"No shit, Sherlock!", you guys are probably thinking. Well, of course I knew, but yesterday it was the first time I did a serious webpage with CSS and stuff that is aimed at Windows users, and after my teammate and I finished it, with some nice looking results, we discovered it's completely crap when viewed on Internet Explorer. This time, the "they lose" strategy won't work, because we don't expect duathletes visiting the site will be using Firebird, so we better fix it. It sucks that 90% of the browser market is dominated by this utter crap. Come on, it's 2004... it's about time transparent PNGs were supported by software that pretends to be serious... not to talk about the random behaviour of their CSS parser. I need to ask some GNOME webmaster how they get their header IE-happy. It probably boils down to avoiding transparent png's where possible, and using jpeg's instead. *sigh*.

To make this entry a bit less ranty, I'll add that as days pass, Debian's GNOME meta packages are nearer and nearer of entering testing. Today, another dependency of the five that remain is entering testing, and Abiword, one of the tough players, is nearly ready. Again all thanks to Kamion and aj doing magic. Now, if we could get epiphany-browser correctly built...

In the more GNOMEish front, it's been a nice week for GNOME-Mud. It has gone from mostly maintenance mode, due to lack of manpower, to, suddenly, having 2 or 3 new persons poking at it and submitting patches, some very nice which close TODO items that were years old. Big thanks to Nuno Sousa, who is on hacking spree, and has already coded connection status and activity for the mud tabs, removed some old annoying behaviours of the tabs, created a nice tray icon that informs of MUD stuff and is currently finishing some rocking MUD Sound Protocol, which will bring sound support for MUDs that support it. It won't be long before 0.10.5 is out. Nuno has more ideas, so stay tuned. :) (anyway, if you think GNOME-Mud has the potential of becoming "The MUD Client" for GNOME and want to help, please write to gnome-mud-list, as we still need help to get things going. For example, we have a plan to move to libglade and do HIG cleanups, help would be very welcome in those areas.)

A few nice things happened in the meta-gnome2 front: yesterday, aj and Kamion kicked jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib into testing, clearing the way for a number of packages like gst-plugins and the packages that depended on it gnome-media, nautilus-media, rhythmbox, etc. Today, aj removed the remaining 7 days of wait for libbonobo, and this is unblocking a new set of packages; and Kinnison did a quick processing of libxslt, which was again stuck on the new/ queue in auric. This will fix the builds of most of the remaining meta-gnome2 problems, so if no new problems come up, it's should be mostly ready when a few of the affected packages get retried. When/if the "must have" packages are in, I'll consider doing a temporary upload removing the less important packages so meta-gnome2 can go in, making Sarge's testing a bit more realistic for people who are doing desktop installs. You never know, given our record of bad luck until now...

One of my Christmas presents was the British edition of Michael Moore's Stupid White Men. I got it in English because I tend to enjoy movies or books more if I see/read them first in their original version. My sister, on a totally unrelated xmas present, got the Spanish version, just as a few friends did. They say it was impossible to find a copy of this book in Valencia the weeks before and during Christmas. Not surprising, as Bowling For Columbine has been one of the most seen (and discussed) films during 2003 in Spain, when all the Iraq war stuff was going on.

Anyway, I didn't know if I should start reading this first, or go ahead with Ferran Torrent's "Espècies protegides". I took "Stupid White Men", as I have very recently read the first part of Torrent's book, so it's probably time to switch a bit. While I travelled to Uni in the subway, I couldn't stop laughing at every single page of this book, and it was just the "introduction to British readers", where he tells the story about the book being printed on September 10, 2001, and after the 9/11 attacks, Harper Collins refusing to put it on the shelves if Mike didn't "rewrite 50% of it". A nice little story of how a bunch of librarians put so much pressure on the editor that they were forced to put the book out, without any media covering or anything, and the book literally dissapeared from book stores the first day it was out. I'm going to enjoy this read.

