When I looked at the definition for "cockroach" in dict.org, I thought I found an entry that was either meant to be a bad joke by one of the WordNet database authors or some kind of easter egg in the dict web interface. It took me three reads to realise my error.

I really, absolutely dislike cockroaches. The thought of having them as my domestic pets made me feel ill.

I'm happy to report that GNOME 2.12 is now completely translated to Catalan thanks to the hard work of Softcatalà's GNOME division. Of the four of five currently active contributors, I think Xavi Conde deserves a special mention, as he has been taking care of big modules like evolution for some time now, and I think completing this task every six months would be quite difficult without him.

It's the first time since 2.4, I think, that we hit a complete 100% coverage. Lately, we had done a few releases where we got very near the number, but a handful of strings out of 30.000 would leave us at the gates with something 99.97% or so. Sure, it's just a silly number, and it has little value when you have the core of GNOME translated. That's why since the 2.9 series, the team has focused on polishing. We've gone over most of the modules trying to find old translation errors and GNOME 2.12 in Catalan is surely going to be a high quality release on the gramatical and spelling front.

With the translation momentum I've gathered while completing GNOME, I've now started a Catalan translation of MoinMoin, the wiki software I probably like most. I hope to have it ready in a few days. After that, I should have a look at finishing my update of GnuPG's translation, which is pending a few months already.

A few days ago, Mikel, from softastur, requested the creation of an Asturian team to translate Ubuntu. As I'm quite passionate about minority and minorised languages, I quickly googled around and mailed him to find out what the state of Asturian (ISO 639 code "ast") was.

While their webpage seems a bit stale, it appears they are trying to gain a bit of momentum by translating Ubuntu. They already have some Mozilla and other free Windows programs translated, but AFAIK, they had never started a plan to translate one of the two major free desktops, GNOME or KDE. If they are going to start a Ubuntu translation, that means we'll soon see a nice GNOME translation coming up, so that's pretty cool.

One of the problems I saw from the beginning is that even if they have an ISO 639 code assigned (albeit a three letter, 639-2 code, instead a two letter code, for which they pass the requisites even better than many other languages out there), they lacked a Glibc locale data file for Asturian. In an attempt to have Ubuntu Breezy's libc support Asturian as soon as it releases next month, I spent some time writing this data file for them, as I did in the past with the Aragonese (an_ES) locale. The result is cool:

                             2005

       xineru               febreru                marzu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6      1  2  3  4  5  6
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   7  8  9 10 11 12 13
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  14 15 16 17 18 19 20
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  21 22 23 24 25 26 27
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28                    28 29 30 31
31
       abril                  mayu                  xunu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3                     1         1  2  3  4  5
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   2  3  4  5  6  7  8   6  7  8  9 10 11 12
11 12 13 14 15 16 17   9 10 11 12 13 14 15  13 14 15 16 17 18 19
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  16 17 18 19 20 21 22  20 21 22 23 24 25 26
25 26 27 28 29 30     23 24 25 26 27 28 29  27 28 29 30
                      30 31
       xunetu                agostu              setiembre
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3   1  2  3  4  5  6  7            1  2  3  4
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   8  9 10 11 12 13 14   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  15 16 17 18 19 20 21  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  22 23 24 25 26 27 28  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
25 26 27 28 29 30 31  29 30 31              26 27 28 29 30

      ochobre               payares               avientu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6            1  2  3  4
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28 29 30              26 27 28 29 30 31
31

This will probably go in the next revision of Ubuntu's libc, while I hope Denis Barbier will include it quickly in belocs for Debian. Eventually I'll submit to the glibc upstream list, but getting them accepted upstream takes a bit more usually.

Hopefully Mikel will find enough volunteers to complete this task soon enough. I dream that it'll help promoting Asturian, one of the most endangered languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Read more about Asturian in the Wikipedia.

During our week around the Pyrenees, our meals consisted on dehydrated pasta, rice and soups, along with the little sandwich bread we could carry, and little more, really. Any extra gram sums up in your backpack and if you carry more than you need, you end up paying with exhaustion.

When I got back to Vàlencia I was really looking forward to eating real food, in a plate. I suspected that with that kind of food, I might have lost some weight, and wanted to find out how much. Unfortunately, I've been forgetting to do get on the scale everyday since, until today.

After 5 days of being well fed (and I have surely regained some of my normal weight), I remembered to weight myself before getting lunch and after going to the toilet. The result was alarming, even for me.

Now I'm so ready to be the Debian Skinny subproject leader!

Note this pic was taken after lunch, naked but holding the camera. On my first measurement, I got something like 53.2kg, way less than my usual 57-58kg range. I should probably get serious about gaining weight, even if that means mdz and moray discrown me in our unofficial "lighter DD" contest.

But I like this one a bit more than the average. :)

Oh yes

When I started this blog a year and a half ago, I was maintaining a blog in my team's webpage, in Catalan, to write about my triathlon-oriented stuff. The momentum this webpage had acquired is now mostly lost, and I have no energy to promote its use among my team members once more.

