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. :)

Last night Guillem finished setting up our new Debian l10n Catalan site at his box, and we're finally ready to go ahead with our plan to get Debian's Catalan translations a bit more organised. Tim said he's working on getting all of this setup globally for all the Debian teams who want it, but waiting for this to be operational would have probably killed the momentum we might have gathered with our announce. We're now ready to call for help on Catalan Free Software forums and start assigning translations.

On a related event, I was nudged again by bubulle about my lack of commits to d-i CVS. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, I have been busy setting up the foundations, but I started merging some of the files today already, I'll continue with the rest tomorrow and the following days, I hope. Also, the Catalan translation of APT was finally submitted.

In other news, exams suck, my right ankle sucks even more, yesterday night I could hardly walk and our first competition this season is on Sunday...

Oh, and that virus sucks too: my mail server is getting tons of it and it's very noticeable in the mrtg graphs...

The accidental JACK upload to unstable is very probably going to be the next "big blocker" for the unstable -> testing transitions. Not everything is bad: after discovering JACK is waiting on alsa-lib (and a big bunch of other packages that still need to transition to the new libjack-dev) to enter testing, ElectricElf and I decided to upload alsa-lib, alsa-oss and alsa-utils directly to unstable, after EE had filed all the needed bugs against the packages that will now fail to build with the new alsa-lib. Many of the maintainers affected by the API change have already acknowledged their bug report, so we hope the impact of this upload will be quite small.

daf, of Welsh translations fame, wants to join Debian, and I'll probably help him with advocacy and sponsorship. I learned about this when I asked him if a mozilla-locale-cy package would be interesting, and ended concluding that him doing the package is a much better idea :) He also has ruby-gnome2 packages which we plan to upload soon, as there seems to be demand for them on the (really) old WNPP bug. I'm looking forward to see more Welsh stuff around in Debian, as it already happens in GNOME.

I planned buying an ATI Radeon 9200SE to replace my old Voodoo3 (which works very well still: does DRI ok, etc., but it's going to break with the hopefully soon to be in unstable X 4.3), and casually learned that Joy was about to buy that same card. Joy has been having a few weird problems in his box since he installed that video card, so I'm probably waiting a bit to see what I do... What I am surely not doing is buying a nVidia card. I wish I would, the choice is quite easy to make with that brand...

After managing to get up more or less on time quite early, dressing up with the cycling clothes, having copious breakfast and preparing my bike, I rushed out the garage to join my teammates at the meeting point... to find out it was raining quite heavily. Oh well.

20 minutes later, I do my daily checking of Internet stuff and what do I I find?

    - meta-gnome2 is going in after 3 days (hinted by cjwatson)

I did some Debian stuff this afternoon. In the ALSA front, I had a go at updating alsa-modules-i386 to use the 2.4.24 kernel (for those who wonder where the packages are, they are stuck in the new/ queue). Sometimes, we ALSA Psychos seem to postpone some of our ALSA duties until we're struck with a RC bug. Then it's quite likely that we react in like 2 hours. ElectricElf has been working on getting a list of packages that fail to build with alsa-lib 1.0.x, due to its switch to the new API by default. The list is, luckily for us (and the release guys) very short, and we should be uploading the missing bits of ALSA 1.0.1 in a few days, I hope, after we file bugs against these packages warning about the API change and telling people what the (very simple) fix is. The most wanted part of the ALSA 1.0.1 final release, alsa-driver, was uploaded a few days ago and surprisingly we haven't got any new bugs about it yet.

Mozilla 1.6 landed in unstable last night, making me feel quite uneasy. Yeah, I'm still under the meta-gnome2 syndrome, as it still hasn't made it into testing (there were problems trying to remove the old gnome-core 1.x package), but it should be sorted soon. For more fun, the arm autobuilder surprised us with a successful retry of galeon, which should make it quite easy to have it in testing soon. I quickly warned Mark about not uploading galeon until it goes in (which will happen in a few days due to libbonobo) and he agreed, and uploaded to a private repository instead. Thanks! Galeon 1.3.12 is another nice step towards 2.0, it fixed many of the small bugs that annoyed me every day. Meanwhile, I quickly uploaded Mozilla Euskaraz 1.6, while I wait until the Catalan Mozilla team makes a final decision on translating or not this version (the guy in charge has no time to do this currently, and said he'd prefer doing 1.7; but who knows if Sarge will have Mozilla 1.7...).

I'm even more sleepy today.

In the last days, the facts have convinced me that GNOME Mud is officially out of the death spiral where it had got stuck in the last many months due to development inactivity. Some days ago I posted about my surprise seeing new blood coming into GNOME-Mud. In the last few months (where barely anything had happened with GNOME-Mud), Robin and I had been getting subscription notifications to gnome-mud-list, but everything was quiet, and we were considering posting a call for help to FootNotes. Suddenly, Aravi and Uranus started joining #gnome-mud regularly, and have posted a few interesting patches. Lately, Aravi fixed PyGTK support and wrote his first script ready for mass consumption, the typical health monitor for your character, which nicely attaches to your taskbar. Finally, a usable GNOME Mud plugin! :) Meanwhile, Robin should be finishing the first bits of the move to libglade, while Uranus finishes MSP support, using GStreamer to play sounds. I'm trying to identify the numerous places where the app needs HIG love.

