On Friday, 5 members of our team are going to el Pont de Suert (Lleida), for our first Olympic triathlon this season. We're all looking forward to this, as normally the competitions that involve travelling and going out of our usual Valencian triathlon circuit are the most exciting and the ones that are best remembered months later.

We'll leave as soon as we all leave our work places, travel for about 6h in a caravan packed with bikes and go straight to the camping nearest to the lake where we'll have to swim. We'll spend Saturday visiting the zone, which has a few Romanic churches and monuments. Being in the Pyrenees, I expect the area to be quite beautiful too.

On Sunday, at 9:30AM, we'll start the triathlon. I feel a bit uneasy about it because my training in the last weeks hasn't been as good as it could have been with the periostitis injury in my right leg and a general lack of motivation. I hope I'll do more or less ok in the swimming -wetsuits will be permitted, as the water will be quite cold- but cycling will probably be quite hellish, as it's in the middle of the mountains. What I fear most is the 10km run, after the hard bicycle. Until now, I had run acceptably well in the sprint distances, but now the conditions change: besides being double distance, we'll be running at about 11:30, with the Sun hitting us hard. I already have my arms burnt of our last byclicle training last Sunday, and I fear that I might get even worse burns this time, as we won't be able to use any Sun protection (well, we can try, but it'll be useless if we put on a wetsuit). We'll see how it goes...

It's not even July and TV news programs are only talking about the high temperatures in Spain. Some southern cities have already hit 50ºC, and I melt just thinking about it. Even worse, it seems Seville had massive blackouts which lasted all day, due to a very high demand caused by air conditioning. I definitely don't want to be in Seville in such situation.

I generally don't mind high temperatures. I will start ranting about the cold weather when Valencia is at 10 or 12ºC in winter, but heat I can handle pretty well. My Athlon, on the other hand, doesn't like heat at all, and just a few months after buying this box, I suffered a few sudden reboots. After removing the metal case, it got a lot better, but when summer comes it's not rare to experience a few reboots...

The other day, Barrapunto had a story about cooling your Athlon, with links to the Athlon Powersaving HOWTO and the athcool utility. I had no idea these things existed. As one may expect, athcool is packaged in Debian, so it was quite trivial to try it out. I'm still quite impressed by the result. With the powersaving mode on, the system temperature got reduced by 12 degrees or so, and now it's quite far from the dangerous "reboot" limit. I'm not experiencing any of the problems the docs talk about (distorted sound, lockups or performance hits). If you've got an Athlon box, I suggest you try this stuff, even if it's just to help your power bill next month.

Bedtime, at 27ºC :)

If you ask for comments, make sure your comment system doesn't break. I hadn't noticed the permission problems after moving the cgi to /var. It's fixed now... sorry about that, folks.

In the meanwhile, Ross and I agreed on IRC that suffixes are bad, and I got rid of them entirely. He also told me about the py['defaultFlavour'] config option, which I hand't found, everything is ok now (well, except for the content_type vs. IE problem which I still need suggestions for).

Update: James pointed me at a nice post on blog URLs.

As I said in a previous post, I spent some time cleaning up my PyBlosxom flavour to make it XHTML 1.1 compliant. I also decided to start using my vanity domain a bit better, and moved the blog to the webserver's rootdir. In order to maintain backwards compatibility and not break a lot of links to my blog out there, I installed a Redirect rule so calls to the old dir look at the new dir, and that seems to work.

The main problem is now that I'm not too sure about how to solve the application/xhtml+xml problem with Internet Explorer. The mod_rewrite rules sjoerd and thom shared don't work too well for pyblosxom:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_ACCEPT} !application/xhtml\+xml
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} \.xhtml$
RewriteRule .* - "[T=text/html]"

It's easy to have URLs like /blog/2004/Jun/28, and if I understand correctly, the Redirect won't work with this type of URLs. I also don't know if it's possible to make "xhtml" the default flavour in pyblosxom, instead of "html". I'm actually not sure if the permalink for this entry "should" end up with .html, .xhtml, or no suffix at all. Suggestions welcome. :)

It's becoming a tradition that my upstreams coordinate the releases of the Debian packages I maintain. GNU mailutils 0.5 and GNU nano 1.2.4 have been released in the last two days.

