On Friday, 5 members of our team are going to el Pont de Suert (Lleida), for our first Olympic triathlon this season. We're all looking forward to this, as normally the competitions that involve travelling and going out of our usual Valencian triathlon circuit are the most exciting and the ones that are best remembered months later.

We'll leave as soon as we all leave our work places, travel for about 6h in a caravan packed with bikes and go straight to the camping nearest to the lake where we'll have to swim. We'll spend Saturday visiting the zone, which has a few Romanic churches and monuments. Being in the Pyrenees, I expect the area to be quite beautiful too.

On Sunday, at 9:30AM, we'll start the triathlon. I feel a bit uneasy about it because my training in the last weeks hasn't been as good as it could have been with the periostitis injury in my right leg and a general lack of motivation. I hope I'll do more or less ok in the swimming -wetsuits will be permitted, as the water will be quite cold- but cycling will probably be quite hellish, as it's in the middle of the mountains. What I fear most is the 10km run, after the hard bicycle. Until now, I had run acceptably well in the sprint distances, but now the conditions change: besides being double distance, we'll be running at about 11:30, with the Sun hitting us hard. I already have my arms burnt of our last byclicle training last Sunday, and I fear that I might get even worse burns this time, as we won't be able to use any Sun protection (well, we can try, but it'll be useless if we put on a wetsuit). We'll see how it goes...

It's not even July and TV news programs are only talking about the high temperatures in Spain. Some southern cities have already hit 50ºC, and I melt just thinking about it. Even worse, it seems Seville had massive blackouts which lasted all day, due to a very high demand caused by air conditioning. I definitely don't want to be in Seville in such situation.

I generally don't mind high temperatures. I will start ranting about the cold weather when Valencia is at 10 or 12ºC in winter, but heat I can handle pretty well. My Athlon, on the other hand, doesn't like heat at all, and just a few months after buying this box, I suffered a few sudden reboots. After removing the metal case, it got a lot better, but when summer comes it's not rare to experience a few reboots...

The other day, Barrapunto had a story about cooling your Athlon, with links to the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO and the athcool utility. I had no idea these things existed. As one may expect, athcool is packaged in Debian, so it was quite trivial to try it out. I'm still quite impressed by the result. With the powersaving mode on, the system temperature got reduced by 12 degrees or so, and now it's quite far from the dangerous "reboot" limit. I'm not experiencing any of the problems the docs talk about (distorted sound, lockups or performance hits). If you've got an Athlon box, I suggest you try this stuff, even if it's just to help your power bill next month.

Bedtime, at 27ºC :)

If you ask for comments, make sure your comment system doesn't break. I hadn't noticed the permission problems after moving the cgi to /var. It's fixed now... sorry about that, folks.

In the meanwhile, Ross and I agreed on IRC that suffixes are bad, and I got rid of them entirely. He also told me about the py['defaultFlavour'] config option, which I hand't found, everything is ok now (well, except for the content_type vs. IE problem which I still need suggestions for).

Update: James pointed me at a nice post on blog URLs.

As I said in a previous post, I spent some time cleaning up my PyBlosxom flavour to make it XHTML 1.1 compliant. I also decided to start using my vanity domain a bit better, and moved the blog to the webserver's rootdir. In order to maintain backwards compatibility and not break a lot of links to my blog out there, I installed a Redirect rule so calls to the old dir look at the new dir, and that seems to work.

The main problem is now that I'm not too sure about how to solve the application/xhtml+xml problem with Internet Explorer. The mod_rewrite rules sjoerd and thom shared don't work too well for pyblosxom:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.xhtml$
RewriteRule .* - "[T=text/html]"

It's easy to have URLs like /blog/2004/Jun/28, and if I understand correctly, the Redirect won't work with this type of URLs. I also don't know if it's possible to make "xhtml" the default flavour in pyblosxom, instead of "html". I'm actually not sure if the permalink for this entry "should" end up with .html, .xhtml, or no suffix at all. Suggestions welcome. :)

It's becoming a tradition that my upstreams coordinate the releases of the Debian packages I maintain. GNU mailutils 0.5 and GNU nano 1.2.4 have been released in the last two days.

