Continuing the thread in my post on Palestine and aj's and DanielS's followups, we've had a short talk on the subject on IRC. It's worth stating it here though, to more or less continue the thread.

I'm not trying to justify or support the Palestinian suicide bombings, but we need to understand what Palestinians are going through to see why they go ahead and blow themselves up, killing dozens near them. For decades, the Palestinians have been opressed and their land occupied by the Israeli army.

Someone must be quite desperate and have no horizons at all in their future to decide that they want to stick an explosive belt around their body. I don't know the exact figures, but there was a study done on the young population of Cisjordania and Gaza, and in both territories, but specially Gaza, the children were found to be depressed, with difficulties to sleep during nights, and easily frightened whenever they hear a loud noise (airplanes, hellicopters) outside their houses. Palestinian kids, instead of having an infance, grow up in dry, dusty refugee camps. Their favourite games are running around the tanks, and throwing stones at them, to annoy soldiers, who everyone and then shoot back. These kids have been born and raised outside their real homes, in overpopulated guettos, have seen how soldiers randomly raid their camp, beat or kill their older brothers, fathers, or uncles, have seen how their best friend was killed by a "lost" bullet, they have seen a bulldozer destroy their home without prior notice, because their neighbour went out with a bomb the night before. These kids see and live these things with even less than 10 years. They have no future other than one day becoming martyrs themselves, making their families and neighbours proud.

If this isn't enough, Israel is now building a horrific wall to aisle Israel from Palestine completely, even if that means that Palestinians can't cross to Israel to go to their working places. Unemployment is over 60% in some cities of Cisjordania and most of the population depends on international aid. If this isn't enough, Israel sends fighters which fire missiles at their "enemies", and if 10 innocent citizens are killed as well, too bad. When a bomb goes off in a Israeli city, it's a unacceptable terrorist attack, when it's an American missile fired by a Israeli soldier, US leaders say "Israel has a right to defend itself".

As long as Israel and the US keep denying Palestine their most basic rights, they will be fuelling the hate of these people, which will have less and less reasons to not stick a bomb to their chests. Just go away from Palestine, stop stealing the small bits of worthy land they have while building your fucked wall, stop the random killings, and help finance the rebuilding of Gaza and Cisjordania. Give Palestinian kids a chance to go to school, learn to be normal children and in a few years your problem will be gone. Keep your current policy and you'll get weekly bloodbaths in both sides of the wall.

I very much agree with what Daniel said about the latest Israeli terrorist attack (yes, it's as terrorist as any suicide bombing a Palestinian might do in Israel). Killing Hamas' leaders won't get you anywhere. This morning, I read in an online newspaper that one of the Israeli military heads warns that this is only the beginning, the leader of Hezbola and Yasir Arafat himself are next in the list. Listen guys: if you kill Arafat be sure there will be no peaceful ending for your local conflict. What Ariel Sharon is doing is state terrorism, and compares quite well to what one country did to the Jews only 60 years ago. It's incredible how fast humans forget.

Moving to other subjects, Debian is having serious problems with the current implementation of our SVN server. It is currently blocking much of the development in two big internal fronts: Debian Installer and the colective effort to package GNOME 2.6. I hope something can be done about this soon. I hear joeyh sent quite a harsh mail to debian-devel about the situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if d-i moved to another server soon.

As many people know, just after the terrorist attacks in Madrid nearly two weeks ago, there were elections to the Parliament and Senate in Spain. The right-wing party paid their very obvious manipulation of the news about the bombings, and on Saturday, people went out on the streets to protest against the "informative blackout". The outcome of the election was quite surprising: not only the right wind didn't retain their comfortable absolute majority of 2000, they ended up losing the election entirely. While it makes me and many others happy, it must be noted that the socialist party has received many votes that don't really belong to them. Many people that vote other left-wing parties voted for them this time, just to get rid of Aznar and his gang. In other words, millions probably didn't vote for Zapatero and the Socialist Party, but against Aznar and their war, which is quite different. Madrid's IMC has a very nice editorial (in Spanish) about this.

