Yesterday, mako did something really important. It's actually something this conference will be remembered for... After much planning and procrastinating, we finally moved the tetrinet.debian.net server (no, this link won't work with GNOME yet, but GTetrinet surely accepts patches, thanks ;) from my shitty Pentium 150Mhz, crappy ADSL-connected box to his very cool server at yukidoke.org. At the time of this writing, Mako probably hasn't ported the server configuration from natura to the new box, but it should happen soon. We discussed about resetting the highscores or leaving them as they are, and for now we'll not touch them. Our past tetrinet Gods can rest happily.

I guess mako and I can try to do some tetrinet contest tonight, in order to kick some ass after the Mao experience. We'll see.

Enjoy!

Tuesday 10th

Woke up at 8:15, looked out the window... DAMN IT, Still raining!

So Tuesday could have started a bit better. There was a very interesting talk by mvo and jdub on package management stuff, and then I entered NMU mode again. The tiff transitions is about to be completed, after a I uploaded a "fixed" jadetex ("fixed", because today I found out the NMU got reverted, and discussion is underway to see what needs to be done. After doing gnobog, only ivtools and grass are left. I'm currently doing a grass build, while it seems ivtools will be fixed by the maintainer. At some point in the morning, I discovered the sky is also blue in the UK, as it finally cleared. Lunch was very good, and as it's self-service, it was pretty quick too. :) During the evening I continued with some NMUs and had some fun as jdub and mdz did some test installs of some well-known commercial distros. Jeff was quite amused by the lack of polish of some parts of their installers.

One hour before lunch, I finally decided to stop sitting and eating and do something about next week's triathlon. I asked at reception if there's some nice place where I can run that isn't all asfalt (bad for my periostitis), but she said there wasn't any. They suggested me going to the right side as soon as I went out the hotel, and so I did. Just a few hundred metres away I crossed a channel filled with boats, and continued down the road, out of the urban area. There was no traffic, but still, not being used at running at the right side I jumped into a narrow trail just at the edge of the road, in an attempt to run on soft surface. That proved to be a bad idea, as not much later I stepped on a rock hiding behind the overgrown grass and I nearly break my ankle. Luckily all my body elasticity appears to be concentrated there, so it only was a warning to get out of there. Got to a small village called Wytham and continued left until I reached a big road with lots of traffic. At that point, I followed a train inside a forest, but realized I probably had been running for nearly 30 minutes and went back, stopping at Wytham for 1 minute to have a look at a monument dedicated to those dead during WWI.

Back in the hotel, dinner was very good again, and this time we had pre-ordered, so it was kinda fast. The rest of the night we spent exploring a few more distros, and me doing the last few NMU's of the day. Most libtiff3g-using packages were fixed at that time. At 2AM, I finally went up to the room, leaving jdub and matt behind.

Wednesday 11th

Carlos woke up quite early, but I managed to oversleep and missed the daily meeting. LaMont was looking for attendees for the first of his BOF's and finally managed to get some. The last tiff transition NMU really didn't want to compile as it uses an *insane* amount of diskspace that I don't have available. I finally found somewhere else where to build & upload the NMU, thanks to LaMont's magic. This time, before dinner, Keybuk, Teo and I went to the gym and did some exercise. I just did static cycling, for the first time. It's not too cool. It's boring, and it's very unlike real cycling, because the resistance for the pedals is always the same (unless you change it, of course). Real cycling has lots of effort changes, depending on the terrain's steepness, etc. In the gym, all of that was constant, so I'm not sure how good of a cycling training for a triathlon it makes. After 20kms in around 38 mins (I guess), the machine said I had produced an average of 213 watts. I guess you can charge a laptop battery with that. :) Tomorrow's running again, and I'll explore a small trail near the main channel which seemed to be cool, but I just discovered on my way back on Tuesday. It seems Lu also goes running outside, so maybe we can make a group of sane people to go out tomorrow. :)

Dinner involved Indian food, and was buffett again. It looked very good, so I asked for a bit of everything. My surprise when I started eating... dude, that's _hot_! I had to drink 3 cups of water to get my mouth sensivity back, ate the less hot food (with the advantage that my tongue wasn't feeling any taste anymore) and went for a second plate with the least hot stuff. The other people sitting at my table were largely amused by me shouting foul words in Spanish.

And finally, after dinner, Keybuk organized his Evil Game Of Mao. Dafydd, LaMont, Scott and a few others started a game with seb128 and me, the lonely virgin players. The first rounds were horrible. The bastards just don't explain anything, and the only stupid rule they do explain you forget almost instantly, as you expect it'll be repeated if you ask. Not quite so. The game is full of rules, but the intrepid new player needs to learn them by himself. Of course, in the learning process, the rest of the players keep pointing out they have broken this or that rule, and they keep drawing cards. After a few minutes I had something like 20 cards in my hand, and you start with 5. After a while, when I had started to get some clue, jdub, Martin Pitt and mdz joined the game, being the first game for all of them. I had quite a nice time watching their faces saying "What the fuck" every time the bastards gave them another card for their collection. And the worst thing was when you started feeling a bit confident about the rules, because every time one of the good players won, they were allowed to add a new rule to the game, which of course they didn't explain, you just found out the hard way.