With mailutils 0.5, Jeff and I have decided to stop packaging CVS snapshots in Debian, as the software is now quite stable and usable. It surely needs some documentation love, but it'll get there. <plug>MH users might want to test mailutils-mh, which is GNU's replacement for the MH package</plug>.

nano 1.2.4 is a minor update, with a few bugfixes, given 1.2 has been in maintenance mode for about one year and a half. In the devel branch, nano 1.3.3 should be released RSN, and the next version should finally have sane UTF-8 support. Very probably not soon enough to ship with Sarge, though.

This evening I ran in the Second Volta a Peu a Godella. There wasn't too much level, and when I crossed the finish line, there only were about 30 (out of ~400) participants ahead of me. It's the first time I end up so high in the rank in a race, but it probably had no merit. Oh, it was a 5kms race, and I estimate I did just below 20 minutes. Acceptable, for me, and more after these weeks of no training due to the evil periostitis.

Bedtime now, I have cycling training tomorrow morning.

Today I saw 3 different persons go into #gnome, ask about the GNOME problems in Sarge, and being directed to my blog. This was enough to make me feel quite embarrased about the lack of css stylesheet (I removed the default pyblosxom style, and the new one wasn't working). So after a few hours and facing many problems, I have a prototype, which still needs polishing, but works for now. I have updated the pyblosxom flavour to XHTML 1.1 Strict, which is a bit painful in some aspects, but works ok on Mozilla-based browsers. The biggest problem is that it requires a sane content-type, application/xhtml+xml, but IE doesn't know about this type at all. Sjoerd gave me some Apache Rewrite magic, but I didn't manage to get it working. I'll see if he knows what's up with Apache2 tomorrow.

Sorry, I know this might be boring, but people seem to want me to post here whenever there's news.

Things have improved quite noticeably since yesterday. control-center has finally entered testing today, so after your next sarge upgrade, your icons should show up as normal again. There gedit problem stands unsolved, and it'll take a while, so if you're annoyed at it, consider hand-fixing it.

Other good news is that epiphany and galeon have also entered testing, even when Mozilla 1.7 had been uploaded to unstable, managing to avoid the new dependency. A new epiphany for Mozilla 1.7 has been uploaded and I guess galeon will follow suit quickly.

Slightly unrelated, I uploaded meta-gnome2 55 today, adding gnome-cups-manager to the gnome meta-package, and the nice HIG documentation to gnome-devel. Spies report that Ross is happy now.

France was kicked out of Euro 2004, too. It's interesting to see how all the big favourites have been sent home quite early.

As people have been asking for news on the semi-disaster, here we go.

Things haven't really improved in the last week. gnome-control-center 2.6 hasn't entered testing yet, but is abou to do so. We're just missing a mips build, which has already been done by the buildd, so hopefully it'll appear in incoming in one or two days. Another of the problematic packages, gnome-applets, is in bad shape, as it hasn't been built in some architectures due to a bug in sgml-base, completely out of the control of the GNOME team. We hope this will be resolved soonish and builds start so succeed after that. There's another problem in the current set of GNOME packages in Sid, as gedit refuses to start now that libeel is at version 2.6. This is due to API breakages in eel which are not well handled upstream with soname bumps. This bug has been reported multiple times, and the bug has been forwarded upstream, but the upstream maintainers don't intend to maintain API compatibility in eel at all. They claim it's a private library in nautilus, but reality is that it's used in epiphany, control-center, abiword and others. (don't read this as a rant, I'm just trying to describe the situation). The easiest way of fixing this problem in Debian is to add unstable sources to apt, install the unstable version of gedit (2.6.x), which will pull new cupsys, libgnomeprint, kdelibs4 (if you have it installed) version. Then remove unstable again from your sources, and you'll end up having a working gedit.

