The newspapers brought good news bits in the last two days.

Público reports on Paco Rivière's ongoing quest to get a refund for the extra money he had to pay for a Windows licence when he bought a laptop. Paco is a well known member of the Ubuntu Catalan community and has been battling for this common-sense right for 3 years. The trial took place last Monday, and hopefully he'll be able to report some good news soon.

In totally unrelated news, the Valencian caveman Juan García Sentandreu, leader of the right-wing “Coalición Valenciana” party, was arrested yesterday, for still not too clear reasons. Being one of the biggest enemies of my language, and having a long record of violent attacks to cultural entities and other political parties in València, I can't say I pitty him at all. I hope he had fun sleeping with the yonkis in the central police station last night. :)

This week I spent some time upgrading PyBlosxom to version 1.4.3. I was still using 1.2, which probably was insecure and buggy. This is the first step in a bigger plan to replace Apache2 with nginx in this server, but that will come later.

I was lucky to find PyBlosxom's author, Will, on IRC at the right time, who kindly answered a few questions and helped solve a few issues with the comments plugin and flavours. So, after a while, I had fixed a few subtle, 4 year old bugs in my XHTML templates and more notably, fixed lots of small bits in the rss feed, which finally makes Liferea and Advogato like my entries.

But, the biggest achievement was getting a brand new comments.py plugin from Will, which allows to close comments on entries after an expiration date. So, even if I was happily using Mako's Akismet plugin, I still was getting 5 or 6 spams each day on very old entries (favourites being one about Alonso visiting València and one remembering the 70^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War). Well, not any longer.

My dear spammers, you can now go pester someone else, or pick new entries pretty quickly before they get closed down. It's been a nice fight, but it's a good time to wish you go away and fuck off. With love, Jordi.

Thank you, Will!

Knowing many people in the Debian community, I knew others would be there too. And Gunnar confirmed it yesterday via Planet Debian. Yes, I participated in the World Naked Bike Ride, although at the time I didn't know about the campaign, I thought people were doing it “just because we can” mostly.

So, after being invited to the ride the week before, 5 of our colla were in the old Túria's river bed, near the Fira Alternativa's scenary at the scheduled time. Not having done anything like this before, we were a bit expectant to see how many people would actually do it, before deciding to join them. After a while, more and more people seemed to gather, and it finally took off. Pants off, and there we go!

The insane amount of photographing and filming that was going on around us at the beginning was a bit uncomfortable, but after a while we had mostly forgotten we were riding our bikes naked through the commercial arteries of València. The ride was too long for my taste, covering the whole Fira, Plaça d'Amèrica, carrer Colom just in front of “El Corte Inglés” (I wonder how many known people saw me there), Xàtiva, Russafa, back to Xàtiva, Town Hall, Ciutat Vella, river margin and Blasco Ibáñez.

Even if it was a sunny day, the chilly wind made me feel really cold, but overall it was quite fun, and an interesting experience I might or might not repeat. I'm certainly not becoming a naturism activist or anything like this. I do think we have way too many taboos, and every time I get rid of one, I feel a lot better. :)

Last week's edition of Ciberpaís included a lengthy article which tried to explain Debian's and Ubuntu's OpenSSL problem to unexperienced computer users, it's impact, what should people do and what happens next.

Mercè Molist sent in a few questions for me to answer, a small part of which were used in the article. While I don't like a few bits of the article that much, I tried my best to make it clear that Debian is not a bunch of clueless and careless Free Software enthusiasts. The treatment that the incident had in some well known Spanish security-related websites was in my opinion deplorable, so I want to thank Mercè for the opportunity to clarify some of the Debian bashing.

I expect the full interview will be published either here or at Mercè's website in the following days.