I still don't have a title

Weird VirtIO errors on a jessie KVM host: Fixed!

Fri, 08 Jan 2016 10:57:00 +0000

Yesterday I posted a desperate plea for help as I had no idea where else to look for clues on what was causing random I/O errors on the guests of our jessie KVM host.

Thanks to Michael Herold, who was kind enough to mail me after identifying our problem, now we know os-prober is to blame, triggering the problem on every kernel update on the host, and we have quickly uninstalled it from all our systems.

Thanks Michael! If you by any chance going to attend FOSDEM, I am so happily going to buy you beers!

Let’s hope anyone else wondering what’s going on with their filesystems will find the trail to these blog posts to find a quick solution!

Weird VirtIO errors on a jessie KVM host running Debian guests

Thu, 07 Jan 2016 16:20:00 +0000

Hi Interwebs! I’m facing a weird issue with one of our server’s at work, involving Debian jessie, libvirt and Debian guests using VirtIO drivers. This is a plea for help. :)

Basically, we are getting random VirtIO errors inside our guests, resulting in stuff like this:

[4735406.568235] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 142339584
[4735406.572008] EXT4-fs warning (device dm-0): ext4_end_bio:317: I/O error -5 writing to inode 1184437 (offset 0 size 208896 starting block 17729472)
[4735406.572008] Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 17729472
[ ... ]
[4735406.572008] Buffer I/O error on device dm-0, logical block 17729481
[4735406.643486] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 142356480
[ ... ]
[4735406.748456] blk_update_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 38587480
[4735411.020309] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 12640808, lost sync page write
[4735411.055184] Aborting journal on device dm-0-8.
[4735411.056148] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 12615680, lost sync page write
[4735411.057626] JBD2: Error -5 detected when updating journal superblock for dm-0-8.
[4735411.057936] Buffer I/O error on dev dm-0, logical block 0, lost sync page write
[4735411.057946] EXT4-fs error (device dm-0): ext4_journal_check_start:56: Detected aborted journal
[4735411.057948] EXT4-fs (dm-0): Remounting filesystem read-only
[4735411.057949] EXT4-fs (dm-0): previous I/O error to superblock detected

(From an Ubuntu 15.04 guest, EXT4 on LVM2)

Or,

Jan 06 03:39:11 titanium kernel: end_request: I/O error, dev vda, sector 1592467904
Jan 06 03:39:11 titanium kernel: EXT4-fs warning (device vda3): ext4_end_bio:317: I/O error -5 writing to inode 31169653 (offset 0 size 0 starting block 199058492)
Jan 06 03:39:11 titanium kernel: Buffer I/O error on device vda3, logical block 198899256
[ ... ]
Jan 06 03:39:12 titanium kernel: Aborting journal on device vda3-8.
Jan 06 03:39:12 titanium kernel: Buffer I/O error on device vda3, logical block 99647488

(From a Debian jessie guest, EXT4 directly on a VirtIO-based block device)

When this happens, it affects multiple guests on the hosts at the same time. Normally they are severe enough that they end up with a r/o file system, but we’ve seen a few hosts survive with a non-fatal I/O error. The host’s dmesg has nothing interesting to see.

We’ve seen this happen with quite heterogeneous guests:

Debian 6, 7 and 8 (Debian kernels 2.6.32, 3.2 and 3.16)
Ubuntu 14.09 and 15.04 (Ubuntu kernels)
32 bit and 64 bit installs.

In short, we haven’t seen a clear characteristic in any guest, other than the affected hosts being the ones with some sustained I/O load (build machines, cgit servers, PostgreSQL RDBMs…). Most of the times, hosts that just sit there doing nothing with their disks are not affected.

The host is a stock Debian jessie install that manages libvirt-based QEMU guests. All the guests have their block devices using virtio drivers, some of them on spinning media based on LSI RAID (was a 3ware card before, got replaced as we were very suspicious about it, but are getting the same results), and some of them based on PCIe SSD storage. We have some other 3 hosts, similar setup except they run Debian wheezy (and honestly we’re not too keen on upgrading them yet, just in case), none of them has ever shown this kind of problem.

We’ve been seeing this since last summer, and haven’t found a pattern that tells us where these I/O error bugs are coming from. Google isn’t revealing other people with a similar problem, and we’re finding that quite surprising as our setup is quite basic.

