Today I went to the hospital to visit the opthalmologist. The good news: as expected, what happened the other day was just a case of optical migraine, which needs no treatment and I shouldn't worry about. Thanks to everyone who mailed me or commented in the blog giving advice or wishing me luck!

The doctor examined my retina, and found nothing wrong with them that would cause “lights” or total blindness. He did find what he described as “the start of retinal folding”, which might be congenite, but I should keep an eye on in case it becomes a real problem. Apparently I should be vigilant to objects appearing with deformed shapes, etc.

So I came back earlier that expected to office, but I really can't do anything here due to the pupil dilation. Everything is blurry, light is extremely annoying, and I'm writing this using a ridiculously big terminal font.

The “get decent sleep” plan continues, and I've been sleeping the expected amount of hours since last Tuesday.

I haven't heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting.

The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Loïc and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.

The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place.

But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it'll probably be too late.

The other day I had an “incident” involving my vision. It has nothing to do with the vision problems many people had the other day, when someone posted some pr0n on various Planets.

For some time already, maybe two or three years, I've had this weird vision problem at times, when I'd start seeing some black stains with some flashing “lights“, even with my eyes closed. These symptoms would go away after a few minutes, and washing my eyes with a good amount of water also helped. It happened a lot during mornings, and I somehow connected it to showering with too hot water, using a certain brand of shampoo (Say no to Revlon!) and shower vapour. When I described the symptoms to my mother, the reaction was the expected in a house of doctors and nurses: indiference. En casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo, for those who understand it.

On Sunday I stayed up helping Belén with her DEA paper until 5AM. I woke up at 7:30AM, and stayed at work like a zombie, until I had a chance to have a needed nap at 6PM. The problem was my nap was a bit longer than I wanted, and woke up at 9:15PM, still tired but no longer sleepy. I wasn't sleepy until 4AM, and next morning I accidentally overslept, and rushed out of the bed to get to work as soon as possible.

While preparing, I suddenly noticed my vision went a bit blurry and strange. I thought it just was one of those ”stains”, until I closed my right eye to rub it and all I saw was darkness.

I totally freaked out. “OMFG, I'm fucking BLIND”. I wanted to phone someone, but wireless had broken down and I didn't have my mobile phone with me, so I tried looking at a text file I have in the laptop with some numbers on, when it ran out of battery. I grabbed my old mobile and failed to introduce the correct PIN three times.

I went to the bathroom, covered my right eye, and yeah, there was darkness. If I waved my hand over my blind eye, I would barely notice some movement on the left side, but that was all. Still very frightened, I washed my eye thoroughly and to my relief, I was able to see the upper part of my field of vision. After some more, I had recovered all my sight. Whew.

I managed to speak to Raül on the phone, who told me this probably wasn't too bad, just the optic nerve being tired due to stress and so on. My mother also asked an opthalmologist at her hospital the day after, who confirmed this. It's probably caused by my recent whacky sleeping habits (basically non-existing), general stress, and long exposures to computer monitors. The doctor asked her if I had a headache, which I didn't the day before, but I had one the day after, when she asked. “How do you know?”, I replied.

Last night I went to bed at 00:05 and managed to sleep eight hours for the first time in many months. I'm really going to make an effort to fix my sleeping habits, because they were quite fucked up lately, not catching up sleep even during weekends. On Monday I'll visit the doctor anyway, just to confirm all of this.

Coincidentally, Russel Coker also had similar symptoms this week, and also blogged about it.

GNOME 2.16 was released this week, delivering, once again to the day, the usual catalogue of improvements and polishing. Congratulations, everyone!

Catalan is, once again, very well covered in this release (99.87% completed as of this writing) thanks to the fantastic GNOME group at Softcatalà. I have only been able to contribute an update to Sound Juicer and little more, due to lack of time and, admittedly, motivation, so I'm very glad to see the group continues to be healthy and active thanks to Xavi, Jordi, Maria (from WSOP fame!), Gil (awesome GUADEC organiser) and others, under the leadership of Josep. Moltes gràcies, equip!

GTetrinet 0.7.10 is out. This release fixes a security hole (CVE-2006-3125), so you're advised to update ASAP.

The last release was assembled during UbuntuDownUnder, back in April 2005, which is a good indication about GTetrinet's development health. If you're interested in writing new features or fixing the many bugs in GTetrinet, please consider joining the mailing list. GTetrinet really needs your help!

Debian binaries are on the way to unstable; Ubuntu will hopefully suck them up soonish. Get the hot tarball from the GNOME FTP mirrors.