The last two weeks have been quite complicated. Very little sleep, lots of stuff to finish at work and the deadline quickly approaching...

I don't think I have been so stressed in many years, some days I got back home and thought about getting some pills to calm down. Thank you for that, OpenOffice!

So, after our longest non-week-end, the LliureX team has created the ISO of the CD that will be distributed in the Valencian Free Software Congress which will take place in Castelló early next month. To get here, I've done around 10 builds of OpenOffice.org in our quest to add Valencian support. The fight was long, and OOo nearly won, but luckily Sergio joined ZuleX's OOo division in the last moment and we managed to get rid of a small bug consisting in menubars speaking German instead of Valencian.

Besides the OOo headaches, it's time ditch MozillaTranslator in favour of any of the alternatives available, because MT really, really sucks and fucked my migration from Thunderbird 0.9 to 1.0.

Anyway, it's been two tough weeks, but I think we got there more or less. After being through this, I guess I cannot envy any Canonical employee two weeks before a Ubuntu release, if they have to work like this before their release day. I guess this happens everywhere actually, but it's the first time I go through it...

This crazy weekend also held me in València, when I was expected to participate in a round table about translation tools during the III Jornades of Softcatalà in Barcelona, to speak about Rosetta. I'm sorry for not being able to attend, but I tried my best. :/

Now I'll get back to "normal life". I've got a ton of mail and IRC queries which I couldn't reply to. Marga et all, please try again now. :)

Mark invited the few Canonical people (Matt, Scott, Scott and Carlos, plus me) that were around this appartment to the theatre yesterday evening. We chose to see The Producers, a comedy musical that apparently has had very good press.

We sat in a quite good spot, in the first floor ring, and could watch all the play in detail. Scott was telling me that people at the back seats of the second floor really need to use the goggles available at the seats (of course, for a price, as everything in London), or you can't even distinguish the faces of the actors.

The argument was nice and we all had a good laughs. I was suprised to be able to follow all the argument without missing anything, as I thought I would have trouble understanding the song lyrics, but the bits I missed (mostly during songs sung by many people) weren't important to understand the rest.

We got out of the theatre pretty late for the UK, at half past ten, which is even late for Spain. Gladly Scott was around and guided us to a pizza restaurant, where we had dinner before taking the Tube back to Earl's Court to sleep.

Arriving there at midnight, I still found shit to do at the laptop until 2AM, which made me a semi-zombie for most of today's morning. It appears I wasn't too calm tonight again, as Carlos suffered my teeth grinding from 6 to 7AM. I need to get that looked at by the dentist...

One of the things that have surprised me most of London was the incredible amount of teatres and musicals that are going on at the same time... the Underground stations are full of posters with many different shows. You certainly don't get in València, where we have just a handful of working theatres, and normally plays aren't musical. Among the advertised shows, you can find many different kinds of shows: from stuff like The Producers to a representation of Winnie the Pooh. Don't ask me how you represent this live, in a scenario, but it can be both very funny and crappy. :)

Daf, as everything else I've proposed during these five days, refused to go see it. He also refused to, from memory, do the following activities with me, who wanted to know a bit more of London:

• take the Tube to go to Manchester or Liverpool one of the evenings, "because they are in Zone 1,500 and your card is only for card 1"
• climb up to one of those roofs with many chimneys to sing the Mary Poppins song, "because I don't know that song" (OMG, he hasn't seen Mary Poppins)
• on our way back from lunch on Monday, to sit down in a bench in the street until 20:00 when we would go for lunch. He was unable to give a valid reason to refuse this offer

So thanks to daf this trip to the UK wasn't more enjoyable that it has been. I will take revenge next week, though, as he'll be in Valencia at Carlos' place for a two-week Rosetta hacking sprint. If he proposes jumping off the Micalet with a parachute, I will find a poor excuse and say no.