On a unrelated note, those who want to play with GNOME 2.7.x can do so by upgrading to experimental. Some GNOME folks have started packaging it.

Luvly! We need a GR to ammend the Constitution to make Debian a monarchy.

I got a pair of comments on my last entry which I guessed I could answer in a new post, specially the second one, as Amaya and I had an argument about Valencian vs. Catalan not that long ago.

Anyway, Tommy wanted to know what these exams are about. Basically, it's a test on your knowledge on the Catalan language. The "Mitjà" level was more or less easy to pass for me. The "Superior" level is the same, but with added difficulty to the questions.

The exam, which lasts for 2:30h, consists on reading comprehension, a dictation, writing, grammar, vocabulary and oral expression. Reading comprehension is easy. They give you a text and you have to summarize in 5 lines. The dictation was kind of hard, because my sister and I were sit in the last row, making it quite difficult to hear, besides the text was weird and contained quite a few words I had never heard before. In the writing exercise, they give you two options to write about (200 words). One was "Space tourism", which I picked, I don't remember what the other was. There are a lot of different exercises to test grammar, including filling in the blanks with missing glyphs and rewriting sentences to use pronoms febles. This last exercise is quite tricky in Valencia because our variant of Catalan in the area doesn't use promons febles extensively. Another difficult exercise is correcting sentences. They give you 5 sentences which contain errors gramatical or morphological errors, which you need to identify and correct. In many cases you are convinced there's nothing wrong with it. Others, you identify a barbarism in one of the words used, but it's of no use, as you don't know or remember what the correct word is. How the fuck do you say "corsé" in Catalan? The vocabulary section is quite hard too, because again some words you haven't heard in your entire life. The oral exam is just reading a text with some random subject (mine was about contamination in the food chain) and then speaking a bit about it.

Next, Jaume asked why I called it a "Valencian" exam in the blog entry, when I really mean Catalan. Jaume, the exam is quite localized. The text said "servici" (ugh) instead of "servei", "este" instead of "aquest", and the verbs were written in the Valencian fashion, "traduïx" instead of "tradueix", etc. Even if I know it's Catalan, it was full of the minor differences between the oriental branch of the language and our variant of the occidental branch, which is commonly known as Valencian. I agree I should have put some emphasis on the fact that it's the same language, in the end. I hope this answers your question, I definitely have no doubts on the boring Catalan unity debate. ;)

This morning, I took the "Grau superior" exam for Valencian. As expected it was damn difficult. It actually was less difficult than I thought, but difficult enough for my sister, me and other 3 friends to have no expectations on passing. After the exam, we started talking about some of the tricky questions and was a bit depressing, heh. This is the highest level of Valencian, and they are not permissive at all with spelling mistakes, etc. I think it's enough with 3 spelling mistakes in a 200-letter writeup to make you fail all of it. Anyway, I had not prepared it at all, I expect to do it again in November after we've studied a bit. Studying this level is difficult though, many of our problems come from lack of very extense vocabulary, which you can't really help by studying a text book. You improve vocabulary by using the language every day, reading books, and so on. Even if it's difficult, I love the language. :)

Following up a bit on Murray's piece on the European elections, let's have a brief look at the brand new Constitution which was approved yesterday (MJ Ray already blogged a bit about this). So, do you, European citizens reading this, know a single thing about this document? Not me, at least. I have no idea what this apparently very important document talks about, and how it affects us in our everyday lifes. I suspect it's quite full of numbers, quotas, freedom limitations and so on, but it's quite interesting that the major part of the population isn't aware of this. It's quite frightening that on some countries, it'll be imposed by their government. Actually, nobody talked about testing it in referendums until Tony Blair announced he would do that. Then, the Spanish PM and others also expressed their support to this idea, but they only started discussing this a month ago or so, when the text was mostly finished.