The day ended with some major GNOME 2.7 breakage in Debian experimental, which I'll start to take care of tomorrow, hopefully helped by JHM and others. It's probably bedtime now, and oversleeping tomorrow seems quite inevitable at this point already. I'll try not to...

Oh, before I forget. The weather, again... the day was quite ok in the morning, but it has been raining for several hours now. Right now it's kinda pouring. Sigh, I want my Summer back. I want my 35ºC!

[ This was written on Monday, not uploaded until Wednesday, sorry. ]

In case you don't know, I was lucky enough to be invited by Canonical to their August Warthogs meeting in Oxford. Carlos and I arrived last night, too late for dinner, after two hours of flight and another two of bus ride through a busy highway. The last and only time I had been to the UK was like 12 years ago, so it's great to be here again.

As soon as the taxi dropped us in the hotel, I started meeting many people I didn't know in real life yet, which always is the best part of conferences. Had "dinner" (gas-station food, heh) with Teo and Daf outside the hotel, the only place not air-conditioned. Temperature was comparable to València's, which was a surprise. Then we went to the meeting room for a while, where I found out little Daniel isn't so little after all. Carlos and I are in the same room, and after a few tries through the endless hotel corridors, we found it. The hotel is huge, apparently divided into different wings and quite nice in general. All we had time to do last night was go into the main meeting room and test the wireless link (after DanielS aggressively tossed a wifi card at me) before going to bed.

Real stuff started today at 9AM with a meeting of all the workgroups, where people briefly explained who they were and why they were there. The team Mark has brought together is simply impressive. Soon after, people started introducing the different projects Canonical is working on. Malone, HCT, Rosetta... they talked about features that are just going to rock, and the best thing is that it's all going to be publically available. I won't say much more for now, as I don't know how private this is still.

I spent the day in some of their meetings and generally trying to help around #debian-release fixing as many bugs as possible. I pretended to go out to run a bit before dinner, but unfortunately it didn't stop raining during all day, so no luck with that. The swimming pool is small and not too appropriate for real training, it's more a place where to take a relaxing bath. The gym appears to be well equipped, so I'll be able to "run" on one of those machines if necessary, and do some cycling in the static bicycles. The food in the hotel's restaurant is quite good, but we spent more than two hours to get our two dishes served. I guess they can optimize that. :) lamont and I are having a fierce fight over temperature in the rooms. ;) Most of the guys want it quite cool, and I ended up getting a long t-shit to not get a cold. I'm ending the day typing stuff at 1AM from our room, where we have a very weak wireless link in the room's door area. I've just discovered wireless rocks.

gnome-applets (plus a number of other less important packages depending on libgtop2) has finally made it into testing. The only two remaining packages that keep the metapackages for GNOME 2.6 out of testing are eog, which is stuck in a libexif transition, and gnome-games, which is affected by all the transitions you can imagine: gcc-3.4, gnutls11, tiff (via gtk+2.0) and librsvg2. It'll take a while to get that one in, I'm afraid. Fortunately, the most important packages are all in testing by now, although joeyh is tracking an important bugfix in gnome-session for the installer team. The fixed gnome-session is, unluckily, trapped in the tiff transition too, so it'll also take some time.

Update: Sigh, again I show that I shouldn't write so late at night. gnome-media is also trying to get in testing still. It was ready to go, but a critical bug prevents it. Unfortunately, fixing the rc bug will mean it'll get into all the transition hell.

::: [signoff/#debian-devel] Osk_epic (goodbye, epic) [01:35]

After many years using EPIC as my IRC client, I just moved to irssi, which probably has a more active development community and a lot more plugins. I never found an epic4 script that completely satisfied me, and for now, I feel a bit lost with irssi, but it's probably a matter of time.

Probably the most uninteresting blog entry ever. Sorry. :)

Last night I finally went to see Michael Moore's new documentary. I really wanted to see this film, after enjoying Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men a lot. And it didn't deceive me. Fahrenheit 9/11 is probably a better film than Bowling overall, and the first part, where he connects the Bushes with the Saudi elite, is very well conducted. The scene with Bush sitting in Florida during the 7 most terrible minutes in the US history, doing nothing and with an empty expression in his face was both very funny and scary. One could imagine this guy is a fool. But that was just too much.

What I didn't enjoy so much was the part where he shows the US troops in Iraq having a bad time. Moore focuses a lot in the American casualties, and sometimes gave me the impression that the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed were second class deaths. There was also a bit too much of patriotism, but as I guess the ultimate goal of this film is (besides making Michael Moore very rich) enlightening a few millions of Americans before the November election, I guess I can ignore it a bit.

In short, there aren't many facts in the film that I didn't know or assumed, but they are presented in a very intelligent way (call it populism or whatever, yesterday I was open to swallowing some of that). I haven't talked to American people on IRC about what they think, but I'd really like that F9/11 helps to kick Bush out of office. As murrayc said, these elections will have a massive impact in the lives of most of us around the world, so here's hoping they come out as most of the rest of the world (I suspect) wants.