My cold isn't getting any better, and patience is not abundant anymore. Pills make me sleepy, and I can't concentrate too much to do Real Stuff when I sit down to do it.

Day 1 of the GNOME mini-freeze wasn't too successful. Abiword stumbled upon a new gcc-3.3 ICE, and while libxslt was fixed, it introduced another RC bug which makes builds using that package fail. The new libbonobo had newer shlibs, and the last buildd that needed to build libbonoboui picked that dep, so now both of the libs wait 10 days. Galeon keeps failing with a misterious "errno 3" when the buildd tries to execute gnome-autogen.sh, but just on two arches. I suggested the maintainer to stop autogen'ing galeon at build time, just to see, but it's weird anyway.

On the bright side, s390 compiled a few of the important packages that were missing like gnome-panel, gnome-applets or libbonoboui, and while they now depend on new libbonobo, it will solve some of the most important problems.

Did two uploads recently, one of them to fix an amusing bug in TWIG, which I have been trying to give away for ages now. Looks like the person in charge of taking it (hi Ignacio ;) is taking action, finally.

Some PlanetGNOME (I guess) reader mailed me a link on a blog entry by Seth Nickell just a few months ago, where he just talked about the same procrastination problem. There's a nice essay on this there. Thanks for the link, Colin & Seth!

I hate when I know I have something important to do, and I keep avoiding doing it by doing all sorts of other lower priority tasks.

For example, I just read Antti-Juhani's call for help on dctrl-tools' i18n/l10n. Instead of studying for the already too menacing exams, or at least translating Debian Installer, I suddenly felt the _urge_ to have a look at this package. The result is cool, grep-dctrl is now translated to Catalan for the next release, but the really important duties remain undone. Antti-Juhani just pointed out that I'm obviously not the only one, and I think I'm glad I don't have a cat, at least. :)

Let's see if I can get *something* done in the next few hours. After scribbling this stupid blog entry, things don't look too bright, though. ;)

The Debian Installer folks get a lot of reports about GNOME being completely broken when they install Sarge. This is because tasksel pulls the "gnome-core" meta-package, which suppossedly would install GNOME 2.4, but on testing, gnome-core is still the GNOME1.x-based package, so people don't even get gnome-session installed.

meta-gnome2 isn't in testing yet because a lot of its dependencies aren't in either, for a variety of reasons. So far, we've faced a GNOME 2.2 -> 2.4 transition which got a bit more complicated than expected due to a libtool bug. Shortly after, Debian got compromised just when things looked bright. Then, the buildd's weren't running. Recently, gcc broke on mips/mipsel, and python2.3 broke completely, making most of our packages unbuildable. jack-audio-connection-kit and alsa-lib are also having problems to enter testing, and that's also holding a few chunks, but Kamion has a plan for aj to fix this.

I have posted a proposal for a mini GNOME freeze to debian-gtk-gnome, with a list of the current problems and what needs to happen.

In other news, Alioth is finally back, and I've been able to commit my pending stuff, and release gnome-mud 0.10.4a-1 to incoming. The ALSA Psychos moved their CVS tree to Alioth today, but we can't upload 1.0.0rc2 because it looks like upstream changed the build system and the tree refuses to clean now. That's our only pending issue, so if you're an Debian ALSA user and want to poke at it, you're more than welcome. :)

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.

Yes, I had been procrastinating about doing this for a looong time already, but never sat down to do it, basically because I didn't know what software I should use, or anything.

I have been an Advogato user before, but gradually stopped posting there, even if I liked participating in that community. Now, with Keybuk very recently opening PlanetDebian, IRC appears to be full of people that just stopped procrastinating about building their own blog, so here I am.

Of course, this site needs a lot of work, and it'll get there, but for now it'll be using the simple 1993 look that comes with the pyblosxom Debian package. Pyblosxom is quite neat, I must say!

I plan talking about my Debian & GNOME stuff here, and hopefully less about my triathlon stuff. For that, I tend to use my Drupal-based blog at my team's website.