If we end up getting a chance of voting about the Constitution, I think it won't be too surprising if it doesn't pass in some of the 25 countries. I suspect the text is vague or ignores completely many social aspects of our different regions. Just to name one, it is impossible for a Catalan citizen to express themselves in their mother tongue when dealing with EU bureocracy. Isn't that discrimination?

Sigh. Yesterday, most of GNOME hit Sarge, and today it reached the mirrors. It seems the result couldn't be more catastrophic... we really didn't expect GNOME packages to go into Sarge today, we probably only expected GTK+2.0 and a few of the lower GNOME libraries to make it. Instead, most of the modules managed to get in, including -panel, -session, -terminal and nautilus, but not including control-center and -applets, due to gst-plugins0.8 not being ready for testing yet.

This reportedly is breaking GNOME in Sarge quite severily, as nautilus is apparently missing a needed dependency on capplets, and nobody noticed. The result is nautilus showing the default icon (a blank paper) for all folder and file icons, making your filebrowsing experience quite interesting.

We're discussing what the most quick remedy may be. One alternative is to do uploads of -applets and control-center without gstreamer support and try to get those in fast. Another one is to see if testing-proposed-updates works and feed it with the gstreamer-less packages so they hit testing immediately.

For those who have already upgraded and need a solution, you will probably be ok if you just install by hand the missing packages, capplets 2.6.1-5, and the two dependencies missing in Sarge, libgstreamer0.8-0 0.8.3-1 and libgstreamer-plugins0.8-0 0.8.1-4. You will probably need to remove acme by hand too (and gnome-desktop-environment, if you had it installed).

If you don't know how to do this, the basics are these: to remove acme, do apt-get --purge remove acme. To install the three packages, once you have downloaded them, apt-get install libxklavier8 and then dpkg -i file1.deb file2.deb file3.deb. If you are a bit more experienced with Debian packages, the easiest is to add unstable (and leave sarge in too) to your sources.list, and after updating, do apt-get install gnome-control-center/unstable. After that, remove unstable from your sources again.

Bedtime now... In 5 hours I pretend to break my record mark of 10 days without any kind of triathlon training. The joy of injuries and lack of motivation.

They keep coming in, and it seems the three members of the Debian ALSA team are too busy with RL or other Debian stuff to handle them. We have bugs with patches that not only have not made their way to unstable, but not even to our CVS repo. Maybe we should start considering asking for a 4th member to join the team, in an attempt to make ALSA packaging a bit more dynamic (as it was some months ago).

As many will have noticed, I was wrong when I said bits of GNOME would go in last night. Actually, GTK+2.4 is supossed to make it tonight, and the more difficult bits will have their chance in the following days. There has been a gstreamer0.8 upload today to fix a RC bug that may delay stuff a bit. I can also see possible problems with meta-gnome2 for 2.4 in testing wanting acme, and control-center 2.6 conflicting it. It probably just means the meta-packages have to go in at the same time as control-center, but this also adds some complexity to the equation. Next chapter, after tonight's testing run. :)

It seems there won't be Claxon Hell in the city due to this evening's Euro 2004 football match. FUTBOLEROS, VIVIDORES! ;)

Today, the first chunks of GNOME 2.6 will start entering Sarge, if nothing strange happens. Things look quite ok right now, with all the autobuilders keeping up to date and with the RC bugs sorted out. The only bit that could be a bit more complicated is the libcupsys transition to gnutls10, as a few big packages are involved: GNOME, KDE, Samba, CUPS and wine. The latter is dragging a dependency for the new alsa-lib 1.0.5 packages, which will probably delay it 5 days or so. There's an RC bug on Samba which could be problematic, but the maintainers probably will do something about it before alsa-lib is ready to go. With a bit of luck, this will go more or less smoothly in, unlike when we did the 2.2->2.4 transition, which was stalled by a series of unfortunate incidents (including the Debian security compromise).