So, dear Interwebs, have you seen this? We could use any comment (on the blog, or in Debian bug #810121, or kernel bug 110441) that clues us on what’s to blame here. Thanks in advance!

Update: We finally know what’s going on! The problem is gone at long last!

A pile of reasons why GNOME should be Debian jessie’s default desktop environment

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 23:58:00 +0000

GNOME has, for some reason or another, always been the default desktop environment in Debian since the installer is able to install a full desktop environment by default. Release after release, Debian has been shipping different versions of GNOME, first based on the venerable 1.2/1.4 series, then moving to the time-based GNOME 2.x series, and finally to the newly designed 3.4 series for the last stable release, Debian 7 ‘wheezy’.

During the final stages of wheezy’s development, it was pointed out that the first install CD image would not longer hold all of the required packages to install a full GNOME desktop environment. There was lots of discussion surrounding this bug or fact, and there were two major reactions to it. The Debian GNOME team rebuilt some key packages so they would be compressed using xz instead of gzip, saving the few megabytes that were needed to squeeze everything in the first CD. In parallel, the tasksel maintainer decided switching to Xfce as default desktop was another obvious fix. This change, unannounced and two days before the freeze, was very contested and spurred the usual massive debian-devel threads. In the end, and after a few default desktop flip flops, it was agreed that GNOME would remain as the default for the already frozen wheezy release, and this issue would be revisited later on during jessie’s development.

And indeed, some months ago, Xfce was again reinstated as Debian’s default desktop for jessie as announced:

Change default desktop to xfce.

This will be re-evaluated before jessie is frozen. The evaluation will
start around the point of DebConf (August 2014). If at that point gnome
looks like a better choice, it’ll go back as the default.

Some criteria for that choice will include:

* Popcon numbers for gnome on jessie. If gnome installations continue to
 rise fast enough despite xfce being the default (compared with, say
 kde installations), then we’ll know that users prefer gnome.
 Currently we have no data about how many users would choose gnome when
 it’s not the default. Part of the reason for switching to xfce now
 is to get such data.

* The state of accessability support, particularly for the blind.

* How well the UI works for both new and existing users. Gnome 3
 seems to be adding back many gnome 2 features that existing users
 expect, as well as making some available via addons. If it feels
 comfortable to gnome 2 (and xfce) users, that would go a long way
 toward switching back to it as the default. Meanwhile, Gnome 3 is also
 breaking new ground in its interface; if the interface seems more
 welcoming to new users, or works better on mobile devices, etc, that
 would again point toward switching back.

* Whatever size constraints exist for CD or other images at the time.

--

Hello to all the tech journalists out there. This is pretty boring.
Why don’t you write a story about monads instead?

― Joey Hess in dfca406eb694e0ac00ea04b12fc912237e01c9b5.

Suffice to say that the Debian GNOME team participants have never been thrilled about how the whole issue is being handled, and we’ve been wondering if we should be doing anything about it, or just move along and enjoy the smaller amount of bug reports against GNOME packages that this change would bring us, if it finally made it through to the final release. During our real life meet-ups in FOSDEM and the systemd+GNOME sprint in Antwerp, most members of the team did feel Debian would not be delivering a graphical environment with the polish we think our users deserve, and decided we at least should try to convince the rest of the Debian project and our users that Debian will be best suited by shipping GNOME 3.12 by default. Power users, of course, can and know how to get around this default and install KDE, Xfce, Cinnamon, MATE or whatever other choice they have. For the average user, though, we think we should be shipping GNOME by default, and tasksel should revert the above commit again. Some of our reasons are:

