19:12 < Данило> jordim: btw, you should look up what 'dude' means in Serbian :)
19:13 < Данило> jordim: (old slang for 'boobs', but don't tell anyone I told 
                you that)

(danilo's name obfuscated in cyrillic so he can't blame me)

Update:

20:52 < kaol> jordi: dude, you fail at obfuscation

1:00 AM. València celebrates with big fireworks, and drivers sound their horns along Blasco Ibánez. People are happy; we will have our urban F1 circuit after all. Our city will continue growing and becoming the very best of Europe. Our land will continue to be developed, and finally becoming the new Côte d'Azur, for the great benefit of a few.

The slow but unstoppable process of degrading a culture to something that can be admired by tourists during Fallas just reached a new milestone.

Welcome to my ex-country. The land of golf, sailing and open-wheel racing.

València clearly leaves no room for mistakes when it comes to bicycles, I just got reminded of this the hard way today.

Last night I came out of the institute just 15 minutes before the closing of the supermarket, and I wanted to buy some stuff for dinner. I rushed back home, and decided I had no time to go up to drop my backpack and bicycle before they would close, so I just tied it to a street lamp outside the supermarket door. I ended up buying a few heavy things like milk so when I went out I then realised I wouldn't be able to carry the four bags, plus the backpack, plus the bicycle up, and the easiest would be to drop the stuff at home and then go down again for the bicycle. Great plan, except after placing the food in the cabinets, I totally forgot about the bike and did the usual cooking-laundry-computer-bed ritual.

Only when I was ready to go to work today I realised the bike was not up in the flat, and I suddenly realised about my fuckup. A quick glance from the balcony revealed what I suspected: the bike was no longer there.

This is quite annoying because there are at least three bikes that sleep outside on the street every single day, although they look “old” and value-less. Ironically, I value old bikes more than any new mountain-bike like mine, which I got for free from my bank, and was pretty crappy, even if at first glance it appeared to be quite ok Orbea (the gears were crappy Shimano, the back wheel was deformed, and a long etc. of quirks).

As I feel quite impaired without a bike, I'll try to get my mother's Orbea Laida, fixed ASAP, something I should have done 7 months ago. For now, I'll just run home/to work; I really need it anyway.

People tell me I should just get one from the stolen bicycle market in València, and I get mad at them. These people are the reason there's such a big offer for stolen bikes, and they get stolen nearly professionally in València. Sigh.

Via Quico Llach's blog, I just learned about Google no longer hiring independent translators to work on their many web applications. Since Quico was hired by them to do their Catalan translators, a few millions of users have been benefitting from his very professional work in Google's most used services: mail, maps, search...

Like Quico, I really hope they already have deals with translation companies to take care of minorised and minority language translations. When Catalan translations were made by random volunteers, I remember the results were quite... unsatisfying, as each one of them used their own glossary and style. When Quico took over, the interfaces were normalised using the Guia d'estil and everything improved dramatically (this problem is something people involved in Rosetta as a developer, translator and team leader know well, and is tricky to solve). Having Google suddenly drop Catalan as a “supported” language would be a huge step back for Catalan on technology. Either way, we'll find out soon.

On this happy day, there's some big news coming from the Ubuntu Catalan Community. Today's Community Council meeting approved the Catalan LoCo team, with lots of praise from the council members.

<mako> this is a fantastic application
<mako> the ultimate sign of a great team is that makes people want to
       move to their community to participate, +1 from me :)
<jono> this team is setting a standard for approval applications

Ubuntaires, my apologies for not being able to attend the meeting to offer my support. It clearly wasn't needed at all, though, thanks to the amazing work you're been doing during the last months. What I like most about the Catalan LoCo is that it's the first culture-based team, as opposed to the traditional model of state, country or territory LoCo's. Quoting the wiki,

[The] Ubuntu Catalan User community gathers Catalan-speaking users of Ubuntu in all its varieties. The scope of the Catalan LoCo Team is mainly the Catalan Countries, that is, the territories where Catalan is traditionally spoken, where members and volunteers are spread practically all over their geography.

Endavant!

Turning 29 means I'm really near the age of 30, becoming grumpy and watching how the 40's keep getting closer and closer. Oh no!

On the more positive side, it also means I've been getting calls from the people who love me all day long, and I'll celebrate with my friends tonight, at Terra. Thanks everyone!

pusa, a server I administer at uni, suffered a massive data accident on Wednesday. When I went to see why it didn't come up from a reboot on Friday, I found out the initrd hadn't been able to mount /. Weird...

Luckily, the two new disks were already installed in the host and waiting for me to finish the migration to the RAID1 and the new Linux-VServer setup, but unfortunately I've been way too busy and it was too late for some of our data. A fsck of /dev/hda1 resulted on large portions of the data going to /lost+found. Discovering this made me feel like a great fool after not having dd'd the device before doing this (a dry-run of fsck had not reported anything useful). I found out some of the lost data in random directories, but in general lots were missing, and others made no sense:

/oldpusa/etc: gzip compressed data, was "libpng.txt", from Unix, last modified: Wed Dec 20 00:58:51 2006, max compression

I hoped for my PostgreSQL stuff being intact, so after dd'ing /dev/hda5, I fsck'd the image. The result was an empty filesystem, and a lost+found full of stuff. I can't find a directory with stuff that resembles postgresql data at all. I did find a directory with a PG_VERSION file in it, but the rest of the files in it (around 100) had numeric names and little more. If anyone thinks I might be able to rebuild my /var/lib/postgresql from this, I'll be infinitely grateful.

Anyway, I haven't written to the corrupted after I fucked up the root partition. I'm very interested in knowing what could cause corruption on all partitions, making them unmountable, but still recognisable by fsck, even if the result is not good at all. Maybe a corrupted partition table? If so, what does the Dear Lazyweb recommend me to try out? I suspect the first portion of all partitions were damaged, but maybe just that. Some “partition table shift”, which makes the filesystems lose the first superblock (trying other superblocks didn't work either)? Suggestions is very welcome by comment or email, and detail on what tools and how to use to try out things, better. My backup of PostgreSQL is not so recent, and recovering some SmartList data would also be great.

As for the mandatory “where are your backups”, the answer is basically we had no resources to store them until very recently, and when we finally got the disks I've had no time until now to set it up entirely, so some bits (db, lists, web) were still not running off the new drives. The luckiest people have been the MUD owners, who have had no data loss at all, as they were living entirely on /dev/md0. Losing MUD data probably means getting angry calls at 4AM or so. :)