I got a pair of comments on my last entry which I guessed I could answer in a new post, specially the second one, as Amaya and I had an argument about Valencian vs. Catalan not that long ago.

Anyway, Tommy wanted to know what these exams are about. Basically, it's a test on your knowledge on the Catalan language. The "Mitjà" level was more or less easy to pass for me. The "Superior" level is the same, but with added difficulty to the questions.

The exam, which lasts for 2:30h, consists on reading comprehension, a dictation, writing, grammar, vocabulary and oral expression. Reading comprehension is easy. They give you a text and you have to summarize in 5 lines. The dictation was kind of hard, because my sister and I were sit in the last row, making it quite difficult to hear, besides the text was weird and contained quite a few words I had never heard before. In the writing exercise, they give you two options to write about (200 words). One was "Space tourism", which I picked, I don't remember what the other was. There are a lot of different exercises to test grammar, including filling in the blanks with missing glyphs and rewriting sentences to use pronoms febles. This last exercise is quite tricky in Valencia because our variant of Catalan in the area doesn't use promons febles extensively. Another difficult exercise is correcting sentences. They give you 5 sentences which contain errors gramatical or morphological errors, which you need to identify and correct. In many cases you are convinced there's nothing wrong with it. Others, you identify a barbarism in one of the words used, but it's of no use, as you don't know or remember what the correct word is. How the fuck do you say "corsé" in Catalan? The vocabulary section is quite hard too, because again some words you haven't heard in your entire life. The oral exam is just reading a text with some random subject (mine was about contamination in the food chain) and then speaking a bit about it.

Next, Jaume asked why I called it a "Valencian" exam in the blog entry, when I really mean Catalan. Jaume, the exam is quite localized. The text said "servici" (ugh) instead of "servei", "este" instead of "aquest", and the verbs were written in the Valencian fashion, "traduïx" instead of "tradueix", etc. Even if I know it's Catalan, it was full of the minor differences between the oriental branch of the language and our variant of the occidental branch, which is commonly known as Valencian. I agree I should have put some emphasis on the fact that it's the same language, in the end. I hope this answers your question, I definitely have no doubts on the boring Catalan unity debate. ;)

This morning, I took the "Grau superior" exam for Valencian. As expected it was damn difficult. It actually was less difficult than I thought, but difficult enough for my sister, me and other 3 friends to have no expectations on passing. After the exam, we started talking about some of the tricky questions and was a bit depressing, heh. This is the highest level of Valencian, and they are not permissive at all with spelling mistakes, etc. I think it's enough with 3 spelling mistakes in a 200-letter writeup to make you fail all of it. Anyway, I had not prepared it at all, I expect to do it again in November after we've studied a bit. Studying this level is difficult though, many of our problems come from lack of very extense vocabulary, which you can't really help by studying a text book. You improve vocabulary by using the language every day, reading books, and so on. Even if it's difficult, I love the language. :)

Following up a bit on Murray's piece on the European elections, let's have a brief look at the brand new Constitution which was approved yesterday (MJ Ray already blogged a bit about this). So, do you, European citizens reading this, know a single thing about this document? Not me, at least. I have no idea what this apparently very important document talks about, and how it affects us in our everyday lifes. I suspect it's quite full of numbers, quotas, freedom limitations and so on, but it's quite interesting that the major part of the population isn't aware of this. It's quite frightening that on some countries, it'll be imposed by their government. Actually, nobody talked about testing it in referendums until Tony Blair announced he would do that. Then, the Spanish PM and others also expressed their support to this idea, but they only started discussing this a month ago or so, when the text was mostly finished.

If we end up getting a chance of voting about the Constitution, I think it won't be too surprising if it doesn't pass in some of the 25 countries. I suspect the text is vague or ignores completely many social aspects of our different regions. Just to name one, it is impossible for a Catalan citizen to express themselves in their mother tongue when dealing with EU bureocracy. Isn't that discrimination?

Sigh. Yesterday, most of GNOME hit Sarge, and today it reached the mirrors. It seems the result couldn't be more catastrophic... we really didn't expect GNOME packages to go into Sarge today, we probably only expected GTK+2.0 and a few of the lower GNOME libraries to make it. Instead, most of the modules managed to get in, including -panel, -session, -terminal and nautilus, but not including control-center and -applets, due to gst-plugins0.8 not being ready for testing yet.

This reportedly is breaking GNOME in Sarge quite severily, as nautilus is apparently missing a needed dependency on capplets, and nobody noticed. The result is nautilus showing the default icon (a blank paper) for all folder and file icons, making your filebrowsing experience quite interesting.

We're discussing what the most quick remedy may be. One alternative is to do uploads of -applets and control-center without gstreamer support and try to get those in fast. Another one is to see if testing-proposed-updates works and feed it with the gstreamer-less packages so they hit testing immediately.