Accessibility: GNOME continues to be the only free desktop environment that provides full accessibility coverage, right from login screen. While it’s true GNOME 3.0 was lacking in many areas, and GNOME 3.4 (which we shipped in wheezy) was just barely acceptable thanks to some last minute GDM fixes, GNOME 3.12 should have ironed out all of the issues and our non-expert understanding is that a11y support is now on par with what GNOME 2.30 from squeeze offered.
Downstream health: The number of active members in the team taking care of GNOME in Debian is around 5-10 persons, while it is 1-2 in the case of Xfce. Being the default desktop draws a lot of attention (and bug reports) that only a bigger team might have the resources to handle.
Upstream health: While GNOME is still committed to its time-based release schedule and ships new versions every 6 months, Xfce upstream is, unfortunately, struggling a bit more to keep up with new plumbing technology. Only very recently it has regained support to suspend/hibernate via logind, or support for Bluez 5.x, for example.
Community: GNOME is one of the biggest free software projects, and is lucky to have created an ecosystem of developers, documenters, translators and users that interact regularly in a live social community. Users and developers gather in hackfests and big, annual conferences like GUADEC, the Boston Summit, or GNOME.Asia. Only KDE has a comparable community, the rest of the free desktop projects don’t have the userbase or humanpower to sustain communities like this.
Localization: Localization is more extensive and complete in GNOME. Xfce has 18 languages above 95% of coverage, and 2 at 100% (excluding English). GNOME has 28 languages above 95%, 9 of them being complete (excluding English).
Documentation: Documentation coverage is extensive in GNOME, with most of the core applications providing localized, up to date and complete manuals, available in an accessible format via the Help reader.
Integration: The level of integration between components is very high in GNOME. For example, instant messaging, agenda and accessibility components are an integral part of the desktop. GNOME is closely integrated to NetworkManager, PulseAudio, udisks and upower so that the user has access to all the plumbing in a single place. GNOME also integrates easily with online accounts and services (ownCloud, Google, MS Exchange…).
Hardware: GNOME 3.12 will be one of the few desktop environments to support HiDPI displays, now very common on some laptop models. Lack of support for HiDPI means non-technical users will get an unreadable desktop by default, and no hints on how to fix that.
Security: GNOME is more secure. There are no processes launched with root permissions on the user’s session. All everyday operations (package management, disk partitioning and formatting, date/time configuration…) are accomplished through PolicyKit wrappers.
Privacy: One of the latest focuses of GNOME development is improving privacy, and work is being done to make it easy to run GNOME applications in isolated containers, integrate Tor seamlessly in the desktop experience, better disk encryption support and other features that should make GNOME a more secure desktop environment for end users.
Popularity: One of the metrics discussed by the tasksel change proponents mentioned popcon numbers. 8 months after the desktop change, Xfce does not seem to have made a dent on install numbers. The Debian GNOME team doesn’t feel popcon’s data is any better than a random online poll though, as it’s an opt-in service which the vast majority of users don’t enable.
systemd embracing: One of the reasons to switch to Xfce was that it didn’t depend on systemd. But now that systemd is the default, that shouldn’t be a problem. Also given ConsoleKit is deprecated and dead upstream, KDE and Xfce are switching or are planning to switch to systemd/logind.
Adaptation: Debian forced a big desktop change with the wheezy release, switching from the traditional GNOME 2.x to the new GNOME Shell environment. Switching again would mean more adaptation for uses when they’ve had two years to experience GNOME 3.4. Furthermore, GNOME 3.12 means two years of improvements and polishing to GNOME 3.4, which should help with some of the rough edges found in the GNOME release shipped with wheezy.
Administration: GNOME is easy to administrate. All the default settings can be defined by administrators, and mandatory settings can be forced to users, which is required in some companies and administrations; Xfce cannot do that. The close integration with freedesktop components (systemd, NM, PulseAudio…) also gives access to specific and useful administration tools.

In short, we think defaulting to GNOME is the best option for the Debian release, and in contrast, shipping Xfce as the default desktop could mean delivering a desktop experience that has some incomplete or rough edges, and not on par with Debian quality standards for a stable release. We believe tasksel should again revert the change and be uploaded as soon as possible, in order to get people testing images with GNOME the sooner the better, with the freeze only two months away.

We would also like that in the future, changes of this nature will not be announced in a git commit log, but widely discussed in debian-project and the other usual development/decision channels, like the change of init system happened recently. We will, whichever the final decision is, continue to package GNOME with great care to ensure our users get the best possible desktop experience Debian can offer.

GUADEC 2012

Sun, 29 Jul 2012 16:31:00 +0000

I’ve been in A Coruña for this year’s GUADEC since Tuesday night, and it rocked. I did a late registration after my first week at Collabora, which is sponsoring my stay here.

I came one day early to participate, as Debian’s representative, at the yearly GNOME Advisory Board meeting, for the first time. It was a positive experience, which helped me get a grasp of the “big picture” of what the GNOME Foundation does. I also had the pleasure of visiting Igalia’s awesome offices in the city, and puting faces to many names during the meeting.