This afternoon I spent some time upgrading pyblosxom to version 1.0.0.

I had been using the Debian package, which had 0.8.1... in experimental... the package in unstable is still at 0.7.x. I obviously grabbed the tarball and installed it in /usr/local. After the upgrade, it seems the rss generator has become a lot more picky, and would choke in the dozen HTML small errors that I had all over my blog posts. Omnic noticed my posts were empty in Planet Debian just as I was closing terminals in preparation for heading to bed. It should be ok now.

I'll probably start writing a new style sheet for the entire web tomorrow, and think about moving the whole blog to the topdir of my webserver, as I really have no other uses for it.

Thanks to all the people who replied to my previous post on blog spam. It's obviously not new, and it seems MT users have been hit quite badly by this. I guess removing links from comments is the first, quick step, but some kind of URL filter for the comment module in pyblosxom would be handy. Has anyone hacked something similar?

Just an extension that lets you create a blacklist of URLs would be a start, as the spammer URLS are always the same. They do know about some anti-anti-spam techniques though, and for example write "online casino" as "on&amp;#108;ine-cas&amp;#105;no", so to read links they should be rendered first.

The other day I found one comment in one of my blog's posts which sounded weird. It said "HI, Wow.. this is a very informative website! I enjoy your site very much! Keep up the good work!" or similar. The author name linked to what looked like a pretty boring personal website. Yesterday I discovered most of my blog posts have one or more of these messages. What the fuck, they are spamming me through my blog! They basically write random nonsense like that, and add a link to an online-casino or whatever in the link you can leave as signature in pyblosxom.

Has anyone else had problems like this in their blogs? If it continues, it'll be easy to fix: I will just remove the comments module from my install and be done with it. Thanks to those who post useful stuff every now and then, though. It's nice to read replies to some of my posts.

In the last week or so I've been more active in the Debian front than usual. I've done uploads of mozilla-thunderbird-locale-ca (for version 0.6), meta-gnome2 (for GNOME 2.6), eog and nautilus-media (needed to complete meta-gnome2 deps), gtranslator (to fix a build failure with GTK 2.4), nano, qstat (with a new CVS snapshot, as upstream isn't doing real releases anymore) and a few mailutils releases (finally fixing the help2man problem). The GNOME team, and specially seb128, have done a great job in getting GNOME 2.6 on track to enter Sarge. Scary enough is that some already talk about packaging 2.7 in experimental...

Apparently, anyway.

It's the second time in less than two months that I appear in the list of speakers for a congress or party... without being informed at all. Sergio Talens pointed me this morning at the Campus Party's webpage (flash crap, sorry), where they announce the presence of Jordi Mallach, "Debian Project Manager", who will give courses and conferences, "warranting a very high level". Great. Please, can anyone mail me and tell me what am I supossed to talk about? Thanks. :)

Today's triathlon was the first I was really happy about my result. Santa Pola is a 2:30h away from València, and we had to get up scarily early to be in time for the boxes check. We left at 6AM, which meant getting up at 4:45... insane.

Santa Pola's is a nice triathlon. Today was the second edition and for the first time I could repeal the blows in the water more or less ok, managed to get in the group before me in the cycling segment, and ran at around 4mins/km in the final segment, ending with a quite ok (for me) 1:06:00 mark in a sprint distance. The following triathlons are all olympic distance, let's see if I keep it up.

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, but I saw Martin-Éric laments about the lack of UTF-8 support in GNU nano. Yes, it's unfortunate that the current stable version is lacking this feature, but don't despair, the development branch (1.3.x) will soonish have it, as David is completing the internal work that was needed to make this possible. As soon as Sarge freezes, I'll consider switching unstable's nano to 1.3.x, as it's quite stable and carries some good fixes in a number of areas.

Martin, I was sorry to read about your wife's miscarriage. I hope both of you are well.