With mailutils 0.5, Jeff and I have decided to stop packaging CVS snapshots in Debian, as the software is now quite stable and usable. It surely needs some documentation love, but it'll get there. <plug>MH users might want to test mailutils-mh, which is GNU's replacement for the MH package</plug>.

nano 1.2.4 is a minor update, with a few bugfixes, given 1.2 has been in maintenance mode for about one year and a half. In the devel branch, nano 1.3.3 should be released RSN, and the next version should finally have sane UTF-8 support. Very probably not soon enough to ship with Sarge, though.

This evening I ran in the Second Volta a Peu a Godella. There wasn't too much level, and when I crossed the finish line, there only were about 30 (out of ~400) participants ahead of me. It's the first time I end up so high in the rank in a race, but it probably had no merit. Oh, it was a 5kms race, and I estimate I did just below 20 minutes. Acceptable, for me, and more after these weeks of no training due to the evil periostitis.

Bedtime now, I have cycling training tomorrow morning.

Today I saw 3 different persons go into #gnome, ask about the GNOME problems in Sarge, and being directed to my blog. This was enough to make me feel quite embarrased about the lack of css stylesheet (I removed the default pyblosxom style, and the new one wasn't working). So after a few hours and facing many problems, I have a prototype, which still needs polishing, but works for now. I have updated the pyblosxom flavour to XHTML 1.1 Strict, which is a bit painful in some aspects, but works ok on Mozilla-based browsers. The biggest problem is that it requires a sane content-type, application/xhtml+xml, but IE doesn't know about this type at all. Sjoerd gave me some Apache Rewrite magic, but I didn't manage to get it working. I'll see if he knows what's up with Apache2 tomorrow.

Sorry, I know this might be boring, but people seem to want me to post here whenever there's news.

Things have improved quite noticeably since yesterday. control-center has finally entered testing today, so after your next sarge upgrade, your icons should show up as normal again. There gedit problem stands unsolved, and it'll take a while, so if you're annoyed at it, consider hand-fixing it.

Other good news is that epiphany and galeon have also entered testing, even when Mozilla 1.7 had been uploaded to unstable, managing to avoid the new dependency. A new epiphany for Mozilla 1.7 has been uploaded and I guess galeon will follow suit quickly.

Slightly unrelated, I uploaded meta-gnome2 55 today, adding gnome-cups-manager to the gnome meta-package, and the nice HIG documentation to gnome-devel. Spies report that Ross is happy now.

France was kicked out of Euro 2004, too. It's interesting to see how all the big favourites have been sent home quite early.

As people have been asking for news on the semi-disaster, here we go.

Things haven't really improved in the last week. gnome-control-center 2.6 hasn't entered testing yet, but is abou to do so. We're just missing a mips build, which has already been done by the buildd, so hopefully it'll appear in incoming in one or two days. Another of the problematic packages, gnome-applets, is in bad shape, as it hasn't been built in some architectures due to a bug in sgml-base, completely out of the control of the GNOME team. We hope this will be resolved soonish and builds start so succeed after that. There's another problem in the current set of GNOME packages in Sid, as gedit refuses to start now that libeel is at version 2.6. This is due to API breakages in eel which are not well handled upstream with soname bumps. This bug has been reported multiple times, and the bug has been forwarded upstream, but the upstream maintainers don't intend to maintain API compatibility in eel at all. They claim it's a private library in nautilus, but reality is that it's used in epiphany, control-center, abiword and others. (don't read this as a rant, I'm just trying to describe the situation). The easiest way of fixing this problem in Debian is to add unstable sources to apt, install the unstable version of gedit (2.6.x), which will pull new cupsys, libgnomeprint, kdelibs4 (if you have it installed) version. Then remove unstable again from your sources, and you'll end up having a working gedit.

On a unrelated note, those who want to play with GNOME 2.7.x can do so by upgrading to experimental. Some GNOME folks have started packaging it.

Luvly! We need a GR to ammend the Constitution to make Debian a monarchy.