For those who have already upgraded and need a solution, you will probably be ok if you just install by hand the missing packages, capplets 2.6.1-5, and the two dependencies missing in Sarge, libgstreamer0.8-0 0.8.3-1 and libgstreamer-plugins0.8-0 0.8.1-4. You will probably need to remove acme by hand too (and gnome-desktop-environment, if you had it installed).

If you don't know how to do this, the basics are these: to remove acme, do apt-get --purge remove acme. To install the three packages, once you have downloaded them, apt-get install libxklavier8 and then dpkg -i file1.deb file2.deb file3.deb. If you are a bit more experienced with Debian packages, the easiest is to add unstable (and leave sarge in too) to your sources.list, and after updating, do apt-get install gnome-control-center/unstable. After that, remove unstable from your sources again.

Bedtime now... In 5 hours I pretend to break my record mark of 10 days without any kind of triathlon training. The joy of injuries and lack of motivation.

They keep coming in, and it seems the three members of the Debian ALSA team are too busy with RL or other Debian stuff to handle them. We have bugs with patches that not only have not made their way to unstable, but not even to our CVS repo. Maybe we should start considering asking for a 4th member to join the team, in an attempt to make ALSA packaging a bit more dynamic (as it was some months ago).

As many will have noticed, I was wrong when I said bits of GNOME would go in last night. Actually, GTK+2.4 is supossed to make it tonight, and the more difficult bits will have their chance in the following days. There has been a gstreamer0.8 upload today to fix a RC bug that may delay stuff a bit. I can also see possible problems with meta-gnome2 for 2.4 in testing wanting acme, and control-center 2.6 conflicting it. It probably just means the meta-packages have to go in at the same time as control-center, but this also adds some complexity to the equation. Next chapter, after tonight's testing run. :)

It seems there won't be Claxon Hell in the city due to this evening's Euro 2004 football match. FUTBOLEROS, VIVIDORES! ;)

Today, the first chunks of GNOME 2.6 will start entering Sarge, if nothing strange happens. Things look quite ok right now, with all the autobuilders keeping up to date and with the RC bugs sorted out. The only bit that could be a bit more complicated is the libcupsys transition to gnutls10, as a few big packages are involved: GNOME, KDE, Samba, CUPS and wine. The latter is dragging a dependency for the new alsa-lib 1.0.5 packages, which will probably delay it 5 days or so. There's an RC bug on Samba which could be problematic, but the maintainers probably will do something about it before alsa-lib is ready to go. With a bit of luck, this will go more or less smoothly in, unlike when we did the 2.2->2.4 transition, which was stalled by a series of unfortunate incidents (including the Debian security compromise).

This afternoon I spent some time upgrading pyblosxom to version 1.0.0.

I had been using the Debian package, which had 0.8.1... in experimental... the package in unstable is still at 0.7.x. I obviously grabbed the tarball and installed it in /usr/local. After the upgrade, it seems the rss generator has become a lot more picky, and would choke in the dozen HTML small errors that I had all over my blog posts. Omnic noticed my posts were empty in Planet Debian just as I was closing terminals in preparation for heading to bed. It should be ok now.

I'll probably start writing a new style sheet for the entire web tomorrow, and think about moving the whole blog to the topdir of my webserver, as I really have no other uses for it.

Thanks to all the people who replied to my previous post on blog spam. It's obviously not new, and it seems MT users have been hit quite badly by this. I guess removing links from comments is the first, quick step, but some kind of URL filter for the comment module in pyblosxom would be handy. Has anyone hacked something similar?

Just an extension that lets you create a blacklist of URLs would be a start, as the spammer URLS are always the same. They do know about some anti-anti-spam techniques though, and for example write "online casino" as "online-casino", so to read links they should be rendered first.

The other day I found one comment in one of my blog's posts which sounded weird. It said "HI, Wow.. this is a very informative website! I enjoy your site very much! Keep up the good work!" or similar. The author name linked to what looked like a pretty boring personal website. Yesterday I discovered most of my blog posts have one or more of these messages. What the fuck, they are spamming me through my blog! They basically write random nonsense like that, and add a link to an online-casino or whatever in the link you can leave as signature in pyblosxom.

Has anyone else had problems like this in their blogs? If it continues, it'll be easy to fix: I will just remove the comments module from my install and be done with it. Thanks to those who post useful stuff every now and then, though. It's nice to read replies to some of my posts.

In the last week or so I've been more active in the Debian front than usual. I've done uploads of mozilla-thunderbird-locale-ca (for version 0.6), meta-gnome2 (for GNOME 2.6), eog and nautilus-media (needed to complete meta-gnome2 deps), gtranslator (to fix a build failure with GTK 2.4), nano, qstat (with a new CVS snapshot, as upstream isn't doing real releases anymore) and a few mailutils releases (finally fixing the help2man problem). The GNOME team, and specially seb128, have done a great job in getting GNOME 2.6 on track to enter Sarge. Scary enough is that some already talk about packaging 2.7 in experimental...