After being in Barcelona, during the suspicious Fòrum de les Cultures, and after in Madrid, the Terracota Warriors from Xi'an exposition came to València. The entrance is free for everyone, but there are long queues. I was lucky enough to get 3 tickets for a guided tour during the first day of the show, last Friday. These tickets get you a guide who explains the details about all the pieces, and also quite important, gets you past the queue. :)

I invited Kiko and his workmate Marisol to come with me. A few other members of my family also came with their own tickets, including my 93 year old grandfather, who didn't seem to have many problems to walk all over the museum without getting too tired.

Marisol, Kiko and I enjoyed the stuff, despite our guide being completely unprofessional... if someone was lucky to understand what she was saying (you could only do that if you were straight in front of her) and then asked something to her, instead of just answering "I don't know, sorry", she would invent something, which in some cases sounded quite funny.

The figures from the Qin dynasty were quite big and and impressive, while the objects and figures from the Han dynasty were smaller but a lot more varied. One interesting object was a female masturbation toy made in bronze, and quite big in size.

While the exposition was very interesting, for some reason I expected more. I had seen many pictures from the excavation which showed hundreds of big figures in huge trenches, and I thought the exposition would have a big number of them. But there were only a few 10 big Qin figures and another area with more Han stuff. This doesn't mean by any means that it's not worth visiting, on the contrary, if you're somewhere near València at some point from now to April 1st, you should consider finding some time to visit els Guerrers.

One month ago I blogged about my awesomely b0rked Metro ticket and how I was being able to use Valencia's expensive metro system nearly for free. I also said that this "gift" would expire at the end of the month, as fees change on January and the old tickets are invalidated.

Yesterday, it started raining a lot in València, and when I woke up today it hadn't stopped. The rain was heavy enough to make me not want to cycle to work, so I had the first opportunity to find out if the ticket still worked after February 1st. At the station, I inserted my card with little hope, and 1 second later the gates opened. It seems Mako's prediction about the card being so fucked up that it would continue working no matter the date was right.

This totally rocks. The Metro here is expensive enough that it hurts to take it 4 or 5 times a week. Luckily I'm still on the Blue Gold Rush, and will have no problems with using it until the cardboard ticket breaks apart after too much usage. Others might think I'm stealing, though. :)

Seeing I wasn't getting the missing tyres my city bicycle is missing, Kiko gave me a bike that was at his parents' house, and nobody has used in a long time. Thanks!

So I've been cycling again for over a week, and it feels great after 2 months. I had forgotten the amount of freedom an old bicycle can provide. No more caring about how late the Metro will be. No more borrowing my mum's car to go here or there just because when I have to go back there's no more public transport, no more not knowing how much it will take to get to places...

It's simply one of those things you don't really realise you are missing that much until you get back to doing it again, and makes your days a bit more happy.

I need a name for the new bicycle, of course. I will probably stick to something original like the Fletxa daurada, to match the names of her sisters Fletxa verda and Fletxa blanca. If you think giving names to bicycles is silly, well... I won't argue. :)

Lately, my mail problems have not been only my pure lack of time to read it. My main e-mail address is jordi@sindominio.net, provided by Sindominio, an organisation which aims to create a space in the net for social and antagonistic organisations which don't want to directly depend on a company to do this. Some members of the more than 130 collectives that are in Sindominio participate in the Sindominio virtual assembly, which rules how the project works and what it does. Sindominio has celebrated its 5th anniversary just a few weeks ago.

My lack of time has prevented me of spending time on Sindominio work (mostly admin stuff), and recently, I stopped reading the lists on a daily basis, but on batches every few weeks. This has the big disadvantage that when there's a crisis (it's not that uncommon to have the Police call someone in the assembly to ask for some suspicious content in one of the hosted websites), I might not know about it until two weeks later.

Today I catched up on really old Sindominio mail, and learned a few things. It seems that ECN, one of the Italian organisations on which we based our project, is about to shut down. As Miquel explained in his post, hopefully the end of ECN will mean that people start other projects with the same spirit in Italy, or join other existing projects to make them better. I've also learned that YOMANGO keeps going without problems. That was great to read about!

