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.

Going to Malaga was really a good idea. I was happy to meet a few Debian people for the first time (Keybuk, Kamion, Mithrandir, pere, Konstantinos... and to a lesser extent, tbm ;) and had a great time with them. I think that the meetings we held were quite productive, and I'm looking forward to read teo's report and conclusions next week.

Some of the best moments where when I first met tbm and he started with the <censored> joke (censored, just so Google doesn't learn too quickly about it), and when he started harassing poor Leni in the meeting rooms area. The Cena de Gala was tremendously funny too. I was invited by Roberto, Juantomás and Miguel to sit at their table, and during the dinner, Juantomás told us how Roberto started bowing before the Spanish prince when he approached the HispaLinux stand and said "Majestad" and all the stuff. Roberto, no se puede caer más bajo! As Miguel put it, Roberto se deja impresionar demasiado fácilmente. Miguel (who by the way seems to finally know who I am ;) also killed time while waiting for the food miss-firing balls of bread at the women in the table behind us. I wanted to hide below the table... The last day, after a few guys had already left, Thimo, Bdale, Tollef, Colin, Scott, Konstantinos, Guillem and I went for lunch/dinner on our own, and later for a few beers in an Irish pub, where we had some good laughs in a small corner which glowed in blue.

Guillem and I had 6 hours from the time the Congress ended (~15:00) to the time we had to get into our train (21:00). Well, we ended up having to run a bit to not miss it. Both train trips were quite awful, as it's pretty difficult to get some sleep in such conditions, but it surely was worth it. I'm looking forward to the Valencian congress, where I hope more Debian people will be able to attend.

Now, back into the routine, I probably want to go to bed, as I have cycling training tomorrow, if the rain permits.

Following my traditions and procedures, I have more or less arranged my trip to the OSWC in the last minute, after nearly giving up yesterday. Guillem and I are taking a train tonight which after countless hours will leave us at Málaga at 9:00AM. What finally made me decide to go there regardless the quite expensive train fees is that so, so many people I really want to meet will attend: lots of non-Spanish Debian people, the people from Seville which apparently are going en masse, Softcatalà people (it was about time to finally meet them), the usual Debian Spanish mob and a long etc.

I need to do countless things this evening to get ready, but count on me for a few beers tomorrow (just a few, eh?!). See you tomorrow!

Today Robin and I released GNOME-Mud 0.10.5, which includes a number of minor but cool features. The annoying handling of connection tabs has been corrected, and tabs are now shown if there's more than one connection, as in Galeon, and the tabs have an icon that describes if the connection is active or not. The Python-GTK support for python plugins has been finally fixed and a useful python plugin (health monitor) has been included in the distribution. A few old and annoying bugs have also been killed, like being now able to use GNOME-Mud in non-UTF-8 muds properly (but this needs a proper solution still).The most noticeable change in this release is that we finally, after 6 years, have our own application icon (gnome-mud had been stealing the gnome-gmush icon that gets distributed with GNOME for ages). The icon is simple and neat, courtesy of Daniel Taylor, who recently contributed icons for gossip and Blam!. He's now writing an Inkscape tutorial, which I really hope will help me to get a clue on icon drawing.

I sponsored a few packages in the last few days: daf's ruby-gnome2 and mozilla-locale-cy packages, and ajmich's treecc, a pre-dependency for his nearly ready to upload Portable.NET packages, which are waiting for a fix for the weird shared libs handling (or just accept it as is and go with the weird dependencies that would carry, I'm getting Andrew to see how the Mono packagers dealt with this).

Finally, made new ispellcat packages to transition to the new debconf .config scripts (Agustín is doing an excellent job with dictionaries-common) and fixed gnome-common's build deps... oops. I knew adding automake1.4 to gnome-common's requirements would quickly get me some bug in the BTS, but the sad reality is that many GNOME modules still don't build with anything newer. You probably want to set REQUIRED_AUTOMAKE_VERSION=1.6 in your autogen.sh script if you want to use something else. For now, at least. Malcolm has a plan to aggressively migrate all the GNOME stuff to something newish, so this shouldn't be a problem in a few months.

Orkut status: mostly forgotten now. Enjoy my personal data, Google.

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.

I just committed the final remaining bits of our Catalan translation for Debian installer. Finally I can be happy when the next beta comes out, as I won't feel guilty anymore. ;) Thanks to bubulle and vorlon for caring, they really made me get my ass moving and finish my already rotting translation before it was completely useless. I won't do the documentation myself. I remember doing parts of that for the Woody release notes and I remember it was quite tedious, but hopefully there'll be plenty of volunteers to do it.

Jeff Bailey asked me yesterday what is the "official" DVD-Ripper for GNOME. I don't know of any... is there one? If not, I guess it'd be cool to have one, just to piss the MPAA a bit. :) Speaking of that, I read in today's newspaper that the Oscar Awards Ceremony won't be totally live on TV, it'll have a slight delay just in case someone decides to show their penis or breast or butt in the middle. Heh, America is funny.

The Valencian exam went very well: the text was about trains (which I love), and I just had to read a few lines, and then comment a bit about the topic. After two or three minutes, the examiner said it was enough, and told me I'd have news soonish. Woot.

The silly virus appeared to be declining a bit in the last days, but today it hit my mail server very hard again. It's annoying... that box is a P150 and on normal circumstances it just idles and idles, but now it's very loaded and hitting swap most of the time, annoying me with the HD noise. If only the stupid windows users developers could get a clue and fix their crap... grrr!

Orkut is getting boring.

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".