period when I have put most strain on my heart (and rest of my body). Last summer, I was arriving late to a training, and I was cycling fast to get there ASAP. There are about 6 kilometres from my father's house to the sports campus. As soon as I entered the city, I came across a closed traffic light, so I suddenly stopped after 15 minutes of extreme effort. A few seconds later, I started to feel dizzy, my sight started to blank a bit and most alarmingly, I felt my heart skip a few beats: pump-pump, pump-pump, pump-pump, ... pump, ... pump, ... pump, pump-pump, pump-pump.... Of course, I freaked out a bit, but mostly forgot about it when the lights went green and I had a completely normal training session. Since then, I've got the same symptoms 3 more times, so I told my mother and her husband, who casually are cardiologists. Even if they thought that could be quite normal in people doing lots of sports, we decided to do some tests just to make sure. I just don't want to collapse one day in the street. :)

On Monday I was auscultated by Adolfo, and he says he found something strange in the heartbeat sound. I had an electrocardiogram done, which didn't reveal anything bad, but hey, now I know I have 45 beats per minute when resting. Finally I got the ecocardiogram done at the hospital. The equipment they use for this is fun. It's nothing new, it's the same technique as the one used to look "inside" a pregnant woman to check the baby. I could see my heart in the monitor from many different angles, distinguishing the ventricles and valves. The two doctors started commenting something at one of the valves, but I couldn't get anything out of their medical speak. In the end, it turns out my aortic valve has a small fault and doesn't close completely, and some blood escapes when it shouldn't. They say it's nothing I should care about (yet?) and I can continue doing sport normally, but I need to keep an eye, and have it checked every two years, as the valve tends to open more as one ages. Someone else in the team had the same diagnosed for his heart, so I guess this is not too uncommon. This evening, to celebrate, I went to the river to run during 50 minutes.

Yesterday, a General Resolution was proposed to decide if the new amd64 architecture is added to the list of supported architectures in Debian 3.1. After reading the thread (and before reading it, anyway), I can't agree more with joeyh's post on the matter: if Debian as a group can't decide about things like this in a civilised discussion in the debian-devel mailing list, it probably means we're fucked. Not so long ago, proposing GR's was an exception, something we got to when reaching a reasonable consensus was completely impossible, and never for strictly technical issues like this one. We do need to vote major political issues like wiping non-free from the archive, or ammendments to the Constitution or whatever, but voting what architectures we're going to support in Sarge is wrong.

Sure, it would be very nice to have amd64 in Sarge, but how positive are the porters that this wouldn't mean yet another delay for our release? How widely tested is the port, given it hasn't entered unstable officially? I'm all for it's inclusion in unstable as soon as our infrastructure can deal with it, but making it mandatory to ship with sarge seems too dangerous to me. Besides, there are alternatives. There are no precedents, but how crackful would it be to add the port to Sarge after it is released, say in 3.1r1 or r2? Why don't we, instead of complaining that not including it would make us not support in the next 2 years an architecture that will soon become more and more popular, commit to doing more frequent releases, so this is a not-so-big issue anyway?

As joeyh and others said, I really hope things change in the future, this situation makes Debian less and less interesting.

Firefox 0.9 is now in unstable, so it was time to do the matching mozilla-firefox-locale-ca. Unfortunately, the upstream XPI had the same problems as the new Thunderbird: by default, it writes the Catalan profile stuff to the base defaults directory, instead of using a CA/ subdirectory. It's also missing some files that were present in previous versions, so I have held the upload until I discuss in the translation mailing list.

On the GNOME front, our chances of getting gst-plugins0.8 and the packages waiting for them have temporarily vanished, as an upload of gst-plugins0.8 was made. seb128 has asked David to ask before doing new uploads, so hopefully things will go better in the future. We're still missing a build of jack-audio-connection-kit for alpha to make gst-plugins0.8 a testing candidate. I'm trying to get jbailey do the dirty job for us. :)

Last night things finally worked out as we wanted and cupsys, kdelibs, samba, wine and various GNOME bits managed to entered Sarge. Thanks to all of you who had the patience to hold off your uploads to help this happen. And big thanks to vorlon and Kamion for nursing all the stuff.