I presented an overview of Debian’s relation to GNOME, how our packaging team works and what are our goals and biggest problems as a GNOME downstream. We stirred some good debate as some other Advisory Board members share part of our problems. I should be posting a summary of what happened there for debian-project@ldo as soon as I have the time to scribble it.

I’ve met with GNOME Hispano people I hadn’t seen since 2004 or 2006 in the best case, and catched up with many of them. I’ve also met many GPUL members I had know for over a decade via IRC, but never had met in person, and it was about time. And of course, I’ve got to known a good number of my new workmates at Collabora, and had fun with them around the conference, the beach and the numerous post-conference events.

Last, but not least, I ended up participating in the GNOME Olympics, substituting Rodrigo in Team B “Core Dumped”, along with Stefano, John, Bastien, Chema and Adam. WE WON, not thanks to me, but the statistics shine: I’ve won all FreeFA World Cups I’ve played :P so here’s a PROtip: if you want to win next year, be sure to be my team mate, and more importantly, be sure Adam is not your rival. :)

Unfortunately, I’m only attending the core days so tonight I’ll be flying back to Madrid on my way home in València. See you next year! A Coruña is a city that has impressed me quite a bit, and I’m looking forward to coming back for some more standard vacation at some point. :)

Season of change

Sun, 15 Jul 2012 22:45:00 +0000

It feels like I’m sitting in a roller-coaster wagon. There’s probably too much change going on for me to assimilate naturally. In particular:

I just wrapped up (well, mostly) one of the toughest Uni semestres. I had to deal with lots of very time consuming assignments, and then the usual round of final exams. Even if this semester I got the best marks in my journey (or shall we say Via Crucis) through University, I still managed to fail one exam, for the Advanced Networks subject, which is quite annoying, given I got high marks (even the highest in one case) in other subjects I really don’t master at all. In any case, this is the end of the pain. The only thing that’s left is just one exam and a project based on GNU/Linux technologies which will basically mean formatting for prettyness the sysadmin docs we’ve been collecting at the office during the last few years. This effort will be nothing to what I’ve been doing during the past 18 months, so I’m really relieved to have it past me already.

Getting rid of studies comes just two weeks before a big change in my professional career. Friday was my last day at the Institut Tecnològic d’Informàtica, after five and a half fantastic years working with awesome people in a very friendly atmosphere. I’ve learned a great deal, and taking this decision wasn’t easy at all. I leave lots of good friends behind, people I really love, and tomorrow will be difficult to not have them around me. I wish my ITI ex-workmates the best of luck in these difficult times for everyone in Spain and specially in the Valencian Country with the massive cuts going on. I feel the timing for this jump couldn’t be better.

Tomorrow, when I get ready to go for work, I won’t be leaving home at all, instead I will just sit where I am right now, at home, and log into some corporate IRC server. Tomorrow I’ll be joining Collabora, and I’m a mix of excited, curious and happy about this incredible opportunity. Thanks to Sjoerd for nags, I might not be writing this if it wasn’t for you!

When I was first approached about this, I thought Collabora was a small company. But as I looked more into it, I discovered that’s not longer the case, there’s many more people than I imagined working there (here!), and was delighted to see I knew many of them, and many other are well known members of the major Free Sofware communities. I’ll be joining the sysadmin team to work closely with Jo Shields. See you tomorrow, folks. :)

This opportunity to work from home is godsend, given the third bit of change that’ll be happening soon: sometime in late September, Maria and I should join the ranks of first-time parents, following the baby boom wave surrounding us. While you can imagine we’re really happy about this, we’re also freaking out because this is going to happen in just two months and a half, and weeks go by really fast lately. So yeah, being able to be at home with this really small baby will be a big bonus for the incredible experience we’re about to enjoy. We’ve been both busy with other stuff, but during the summer we should be focusing on preparing the baby’s arrival. There’s a whole lot to do!

Expect my Debian and other Free Software activities to get a hit, of course. :) If I am normally sleep-deprived, this is going to be the next level.

GNOME 3.4 in wheezy

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 09:47:00 +0000

Users of Debian sid will have noticed: the final (and interesting) bits of GNOME 3.4 have landed and if all looks as good as it does now, they should migrate to wheezy in about a week.

