Visited the opthalmologist
Today I went to the hospital to visit the opthalmologist. The good news:
as expected,
what happened the other day
was just a case of optical migraine, which needs no treatment and I shouldn't
worry about. Thanks to everyone who mailed me or commented in the blog giving
advice or wishing me luck!
The doctor examined my retina, and found nothing wrong with them that would
cause “lights” or total blindness. He did find what he described as “the start
of retinal folding”, which might be congenite, but I should keep an eye on
in case it becomes a real problem. Apparently I should be vigilant to objects
appearing with deformed shapes, etc.
So I came back earlier that expected to office, but I really can't do
anything here due to the pupil dilation. Everything is blurry, light is
extremely annoying, and I'm writing this using a ridiculously big terminal
font.
The “get decent sleep” plan continues, and I've been sleeping the expected
amount of hours since last Tuesday.
10:53 |
[/life] |
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(comments: 0)
What about GNOME 2.16 and Debian?
I haven't heard too many people asking if
GNOME 2.16 will make etch.
Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been
pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would
expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe
Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that
is more interesting.
The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though,
as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping
the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages
people can look at. Joss,
Guilherme, Loïc and others
have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now
ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking
and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.
The
GNOME 2.16 status page
still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on,
with GTK+ 2.10 in place.
But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16
transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of
GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other
distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be
very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix
as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui
available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release
managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news,
it'll probably be too late.
12:08 |
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Temporarily blind
The other day I had an “incident” involving my vision. It has nothing to
do with the vision problems many people had the other day, when
someone posted some
pr0n
on various Planets.
For some time already, maybe two or three years, I've had this weird vision
problem at times, when I'd start seeing some black stains with some flashing
“lights“, even with my eyes closed. These symptoms would go away after a
few minutes, and washing my eyes with a good amount of water also helped. It
happened a lot during mornings, and I somehow connected it to showering with
too hot water, using a certain brand of shampoo (Say no to Revlon!) and
shower vapour. When I described the symptoms to my mother, the reaction was
the expected in a house of doctors and nurses: indiference. En casa del
herrero, cuchillo de palo, for those who understand it.
On Sunday I stayed up helping Belén with her DEA paper until 5AM. I woke up
at 7:30AM, and stayed at work like a zombie, until I had a chance to have a
needed nap at 6PM. The problem was my nap was a bit longer than I wanted, and
woke up at 9:15PM, still tired but no longer sleepy. I wasn't sleepy until
4AM, and next morning I accidentally overslept, and rushed out of the bed
to get to work as soon as possible.
While preparing, I suddenly noticed my vision went a bit blurry and strange.
I thought it just was one of those ”stains”, until I closed my right eye to
rub it and all I saw was darkness.
I totally freaked out. “OMFG, I'm fucking BLIND”. I wanted to phone
someone, but wireless had broken down and I didn't have my mobile phone with
me, so I tried looking at a text file I have in the laptop with some numbers
on, when it ran out of battery. I grabbed my old mobile and failed to
introduce the correct PIN three times.
I went to the bathroom, covered my right eye, and yeah, there was darkness.
If I waved my hand over my blind eye, I would barely notice some movement on
the left side, but that was all. Still very frightened, I washed my eye
thoroughly and to my relief, I was able to see the upper part of my field of
vision. After some more, I had recovered all my sight. Whew.
I managed to speak to Raül on the phone, who told me this probably wasn't
too bad, just the optic nerve being tired due to stress and so on. My mother
also asked an opthalmologist at her hospital the day after, who confirmed
this. It's probably caused by my recent whacky sleeping habits (basically
non-existing), general stress, and long exposures to computer monitors. The
doctor asked her if I had a headache, which I didn't the day before, but I had
one the day after, when she asked. “How do you know?”, I replied.
Last night I went to bed at 00:05 and managed to sleep eight hours for the
first time in many months. I'm really going to make an effort to fix my
sleeping habits, because they were quite fucked up lately, not catching up
sleep even during weekends. On Monday I'll visit the doctor anyway, just to
confirm all of this.
Coincidentally,
Russel Coker also
had similar symptoms this week, and also blogged about it.
20:13 |
[/life] |
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(comments: 12)
GNOME 2.16
GNOME 2.16 was released this week, delivering, once again to the day,
the usual catalogue of improvements and polishing. Congratulations,
everyone!
Catalan is, once again, very well covered in this release
(99.87% completed as of this writing) thanks to the fantastic GNOME group at
Softcatalà. I have only been able
to contribute an update to Sound Juicer and little more, due to lack of time
and, admittedly, motivation, so I'm very glad to see the group continues to
be healthy and active thanks to Xavi,
Jordi,
Maria (from WSOP fame!),
Gil (awesome GUADEC organiser) and others, under the leadership of Josep.
Moltes gràcies, equip!
10:14 |
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(comments: 1)
GTetrinet 0.7.10 released
GTetrinet 0.7.10 is out. This release fixes a security hole (CVE-2006-3125),
so you're advised to update ASAP.
The last release was assembled during UbuntuDownUnder, back in April 2005,
which is a good indication about GTetrinet's development health. If you're
interested in writing new features or fixing the many bugs in GTetrinet,
please consider joining the
mailing list. GTetrinet really
needs your help!
Debian binaries are on the way to unstable; Ubuntu will hopefully suck them
up soonish. Get the hot
tarball
from the GNOME FTP mirrors.
18:19 |
[/freesoftware] |
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