More surprising is to discover, along with all of the above, that gstreamer0.8 also made it in testing, at least according to the testing output interpreter. If this is true, it would mean all of the important problems of GNOME in testing would be solved now. In any case, when you apt-get update tonight, you testing users should finally get a working gedit and other stuff.

Update: I was obviously too sleepy to blog... what we're missing is gst-plugins0.8, not gstreamer itself.

Yesterday after lunch I decided I would spend all the evening doing pending Debian work. I uploaded mozilla-locale-eu 1.7 for the Basque guys, did my own mozilla-thunderbird-locale-ca as soon as I spotted thunderbird 0.7.1 in incoming, then moved to freeciv bug triaging and ended up fixing just two bugs (other bugs are fixed upstream for 1.15), and finally I did some bug fixing in alsa-utils, including the annoying alsaconf config path bug. I'm still missing updates for mozilla-locale-ca (waiting for upstream) and mozilla-firefox-locale-ca (waiting for the unstable upload), but the Debian TODO is a lot better now.

gimp-print now has all builds ready to go into testing. Tonight we might go to bed with the nice surprise of getting the cups stuff sorted out.

Last evening, the release guys were doing simulations on the cupsys stuff, and everything looked well: qt3 has been accepted in Sarge, thus unblocking kdelibs. The Samba RC bug had been temporarily downgraded to help things a bit. Everything looked bright, and the release team started thinking the transition would be complete in yesterday's testing run... until we spotted a gimp-print upload in incoming. This made it not possible to have the transition done last night, but fortunately, the buildd's reacted promptly and at this time, all the 11 builds have been completed successfully, with just a few remaining to be uploaded to incoming.

The catch: the upload was marked with low priority, so it would have taken 10 days to enter testing. The maintainer was then asked to reupload with a higher urgency, and that just happenned. Guys, this is bad. If you need to push some urgency so a package waits less to enter testing, don't do new uploads just for this. Instead, explain why you need the higher urgency to the release team (always reachable in debian-release@lists.debian.org or #debian-release in Freenode. They can bump these things internally in the testing scripts.

On a related note, if you maintain a package that directly or indirectly uses libcupsys, please, please don't do uploads until further notice, or you'll be blocking the transition further. Thanks.

Obviously Murphy is not on vacation yet... another day passes in the testing puzzle world.

I did my i18n workshop this evening, and I'm not too sure about the result. First, the computers at the computer lab didn't work, so we had to use a KDE-based Live-CD, which only had one of the 4 translation tools (KBabel) I wanted to demo. The USB stick with my OpenOffice presentation, for some reason, had the old version from yesterday night, and I was missing most of my slides, so I had to do the presentation from memory. Finally, I had no projector, so I had to write some of the URLs and gettext examples by hand in the chalkboard. Despite this, I think the people got the idea, and next time I do it it'll be better, hopefully.

tbm just whines about being hungry, and Robert and Guillem are planning staying all night in the University hacking their KFreeBSD port. Quite insane... Amaya and Ian are completely MIA since a few hours ago and don't answer our calls. They are going to miss today's dinner...

Sergio and I need to leave tomorrow at 7:30AM, unfortunately. The rest will stay until Saturday, when tbm will speak about Debian and Robert and Guillem about Debian GNU/K*BSD.

We have arrived at Manresa, after a longish drive from Valencia. Poor Ian is still suffering a bad jet-lag, and Amaya is still not convinced about my very clear arguments regarding Valencian and Catalan. She will give in before Friday, and it's actually true she's learning Catalan... she's asking all of us to speak Catalan with her. We have already met Guillem and Robert at the University, as well as Aleix Badia, the restless Catalan translator in our team. Guillem and Robert have gone to the airport to pick up tbm, who should be here soon, and then we'll go to the youth hostal and have some dinner. Sergio and I are trying to quickly finish up our talk and workshop for tomorrow. I hope I'll manage to finish it on time...

Once again, I couldn't ressist taking my training shoes with me, even if I know the chances of me going out to run for a while are minimal. tbm will want to make fun of this... again.

Update: Sergio stole my title. And Amaya is using Windows XP.

