Tue, 23 Mar 2004

That's not the way to go...

I very much agree with what Daniel said about the latest Israeli terrorist attack (yes, it's as terrorist as any suicide bombing a Palestinian might do in Israel). Killing Hamas' leaders won't get you anywhere. This morning, I read in an online newspaper that one of the Israeli military heads warns that this is only the beginning, the leader of Hezbola and Yasir Arafat himself are next in the list. Listen guys: if you kill Arafat be sure there will be no peaceful ending for your local conflict. What Ariel Sharon is doing is state terrorism, and compares quite well to what one country did to the Jews only 60 years ago. It's incredible how fast humans forget.

Moving to other subjects, Debian is having serious problems with the current implementation of our SVN server. It is currently blocking much of the development in two big internal fronts: Debian Installer and the colective effort to package GNOME 2.6. I hope something can be done about this soon. I hear joeyh sent quite a harsh mail to debian-devel about the situation, and I wouldn't be surprised if d-i moved to another server soon.

As many people know, just after the terrorist attacks in Madrid nearly two weeks ago, there were elections to the Parliament and Senate in Spain. The right-wing party paid their very obvious manipulation of the news about the bombings, and on Saturday, people went out on the streets to protest against the "informative blackout". The outcome of the election was quite surprising: not only the right wind didn't retain their comfortable absolute majority of 2000, they ended up losing the election entirely. While it makes me and many others happy, it must be noted that the socialist party has received many votes that don't really belong to them. Many people that vote other left-wing parties voted for them this time, just to get rid of Aznar and his gang. In other words, millions probably didn't vote for Zapatero and the Socialist Party, but against Aznar and their war, which is quite different. Madrid's IMC has a very nice editorial (in Spanish) about this.

Finally, Fallas are over. If you want to visit Valencia during the most annoying week of the year, with closed streets, kids throwing fireworks at your feet, very loud music just below your window all night non-stop and a sudden rise of the most right-wingish nationalist sentiments, listen to your travel agent and come to Valencia during Fallas. You won't be deceived, we have loads of annoying stuff to annoy millions of visitors.

Motivation to work on stuff is slowly rising again, but very low still. I committed some pending bits of the Catalan translations for GNOME 2.6 (due tomorrow) a day late, and some stuff won't be available until 2.6.1 is out. I suck, but this is what you get when you're a bit burnt.