Finally, Fallas are over. If you want to visit Valencia during the most annoying week of the year, with closed streets, kids throwing fireworks at your feet, very loud music just below your window all night non-stop and a sudden rise of the most right-wingish nationalist sentiments, listen to your travel agent and come to Valencia during Fallas. You won't be deceived, we have loads of annoying stuff to annoy millions of visitors.

Motivation to work on stuff is slowly rising again, but very low still. I committed some pending bits of the Catalan translations for GNOME 2.6 (due tomorrow) a day late, and some stuff won't be available until 2.6.1 is out. I suck, but this is what you get when you're a bit burnt.

So everybody knows by now that three trains were bombed early this morning in the Spanish capital Madrid. The bombs went off at rush hour, when the trains were packed with workers, students and kids that were on their way to work, school or uni.

The footage on TV is quite horrible, but most of the info coming from the TV station sounds like unconfirmed rumours. As time passes, more and more officials talk about ETA being behind this mass murder, even if it's not their "style" (when they place bombs on public places, they use to call some newspaper to notify where the bomb is and at what time it's programmed to go off). On Sunday, there's a presidential election in Spain, so who knows if this is their way of doing their campaigning. Others talk about some Al Qaeda-like organization doing this, but as I said, nothing is clear right now, besides the number of dead (173 at this time) which will keep rising as hours pass.

Terrible :(

After my little crisis of last week (this blog entry I wrote last Wednesday, but in the last moment I decided not to publish it, just to see how it evolutioned), I spent the last 7 or 8 days basically ignoring most of my mail, and it was a relief. Ok, in the last day I've had to do a lot of cleanup, but it felt quite good.

I unsubscribed from many of the Debian lists I still followed, as well as some minor non-Debian ones. I still need to talk to many people to see how I distribute my work load with others, but I guess I'll find plenty of volunteers to help me with some stuff.

The Softcatalà people are organizing some conferences in Barcelona in April. I'll be doing a brief introduction to the GNOME translation effort, while Guillem will be talking about the Debian Catalan team. Other Softcatalà members will be talking about Fedora, OpenOffice and Mozilla, and the KDE translators will be around too. Sounds very interesting. Also, in July, the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya will be hosting a Free Software congress, with plenty of Debian presence.

The duathlon season keeps going. Last week we had a very nice race, and I luckily discovered that my ankle pain was caused by my new training shoes. Since I went back to use the old ones, the problem is gone, so I hope I'll be able to run normally again.

I'm too stressed again.

I think this new crisis started on Monday, after a long duathlon weekend (which was fun). My inbox was overflowing, I had lots of mailing-list mboxes with zillions of unread mail waiting for me to ^D over, and my TODO was insane still. The GNOME 2.6.0 deadline has been putting some pressure on me lately, and I currently lack the motivation to fight that front (just when I seem to be motivated to keep up with the d-i translation changes...). I have this feeling that I'm betraying the whole Catalan GNOME team, because the good folks in there are translating like hell lately, and I even find it difficult to find the time to do the corresponding commits. Many Desktop & Developer Platform modules have translations to update. In short, I think I got burnt, and need to have a rest...

I decided I had to pick between triathlon and my big involvement in Free Software stuff. Triathlon is a central part of my life right now (it's the group of friends I've been seeing more regularly in the last 18 months). Some of my tasks in the Free Software community places a lot of pressure on my shoulders, some of them are boring and unpleasant.

I'm going to ask Guillem to take care of debian-l10n-catalan for a while, and see if either Xavi or Aleix want to get a GNOME CVS account so they can do commits too. I guess the Catalan team at the Translation Project I can manage, as it's not time consuming at all (well, maybe I'm just not doing my job correctly ;) and need to have a look at my $HOME to see what other independent translations (e.g. XMMS) I am currently responsible for, and find new homes for them.