Tomorrow, Ian Murdock, Amaya, Sergio and I will head to Manresa, near Barcelona, to attend to the III Jornades de Programari Lliure, after the first two arrive to Valencia from Madrid. In this meeting, Sergio will talk about Custom Debian Distributions and I'll do a workshop on free software localization. tbm is also coming and will give a talk about Debian on Saturday. Additionally, Robert Millan and Guillem Jover will talk about Debian GNU/K*BSD, and giving the Debian Catalan Cabal a nice opportunity to meet in Real Life and talk about the next steps in the World Domination Plan.

tbm wants to go to the beach, so you lot should be taking a swimming suit just in case. Ok, admittedly, I want to go too. :)

The meeting has a lot more Debian presence than the organizers expected at the beginning. Besides, lots of people from Softcatalà and a few other projects I contribute to will be present, and I'm looking forward to meet them too. See you all in Manresa!

I haven't posted about this in a while, mostly due to lack of news.

As it stands now, the biggest problem with the GNOME components in Sarge is gedit not starting, and the easies solution is still to hand-fix it. This is due to the big gnutls10 transition still being stalled. The biggest problem today is kdelibs, which is waiting for a qt3 build on m68k. Hopefully, with a bit of luck, this will be resolved soon and the release mages will be able to cast the spell that makes kdelibs, GNOME stuff, Samba, CUPS and others enter Sarge at once.

Another of the GNOME problems is the lack of gst-plugins0.8 in Sarge. This is stalling gnome-applets, gnome-media and a few more. The problem this time is jack-audio-connection-kit, which is missing an alpha build and a few days of wait. With lully up and running again (apparently), one hopes that jack will be ready to go soon, thus removing a good list of packages needed by meta-gnome in testing.

Speaking of meta-gnome2, I uploaded version 56 today, adding an alternative for mozilla-xft, which has been replaced by the normal mozilla build. Little after my upload, mozilla-browser was corrected to declare a Provides: mozilla-xft, but I guess it won't harm anyone to have the alternative there for a while.

My libgnetwork packages were accepted, but failed to build do to a compile warning on some arches mixed with the usage of -Werror. I'll fix soonish, hopefully.

I need to translate gstreamer. Maybe tonight.

One of the expected surprises I found when I came back from Pont the Suert was a tremendous amount of unfiltered mail (ie, spam + non-list mail I probably have to reply to). Just one year ago, the alarm bells would have gone off if my inbox reached 40 mails or so. Today, it's probably at 400 mails, some of them that I really should reply but I have no time to. If you're waiting for a reply from me and you don't get it, I suggest you remail me and insist. IRC and jabber probably works better these days, though.

It's been an exhausting weekend, but very, very fun.

We left at 16:00 or so after I left my workplace and had lunch in about 6 minutes. After a drive to the Pyrenees without incidents, we got to the town at 22:00, found a place to camp and went to sleep after dinner. We spent all Saturday seeing things around the area, like the lake where we'd swim, and specially the romanic churches in Boí and Taüll. We went back to Pont de Suert to hear the triathlon's briefing, and finally back to the camping to prepare for the triathlon.

On Sunday morning we woke up early, had a quick breakfast and headed to the town again, to prepare the second boxes, where we left our running shoes and a cap for the sun. We left the caravan there too, took our bikes, the wetsuits and our swimming and cycling stuff and headed to the lake, where the first boxes were. We prepared everything quickly and some minutes later we were starting the 1.500m swim. Swimming in lakes is a lot better than sea in many ways, but above all, because if you accidentally swallow water it's not the end of the world like with salt water. The cycling segment was hard. After getting out of the water, the road would never stop going up until km. 23, where we turned around and descended at 60km/h to Pont de Suert. The running segment made the triathlon the toughest one we've ever run. They took us through a forestal road with many steep areas, with a lot of heat and sun. I had plenty of muscular problems in my quadriceps, and should have abandoned at km. 3, but decided to finish no matter what, and at km. 6 my legs started to hurt a bit less so I could continue running more or less normally the reimaining 4 kilometres. I ended the running segment in 1:01h, probably 15 minutes more than expected, but at least I crossed the finish line.

Soon after finishing, we had a quick shower, packed our bags and bicycles in the caravan and started our return to Valencia. After dealing with a road cut by some farmers in Maials and a tire blow-out (with no further implications thanks to Gabi's driving expertise), we managed to get home at 22:00, little after Greece scored their goal in the Euro final.

It's been a nice triathlon weekend, with the bonus of going back to my loved Pyrenees after 5 years.