3.2 → 3.4 hasn’t been as complicated as the previous horrible transition, but still had some complications due to Cogl/Clutter incompatibilities. Other than that, our major problem has been manpower, but this isn’t new for many other Debian teams. We’ve also seen new incarnations of “Linux-only technology is now mandatory” which makes our lives a bit more miserable due to kfreebsd-* and hurd-i386, but for now we’ve still been able to dodge it. It seems wheezy+1 will be fun in that regard though, and we might need to take drastic approaches.

If all goes well and the current lot (GNOME Shell, Control Center, Settings daemon, Mutter…) transitions without additional problems, we should be wrapping up our transitions for wheezy with Evolution and friends (currently sitting in experimental), and hopefully GDM 3.4.

As we get many questions regarding the status of GDM in Debian, let’s add a short note on this. Packaging GDM, at least in its current upstream form, is not a matter of unpacking a new tarball and editing debian/changelog. When Joss works on a new major version, the amount of tweaking to break away from stuff that works on other distros but is not so simple in Debian is outstanding (see, for example, the current unfinished work for GDM 3.2 in our SVN repo). In our case, to handle our GDM defaults, we even need changes to the underlying configuration system, dconf. This evidently takes some effort to do, and unfortunately our GDM expert has had little time for Debian lately, but we’re confident we’ll end up with a GDM in wheezy that is on par with Debian standards.

We are, as always, reachable at #debian-gnome in the OFTC IRC network. Have fun!

GNOME 3.4

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 23:50:00 +0000

The GNOME project released today GNOME 3.4, the second major update to the GNOME 3 platform. Congrats!

I know there’s lots of polish and improvements to some of the major rough edges in GNOME 3.2, but I think that of all changes in this release, Epiphany really stands out, as you can see in blog posts by Xan and Diego.

Work to bring GNOME 3.4 to Debian wheezy users has been underway for a few weeks already, and some bits and pieces have been hitting unstable since the tarballs were released a pair of days ago. We still need more base work to be done before some exciting components like GNOME Shell can hit our archive, and we want to fix as many FTBFS with GLib 2.32 bugs as possible before pushing it to unstable, but all in all, hopefully this time, shepherding a major GNOME release to Debian testing won’t be as painful as it was not so long ago. However, we have already identified some fun bits involving clutter, cogl and mutter in our initial analysis, but nothing that hopefully can’t be dealt with in a civilised way.

As always, if you think you can help us, we’re reachable at #debian-gnome at OFTC!

alsaconf

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 23:53:00 +0000

Removing alsaconf was one of the very few rewarding moments of these ten years of taking care of ALSA in Debian.

Not everyone agreed back then, and we still get some retaliation. :)

Date: Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:59:31 +0100
From: <CENSORED>
To: jordi@debian.org
Subject: sabotage!

the removing of alsaconf without working(!) alternatives was (AND IS!) an
act of sabotage against millions of debian/alsa - users who needs stable
productive systems

you and all those proponents of removing this still needed alsaconf - program
will have to take the responsibility in front of an (us-) court for damages in
millions of dollars - amounts (lost man hours) all over the world

only a short while and we will have enough sponsors and witnesses around the
globe (and a very specialised, international labouring bureau of advocates) to
go to the court for prosecution.

we will not tolerate such an betray ("stable"? - do you believe, we're
fools??!!) against broad sections of the population and against the spirit of
free software!

it will be intresting to investigate, in whoms interests you've done so and
who the beneficiaries are ...

L.B.
conductor, publicist, whistleblower

FOSDEM 2012

Fri, 03 Feb 2012 13:05:00 +0000

In a few hours, I’ll be flying to Brussels with Ivan, for a new edition of FOSDEM, undoubtedly the best Free Software conference in Europe.

I’m looking forward to hang out with Debian, GNOME and #dudes people, as well as to explore some other quiet and cool spots in the city with our hosts Raül and Vir.

I’ll probably be around the CrossDistro and CrossDesktop rooms most of the time, but before that I’ll be at the Delirium café not long after landing in Brussels.

For someone who doesn’t enjoy cold weather that much, this is going to be a special edition… oh dear, -10℃, this is fucking crazy!

GNOME Shell 3.2 in wheezy: a retrospective

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 01:23:00 +0000

When you read this, GNOME Shell 3.2 will (hopefully!) have finally transitioned to Debian’s testing suite.

Planet GNOME readers might think Debian now has outdated versions of software even in their development versions, or the distribution’s development marches at glacial pace. Wheezy GNOME users will finally have a Shell that matches the rest of their GNOME components, something that works with the Shell extensions website and much less problems and limitations compared to 3.0.2.