As for Debian packages, I'm going to try to get rid of whatever I wanted to get rid already, and keep whatever I was happy with maintaining until now. None of the packages take much of my time lately, as thankfully most of them have slowed down their release cycles a lot.

Another activity that is probably going away RSN is IRC. While it's useful in some cases, it's a time trap. I guess I'll log in when I *really* need to talk to someone. Sorry folks :(

In all, this should give me the necessary time to properly concentrate on my studies, which are a bit stalled lately, and in general... see my old non-triathlon friends again, etc.

Remember I had failed a Valencian exam, I asked for a revision of my qualification and got it accepted? Well, the bastards at the JQCV rectified and declared me "Apt". This was the first thing I learned when I came back home from Málaga at 7AM, and found a big envelope on my bed. This is good, it's a required title to work on administration stuff, and it probably will give me a bit more credit to work on Catalan translations. Next goal is passing the "Superior" level, in June.

In the last months, I had tried to upgrade our Drupal-based triathlon team website from Drupal 4.1 to the current version 3 times. All 3 attemps ended with a non-working installation (the thing would refuse to output anything more than <html><body></body></html>, which is very useful).

I had posted about the problem in the Drupal support forums, but nobody was able to help, and I was quite lost. Yesterday I decided to try again, and got in #Drupal, where UnConeD put me on the right track about what was going wrong. Apparently, the core of Drupal wasn't liking something that was wrong in my database, and after some fix ups, the website started spewing errors, which was a relief, and more as they were fixed progressively. It ended working more or less, but comments and adding material wasn't working still. By pure luck, I got Vertice, the Drupal PostgreSQL maintainer, to assist me a bit, and now the database is in an acceptable state. We have lost the personal info for our users (strange, that that wasn't suppossedly affected by any upgrade, but maybe I wiped it out when I nuked parts of the database to fix it up). This probably happened because I insisted in installing Drupal 4.1 on PostgreSQL, when pgsql support was a bit flaky at that time (it one became officially supported in 4.2). Probably my database was bogus since day 1, and with the upgrade errors it has become evident. We still need to get our theme fixed or go ahead and write our new theme one of these days.

Our duathlon season started last Sunday, and it could have gone better. Personally, I ran quite badly (it was too fucking cold to be half-naked out there) but the worst part is that some of my team mates came in first place, and were disqualified because some asshole accussed them of not having completed the 4 required laps in the cycling segment, and one judge believed them (or was interested in believing them). A very dissapointing start of the 2004 season, although it might motivate my affected team mates to run a lot better in the coming races.

Some months ago, I took the local government's Valencian exam for "medium" level. Failed, even if it hadn't gone so wrong, and I suspected the oral exam (a silly interview, where they ask you to talk about the topic in a newspaper article they give you minutes before) might have been what fucked it. Well, my topic was about parents contracting detectives to follow their kids when they go out to see what they do, and that most of them discover they are a bunch of drug-addicts, vandals and in general, not quite what they believed. Well, I was so surprised about parents really doing this (not about what kids do, you have to be quite blind to not notice that stuff) that I hardly knew what to say, except "well, how fucked is that..." and so. I guess that made me fail, but I asked to get a review of my result.

In parallel, I have been waiting for a call from the local government to see if I finally get a job with them. No news yet, but it'd trully rock if I was able to join that team.

Yesterday I got a phone call from the government office while I wasn't at home, and when my mother told me, I really thought it was The Call. When I phoned this morning, I learned it wasn't about the job, but about my exam, and that they want me to do the oral exam again tomorrow at nine. Cool, if it's just repeating the oral, I will probably pass and won't need to do the exam again on June (instead, I'll do the "high" level), but at the same time I'm back to waiting mode, with this feeling of uncertainity, not knowing if I'll end up being call, or when.