Currently, Sindominio has two servers hosted at the Infoespai in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the servers don't grow but Sindominio keeps adding more and more content, and during the last few months we've been having big scalability issues with our older machine, fanelli, despite we moved the mail processing out to the more powerful box a while ago. Right now, it receives mail after it's been cleaned out of viruses and spam in the other box, ada, and runs an imapd for our users and collectives. It hosts the static web pages server, and other minor services like jabber and IRC. Still, the load is too big for this box, and during the last days, it seems to have crossed the line and we are facing OOM killer genocide every few hours.

The other box has suddenly become quite busy, and results in clamav dying every now and then, which makes our mail get stuck in a huge queue. Thus, I've been getting my mail in batches and in weird ordering, which makes it even more difficult to read. While we work on finding out what's going on with these boxes, there's talk about buying a really good box for Sindominio, which will require some serious fundraising as we've never done.

It doesn't help that on Tuesday, when I got home, I discovered that my main desktop box had died. Luckily, it was just a burned power supply, which I could replace in a few hours.

I assume I have missed some mails lately. If you are waiting for a reply from me and it's not happening, please, send it again. Currently, the amount of stuff in my main mailbox is over 1000 mails waiting for action to be taken. Ugh!

I had been thinking about getting a laptop for over one year, but never decided to do it because I had gripes on most of the models I saw here and there, or when I saw a model that seemed to be more or less decent, someone else would come and told me "No way dude!". So I just kept saving money without knowing what to buy.

Recently, I've been travelling more than usual: Málaga, Oxford, Mataró, etc. and during the Free Software conferences I've attended I saw more and more people with Apple laptops. Being used to see the normal screens in the average PC laptops, I thought these 15" powerbooks were fabulous, and started to think seriously about getting one. Very recently I finally made up my mind and settled on one of them instead of a Thinkpad, pushed by carlos and sjoerd, with elmo's approval at Mataró, and sto and Pablo at work, and finally knew what to buy exactly. It would be a 15" Powerbook with a 1.5Ghz G4 and a Superdrive.

During mako's stay in València, he suggested that he could buy the computer for me in the states and I could get Paula, one of Kiko's workmates, to bring it back just after New Year. This would apparently save me big money, because the Dollar is currently quite fucked up with respect to the Euro...

On Tuesday, I picked up the laptop at Paula's house, who told me how one of the idiots at the airport nearly tossed the laptop bag as if it was normal luggage, and stared at her like saying "hey, calm down dude!" when she started shouting at him.

The laptop is a US model, so I either need to get the keyboard replaced (not so difficult) or get used to it, and get a new power cord, as the plug is for the US plug model, and I currently have to use an adapter. Besides the keyboard, the hard drive couldn't be upgraded in time for Paula's departure to the faster option, which is a pitty, but it's not that expensive to replace at some point in the future if I really care.

The first night, I had no Debian install CD to start setting my new system, so I played a bit with OS X. Lovely, but after a few hours, I got the same sensation of unproductiveness that you get with Windows: you have nothing useful installed by default, except for a browser and mail program that you don't really want to use. And I wasn't going to bother with Fink so early. So in the morning, I started setting up Debian, and after solving a few issues with X, I've got a GNOME desktop up and running. I feel clumsy, though.

14:19 <@jordim> I feel kind of like a newbie these days.
14:19 <@jordim> can't type, can't config X on my own, can't middle click.
14:19 <@jordim> wtf!
14:19 < sjoerd> you just entered the world of !i386 dude :)

But it's good. :) I need to find a new pcmcia wireless card for now, and need to transfer all my stuff to the new home. I also need to urgently rethink my handling of the stuff I have in /home, because the current incarnation is a big mess, with more than 500 files and directories in the toplevel directory...

I seriously need to rethink my mail handling too, because now I'll want to have a main mail server and some way to sync the mail into and from the laptop. Given mako advertises his greatest talent a lot, I guess I will ask him for suggestions on how to fix my mail setup. Currently it's so bad, that my inbox is about to hit 1000 unclassified mails, many of them which need replying...