I tried playing a bit with Sodipodi and Inkscape to create a small shield to be used as notification area icon. Hmm, I suck at those programs for now. :)

We finally sent in the proposal to reorganise Debian's Catalan team. There's not too much feedback yet, but at least it's positive for now. Looks promising though, I believe we can find plenty of contributors in the many Catalan LUGs around the territory. We'll see. Committed a bunch of new GNOME translations from Xavi, while we try to figure out what to do with the giant evolution translation.

Holliday tomorrow, which means getting up quite early for cycling...

Guillem and I have finally decided what coordination strategy we want to use for Debian's reborn Catalan l10n team. The Dutch and French teams have a quite organised method that works through e-mail, as we wanted, and provides a way of nicely tracking the status of all the translations that Debian translators need to care about. We have a proposal written which we'll mail to debian-l10n-catalan@l.d.o tomorrow, let's see if people like it.

Uploaded GTranslator 1.1.4 to Debian, after applying a patch to remove some GTK 2.3-only (I guess) stuff.

Yesterday I went to bed at 1:30AM, probably managed to get asleep at around 4:30. Excellent...

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.

Today I was prodded publicly on debian-l10n-catalan@lists.debian.org about the lack of Catalan translations for Debian Installer... looks like I had slacked for too long, although I had finally restarted my work on this during the last few days. Finishing it isn't a big problem -it's not that big-, what was slowing me down was my lack of experience to merge the big full ca.po into the little modules' po files. I don't know why, but I hadn't learned about msgmerge -C, which will do the trick (although it's still quite time consuming, at least for the first commits which will need changes to probably all the installer modules). Christian Perrier and Steve Langasek (the very famous Catalan-American ;) have offered help to handle this. I'll probably accept their kind offer tomorrow, when I finish putting my po more or less in shape. All of this makes me wonder something else, though. What is the status of the SGML installer and release notes docs for Sarge? Has work started on this? If so, I should probably find some minion to handle the Catalan translation if we want to have it ready in time.

In short, the Catalan World Domination Plan has been slightly delayed, but just wait... in 10 months or so you'll find yourselves saying "Bon dia!" every morning!

I need to find some time to do some GNOME commits I have pending, mostly Catalan corrections from Jordi Mas to a zillion modules in the extra and fifth-toe sections. I promise it'll be done by the weekend.

I also have to do my usual ration of studying, plus some cycling training, plus I have to be in a party in about 2 hours. This weekend is going to be short...

I tried to upload the new mailutils snapshot today, but found out it requires the new gnutls packages which are stuck in the new/ queue. I downloaded the packages from Ivo's web, but can't upload until the packages hit incoming. This started a discussion which made us find out a few packages still use gnutls5. Time to change that... On other fronts, StevenK fixed the remaining issues with alsa-driver 1.0.1, and it's ready for upload. Probably tomorrow. What we can't upload yet is alsa-lib, that's going to get hairy thanks to an API change in 1.0.x...

Now, off to cook some Spanish omelet...

After days of annoying different people and mailing lists, meta-gnome2 is finally ready to enter Debian testing during Saturday's testing run. Yesterday, one of the two required browsers, epiphany-browser, finally made it into testing, while planner, libgda2 and libgnomedb got their missing builds. libxslt is ready to go in tonight, unblocking the way for abiword, too. The only missing bit was sound-juicer, which I demoted to Suggests: for now in the new version I uploaded yesterday. Two days of wait and, hooray, testing will have all the important bits of GNOME installed (for i386 and powerpc, at last). We'll have to keep looking for a few missing builds for a handful of packages for 3 architectures. Kamion and I are tracking the status daily at the DebianWiki. Many thanks to aj and Kamion for the nice help with most of this, specially with the big jack-audio-connection-kit hinting, and the s390 and m68k guys for not getting too pissed at me when I requested random builds. :) At last I'll be able to stop looking at build logs every 6h looking for the happy "maybe-successful" tag... not Kamion, who apparently has to nurse KDE in now, good luck. ;)

I also made a quick upload of mailutils, basically to link it against the new libidn11. In the upstream trench, Maildir support landed in CVS on Wednesday, adding to the already available support for mh, mbox and imap mailboxes in GNU Mailutils. Some people have been waiting for Maildir support for many months, and it's finally here. I hope this makes more people give mailutils-imap4d a go, even if there's a severe lack of good documentation right now. I'll upload a new snapshot to Debian unstable in a few days, just in case a mail-eating bug has crawled into the new code.

Thanks to the two persons that mailed me privately about my personal fight against IE's stupidity. It finally wasn't a transparent PNG issue, but IE not grokking position statements on the global body block of CSS, or something similar. Ross put me on the right track, and I have it nearly fixed now.

My cold is nearly gone now. I have been training since Monday and except that day when I couldn't breathe too much, the other sessions have been nice. Of course, I'm sleep deprived again, but that's a minor side-effect. :)

Last, but not least, tbm, I do not suck!