The reality is that GNOME 3.2’s packaging was quite ready back when it was released in late September, but a number of not-so-desirable situations held GNOME Shell from transitioning to testing until today, four months later. So, what happened?

TL;DR: transitioning from GNOME 2 → GNOME 3 is not so easy if you want to keep testing in a sane state, and when you need to deal with dozens of indirectly related packages, for more than 10 architectures… but it shouldn’t take nearly a full year*, either…*

Let’s go back to the last months of 2010. Debian squeeze is in very deep freeze, and the release team and many Debian developers are focusing on squashing as many release critical bugs as they can, in order to make Debian 6.0 the great release it ended up being. The GNOME project has recently delayed the big launch of GNOME 3.0 again, until March 2011; Debian has already settled on GNOME 2.28 for its release, although it will end up cherry-picking many updates from the 2.30 release modules.

With most of the stabilization work being done, many Debian GNOME team members were at that time working on packaging very early versions of what would end up being GNOME 3.0 technology: GTK+3.0, GNOME Shell, Mutter… and some brave users even tried to use it via the experimental archive.

On February 6th, Debian 6.0 was released, and soon after, on April 6th, GNOME made a huge step forward with the much anticipated release of GNOME 3.0. At that time, Debian developers were busy breaking unstable as much as they could, as it’s tradition on the weeks following a major release, and the Debian GNOME team was able to start moving some GNOME 3.0 libraries (those which were parallel-installable with their GTK+2.0 versions) to unstable.

However, moving the bulk of GNOME 3.0 to unstable wasn’t so easy. When you start doing that, you need to be sure you’re ready to have all affected packages in a “transitionable” state as soon as possible, to minimise the chances of blocking transitions of unrelated packages via the dependencies they pick up with rebuilds. All the packages involved in a transition need to be ready to go in the same “testing run”, for all supported architectures. When you’re dealing with dozens of GNOME source packages at the same time, many of which introduce new libraries, or worse, introduce incompatible APIs that affect many more unrelated packages, things get hairy, and you need a plan.

So, Joss outlined what a sane approach to this monster transition could look like. The amount of work to do was what we call “fun” on #debian-gnome. In a nutshell, we had to deal with quite a few transitions, starting with having a newer version of libnotify in unstable, and a pre-requisite for that was making sure all the packages using libnotify1 were ready to use the source-incompatible libnotify4, and this meant preparing patches and NMUs for many of our packages, as well as many others not under our control.

Before starting a controlled transition like this one, we had to get an ACK from the release team, who was busy enough handling other huge transitions like Perl 5.12, so by the time we got our own slot, we were well into Summer.

With libnotify done in August, it was time to get our hands dirty with more exciting stuff, like getting Nautilus in testing. This meant bumping a soname and requiring all packages providing Nautilus extensions to migrate to GTK+3.0, or drop the extension entirely, as you can’t mix GTK+2.0 and GTK+3.0 symbols in the same process. However, in GNOME 3.0, automounting code had moved from Nautilus to gnome-settings-daemon, so in order to not break filesystem automounting in testing for an unreasonable amount of time, both Nautilus and g-s-d needed to go in at the same time. The fun thing is that g-s-d dragged glib2.0, gvfs, gnome-control-center, gdm3, gnome-media, gnome-session and gnome-panel into the equation, so this transition needed extra planning and a lot more work than initially expected: migrating all nautilus extensions, plus ensuring all Panel applets had migrated to GTK+3.0 and the new libpanel-applet-4 interface. In short, this was the monster transition we were trying to avoid.

By the time all this mess was sorted out, GNOME 3.2 had been released, and for what users said, it was a lot better than 3.0. We still had no more than a few bits and pieces of 3.0 in testing, and we were working hard to get 3.0 in wheezy. With all the excitement around 3.2, at times it was difficult to explain outsiders why we were beating a dead 3.0 horse… Going back to our huge transition, it was just a matter of time before all the packages would be built and be ready to enter, on the same run, in testing.