In the Debian front, two minor updates: with galeon in testing, I uploaded a new meta-gnome2 that restores the alternative to epiphany, for they joy of our Galeon users. I also took over gnome-common, and restored automake1.4 as a valid automake version for gnome-autogen.sh, per request of Malcolm, who was getting weird bug reports on gnome-common's bugzilla for this. :)

tbm's great orkut community wants to be filled with all of you tbm-lovers out there. What are you waiting for? Yeah, as predicted, orkut is the current hot stuff. It has propagated to GNOME people massively now, too. Expect a buggy GNOME 2.6 release, hackers are busy... adding smileys, stars and hearts to their "friends".

A few days ago, tbm invited me to join Orkut, Google's new toy. I wasn't too interested in the begining, but in the last hours it has caught fire. I don't stop getting new invitations (ok, I don't stop sending invitations myself), and this hopelessly looks like the next grand way of making your free time vanish.

In a few hours, orkut is telling me I'm quite trustworthy, quite cool and, take this, sexy. An obvious indication that this is just a toy. Oh, and I also have two fans. I love you too, Amaya :) (sorry DanielS ;) I have joined a few nice communities, and guess what, I'm now an Official Fan of Branden Robinson.

While discussing on IRC if the American meaning for "libertarian" is the same as the Spanish meaning (although what I knew about the American Libertarian Party and Eric Raymond being a declared "libertarian" made me think it wasn't), we came across The Political Compass, a fun tool. My result:

   Economic Left/Right: -9.12
   Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -6.92

Heimy and braindmg have been hacking on the l10n-bot for a while. Heimy rewrote it in python, while braindmg fixed some more issues in the old perl version we're currently using. Their plan is, I think, to open an Alioth project for the stuff so all the Debian l10n teams can benefit from a central installation. Oh. It has been PostgreSQLised too. :)

After going cycling on Saturday (when I discovered my cold is still alive and well), I had a looong lunch at house of some of my father's friends. We got back home at 18:30 or so, with a big headache, due to the critical need of sleep that I have been accumulating... went to bed for a "short" nap, and by accident I woke up at 23:30, quite confused... "Is it the morning? Why am I so hungry?". Since then, I haven't been able to get asleep at decent hours, and tbm is laughing at me because I very recently said I never go to bed at 2AM these days... well, 3 days in a row now, and counting.

In one of these long evenings and nights, I decided to upgrade the first of my servers to Sarge, and the upgrade went quite ok; only PostgreSQL and PHP4 gave me headaches. In the first case, the automatic upgrade of the databases failed (in fact, I think I have never seen it work correctly across minor releases, but that's probably due to some non-Debianish setup I have in my boxes). After that, the format change in pg_hba.conf confused me a bit. Got it straight in the end, thanks to the nice help I got from Isaac. PHP4 was tricky too. Apache would segfault if the PHP gd module (which gallery needs) was loaded. Got input from the two local experts. Fabbione said "blame PHP, remove it and it won't segfault". Well, thanks Fabio ;P When I tried harder on him, he said php4-gd sucks, and bingo, removing gd.so from php.ini made Apache happy. Vorlon suggested using php4-gd2, which I didn't even know about. Woops, unresolved symbols. Upgrading to the version of libgd2-xmp in unstable fixed it luckily (for those who care, that version of libgd2 is entering testing today), and all services are ok now. In all, the upgrade went well, having in mind many bits are missing from Sarge still.

As we feared, testing really insisted in having galeon built for arm before it would allow meta-gnome2 into testing. I have uploaded version 45 to unstable and this should hopefully be the final version that makes it in.

Oh, very important, I'd like to use the nice window that the Planets provide to state that weasel rules, and you should vote for him in the next Debian elections, just as I will. He has wild ideas for Debian if he gets elected. For example, he promises he'll get rid of the bureaucratic DPL elections starting next year, so we can concentrate more on releasing Sarge (and as a bonus, weasel will be DPL forever: as good as it can get). I'm a proud member of his campaign coordination team. I hope this will make him not remove my Debian account as he will do with tbm's.