Exams are near, so it's probably translation season again, that time of the year when I work hard on all those Catalan translations I have neglected during the last months.

This evening I've restarted my work on GNOME 2.6, due on March. The number of new strings or strings to update is long, but I normally make it. What worries me is that the proposed modules for inclusion in GNOME 2.6 will add 6000+ strings to the list, and I'm not sure we'll be able to cope with that. There's an ongoing thread on gnome-i18n discussing this.

While doing updates and assigning modules to other translators, I've noticed that our gal translation was quite outdated, but I remember Aleix had updated it recently. For some months, Evo folks have asked to translate evolution 1.4, and recently they switched their focus to 1.5. All the translation work on evolution-1-4-branch hasn't been ported to HEAD, so the gal translation was temporarily lost. Of course, I watch for these things for my team, but I wonder how many translations get lost during branch transitions at GNOME's CVS. Another example, with the libmrproper -> planner transition, we have lost our last update to libmrproper's ca.po. I need to merge them back manually using msgcat or whatever.

Besides GNOME, I had also promised Debian Installer translations for December 28, but never got near finishing it. It won't take long though, that's #1 priority right now. On the Debian Catalan l10n front, Guillem and I are planning a rebirth of the Catalan team, as the current model didn't scale too well: I was the only person reviewing what needed committing, and some of the translations that came in needed hours of correction work, so I ended burning out. Now there are other Catalan-speaking Debian developers, and hopefully we'll be able to work more efficiently in the future.

My dad rented a Terminator 3 DVD tonight, and I decided to watch it with my brother. After 20 mins of playing, the DVD player started to do weird things and the display would click and bounce forward randomly. The player must be dirty or something, and everyone gave up, except my brother, who wasn't too happy about what was going on. He proposed watching it on the DVD drive in his computer. First try: Windows Media Player won't grok DVD's. Fine, I see it's WMP 8. Windows Update has version 9. Install, reboot, click on "I agree"... same result; "probably it needs some CSS module too, the MPAA is a pain even on Windows", I conclude. I go to the Windows Media site. WTF!! They want me to _buy_ DVD support for their player. Booting to Linux. I install Totem, but it refuses to play the DVD. I find out about libdvdcss, and download Marillat's .deb. OMG, Totem is playing the DVD, but it is *so slow*. Of course... nVidia card and using the "nv" X driver. Oh well. We move to my desktop. I quickly install libdvdcss2, and Totem starts playing, but I see no image, I just hear the music, or sometimes it just crashes. Xine crashes with some cryptic X error, and mplayer just complains about the video driver. Finally, some GNOMEr tells me I need X 4.3, even if I thought we had the patch that Totem needs backported.

Finally, after upgrading to xserver-xfree86 4.3, Totem starts playing the DVD very nicely, and we continue watching Terminator 3. The sad thing is this movie sucks so much, it made us laugh in a few moments. The best one is when the T101 deactivates itself crushing a car in front of him. After a while, it mysteriously restarts. At least on this one, the bad terminator is hot, and better, I'm now able to watch encrypted DVD's.