Recently, some Softcatalà people started a Planeta Softcatalà for the blogs of all the organisation's members. If you have a look, you'll see that my blog entries are clearly distinct to the rest of my friends in there: I'm the only one with an English blog.

For some time I've been wondering about dividing this blog in two sections, en and ca, and point the different planets to the appropriate languages. I think I would still give English posts some priority, but there are some things I'd rather write in Catalan (I think I feel like posting about my recent stay in the Pirineus in Catalan, for example). What do people do with respect to multi-language blogs? Catalan content probably wouldn't be too ok for Planet Debian or Planet GNOME, but would my Catalan readers want to continue reading my English content?

If you follow my blog, your comment is welcome.

5 months ago, I switched my shell to GNU bash on my main workstation, and slowly that change trickled to all my other UNIX accounts where I could use zsh. Incidentally, I switched to bash on debian.org boxes just a few weeks ago, not knowing what was going on the zsh-workers mailing list.

The night I was preparing to leave to the Pyrenees, the news travelled fast on IRC: the zsh-beta package in Debian's incoming directory finally had UTF-8 support. I installed zsh-beta and switched to it, so I wouldn't forget about it when I came back, and finally switched off my desktop for a week.

Now, with the new zsh in action, I can try a few simple test. Incredible, deleting a "ç" only requires one backspace.

16631:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/R\M-C\M- bia positiva$ setopt printeightbit
16632:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/Ràbia positiva$

Still feels like black magic to me! Thanks Clint and whoever was involved in this. I hope zsh will forgive me for abandoning her during five months. I am glad to be back!

Yesterday we walked down the Valle de Eriste on our way back to civilisation, after spending 6 days in the deep Pyrenees. It's been a fantastic and tough week. The bad weather and the sudden drop of temperatures in the area has made us suffer situations that are more appropriate for October instead of August, but it's been a lot of fun.

Among other things, we've climbed Posets, my first 3.000, during the only 3 hour window when the weather was reasonable enough to attempt it.

My group observes Ordesa and Monte Perdido from the top of Posets (3.375)

During 5 days we've been completely unable to communicate with people or get news of what was going on 10 kilometres away from our spot. Back in Benás, we learned about some Spanish soldiers dead in Afghanistan, which seems the big news this week. The other big news was that fire continues to consume Spain and Portugal.

After being in this high mountain paradise, watching the images of great forests in Galicia and Portugal burning were a lot more impacting than ever. I wonder what I would do if I had one of these pyromaniacs in front of me. Bastards.

I'll post some more about this week in the following days, along with some of the nearly 200 pictures I've taken.

Tomorrow I'll travel to the Pyrenees, to the Benasque area, where we'll walk a five day route around the GR-11, near the Aneto peak. I'm going with quite a few people and it looks like it's going to be very fun, but tiresome.

We'll carry all our tents, food, clothes and everything else on our backpacks, and hopefully we won't get many of the typical evening showers of the summers in that area.

It's been a while since my last vacation completely away from technology, and I'm really looking forward to it after so many years. I need a break before the hectic times that probably await at work...

I'll post some pictures when I come back from my stay under the stars!

I got slightly fed up of my long hair and asked my mercyless sister to do something about it. The idea was to have it short everywhere except on the back, but now I think she went a bit too far. Fortunately this is something that will be fixable in just a few weeks.

This is the end of my fourth cycle of long-hair/short hair. Since 9 years ago I've constantly been growing and then cutting it very short every two years. I don't think I'm going to do it immediately again though, as the idea is to let my sister experiment as much as she wants. The only condition is "Remember I work in a government office!".

The real reason for deciding to cut it off (something I had been talking about since March or something) was that when it gets long and it falls at the natural rate, the hairs are so big that I get alarmed very easily because of the volume of the fallen hair when I just pass my hand around my head. As I was getting a bit obsessed about the idea of running out of hair, I just took the quick decision. My scalp also needed it after two years anyway.

No, I don't know what that white spot is either

The bad news is when I told mako on IRC.

19:47 < jordi> I got rid of it all
19:47 < mako> no way
19:47 < jordi> yeah man
19:47 < mako> NO WAY
19:47 < mako> dude, you are vega no more

Duh! I forgot we hadn't done our Vega vs. Jordi comparison. Since our meeting in Sydney, mako has been insisting that Vega, the Street Fighter character, is exactly the same as me. Vega is Spanish, blonde, has long hair and is a bull fighter who climbs to weird places. EXACT MATCH! Even for the bullfighting bit!

Vega or Jordi? Vega or Jordi? Vega or Jordi?

Mako and I tried our best to get a picture of me with a flower or something that would make me look like Vega during one of his deadly fights, but we didn't find any in Sydney, and Helsinki's nude attractions made us forget about it. Now it's too late. I wish I could have my hair back.