Remember when my bike was stolen two months ago? I was pretty pissed off, and I still remember. :)

The first thing I had to do was buy a 10 trip ticket for València's Metro system. These tickets are quite expensive, more than in Madrid or Barcelona, but fortunately I normally can go everywhere cycling and don't use the Metro much. Actually, when the bike was stolen, it had been months since the last time I took it, but I relied on its unreliable system for a week or two while I got a new bike to get going again.

The first days were a bit painful, because there's not that many trains as in other cities, so it might take either 15 minutes or 45 to do the same distance, depending on your luck with connections and timetables.

After the first week, something changed in my perception of the service. Once I had used my first five trips, I went into a Metro station and inserted the ticket. When it came out, I noticed it had marked over the fifth slot again. That happened a few more times; then the cancelling machines started printing lines somewhere not on the ticket, and finally I got my gift, when on another trip the cancelling machine said I had 128 trips left. Woot! That means free rides for a looong time. The 128 figure is suspicious. Once, I saw one of these machines open, and it was running MS-DOS, so who knows what kind of overflow my card might have caused...

I could take advantage of this when mako came visit València and we shared the ticket for a week. We started calling it the "BLUE GOLD", and people would look at us oddly inside the train when he said "YOU'VE GOT BLUE GOLD, MAN!". The effects have gotten better lately: it now never marks anything and when I use it to open the gates to get out of the Metro stations, sometimes the machines go bonkers and leave the doors open, while their display reads Error, allowing people that haven't paid for a ticket an easy escape from the station. :)

The bad news is that this will end on January 31, as the fees have changed and the old tickets will be obsoleted starting on February. I wonder if I can easily find someone that uses the Metro more than twice a day and sparing the money would help his economy a lot. Or I could try to be selfish and sell it. 51¢ x ∞ sounds like a good deal.

While this happened, I didn't manage to fix up my new bicycle, and I managed to go through the worst part of winter underground. Hopefully I'll start riding it again next week, as this has been the longest period of time with me not riding bicycles at all in the last 9 years and you end up missing it.

I have been wasting a few good hours tonight playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 under MAME while others re-edit the Tetrinet addiction that hit Debian a few years ago already. But this is completely offtopic.

A few minutes ago I was working on packaging Freeciv 2.0beta6 for Debian and realised I have refused to do a few things while playing due to ethical issues.

Freeciv is a free clone of the good and famous DOS "Civilization II" game, for UNIX and Windows. The player starts with a small civilisation and the goal of the game is to either defeat all the enemy civilisations or launching a spaceship that reaches Alpha Centauri before any other civilisation. You do this through population and military growth, and technology advances.

At some point of the game, you discover Nuclear Fission, and soon enough your people develops a nuclear bomb. Using a nuclear bomb against another civilisation has a few effects:

• your population will be so pissed at you that you might face a civil war or big strikes that damage your economy.
• the area targetted by the nuclear bomb will be very contaminated and this will contribute to damaging the global environment.
• your enemy will be quite fucked up

Well, it's a game and all, but until now, I have not been able to use the bomb against my enemies, human or computer-controlled. I haven't been able because "it is not right", and I think if I did, I would just quit the game and start a new one. This sense of not being a total asshole while playing Freeciv has also got me to invest more researchers into developing recycling technologies to keep my contamination levels low and not contribute to global warming instead of trying to discover new, more powerful war devices that would help me not being crushed by nearby civilisations.

I guess this makes me a bad Freeciv player. :)

Another year is gone... 2004 has been quite good for me: a job, another triathlon session, being more happy than unhappy, government change at last, moving to a new house...

But I can't forget the few things that have been worrying me throughout the year: the horrible situation that some people provoked in Iraq, the 11-M terrorist attack in Madrid, the death of my grandmother (the first close relative I lose), and very recently, the terrible tsunamis in southern Asia.

I expect that things can go a bit better in 2005. There's a lot of open doors ahead!

Anyway, I wish you all a happy 2005!