A few weeks later, in early November and after several rounds of mass-bug-filings, fixing unrelated FTBFS, many NMUs, package removal requests and dealing with any possible problem that could block our transition, everything seemed to be set, and our release team magicians had everything in place for the big magic to happen. However, our first clash with the rest of Debian happened a few hours before our victory, in the form of an unannounced ruby-gnome2 upload which resetted the count for everyone. It was fun to see the release team trying all sorts of black magic in an attempt to mitigate the damage. Fortunately, after a few tries they managed to fool britney (the script that handles package transitions from unstable to testing) somehow, and the hardest part of the job was done with just one day of delay.

At last, the core of GNOME 3 was in testing, and testing users found soon after. The rest of the week saw a cascade of hate posts against GNOME 3 in Planet Debian, and personally I didn’t find that especially motivating to keep on working on the rest of GNOME bits. With experimental clear of GNOME 3.0 stuff, we finally were able to focus on packaging whatever GNOME 3.2 components were not already done, and preparing for what should be a plain simple transition of GNOME 3.0 to 3.2.

After our share of wait for a transition slot, as Perl 5.14, ICU and OpenSSL were in the line before us, and after dealing with a minor tracker 0.12 transition, we were ready for our next episode: evolution-data-server.

At first sight, we thought this would be a lot easier, but it still got a bit hairy due to evo-data-server massive soname bumps. We were given our slot just before Christmas, after a few weeks of wait for others to finish their migration rounds, and most of the pack entered wheezy a few days before the new year.

No rejoicing, though, as GNOME Shell 3.2 didn’t make it. First, we discovered it was FTBFS on kFreeBSD architectures, as NetworkManager had been promoted from optional to required, for apparently no good reason, leaving the BSD world in the cold, including our exotic GNU/kFreeBSD architectures. Now, let’s clarify that I’m a supporter of the Debian kFreeBSD architectures and was really happy to see it accepted as a technology preview in squeeze. However, as you know, GNOME Shell currently requires hardware acceleration to run, a requirement hardly met in kFreeBSD, unless you’re using a DRI1 X driver. We seriously doubted anyone had ever ran a GNOME 3 session on kfreebsd-*. However, if it didn’t build, it was a blocker bug for GNOME Shell. We considered creating different meta-packages for kFreeBSD architectures, to conclude it’d be a mess, so our awesome Michael Biebl ended up cooking up a patch that restored the ability to build the Shell without NetworkManager support.

With this out of our way, we just needed to upload Michael’s fix and watch the buildds do their part of the job. Or maybe not?

Enter Iceweasel 9.

In parallel, and with incredible bad timing, Iceweasel 9.0 was uploaded to Debian the very same day it was released by Mozilla. Again, it greeted us with a nasty surprise: yet another mozjs API change, which made gjs FTBFS, which meant our kFreeBSD fixes would be unusable until someone who knew Gjs’ internals well enough bit the bullet and worked around the new API changes. Again, Michael Biebl tried to be our saviour, but unfortunately wasn’t able to fix all the problems, so we tried to focus on plan B.

Mozilla had released a fork of the mozjs that is included in Firefox, so that embedders would have a bit less of a hard time with these recurrent API changes. This was based on Firefox 4, and was already being packaged by Ubuntu. Gjs would build using this older version just fine, so we just needed to get it in Debian as soon as possible. We just needed to find a sucke^Wvolunteer that would be inclined to maintain the beast. Only after a few weeks we managed to get Chris Coulson, the Ubuntu packager, to maintain the package directly through the Debian archive via package syncs. However, his package had only been auto-compiled in the three Ubuntu architectures, that is amd64, armel and i386. It’s late January 2012, and we’ve been fighting this war for 10 months.

After getting some help from Michael to get the new package in shape for Debian standards, we were excited to sponsor it for Chris. Duh, after a few days in the NEW fridge, it was rejected by the ftp-masters. The license statement was missing quite a few details, so I went ahead and sacrificed a few hours of my copious free time to get this sorted out. A few days later, mozjs was accepted, but the result was horrible. It was very red. mozjs didn’t build on half of our targets.

Mike Hommey was quick to file a bug and point us to the most obvious fuckups. As he had dealt with this in the past as the Iceweasel maintainer, all of these issues were fixed and patches were ready to be applied verbatim or with minimal changes to our sources. With mozjs finally built successfully (although with severe problems on ia64), we were finally able to rebuild Gjs against it, upload GNOME Shell with our kFreeBSD fixes and wait until today for this mess to be over. Whew.

I can’t say I’ve enjoyed all the stages of this ride. Some bumps on the road were clearly there to test our patience, but it has helped me get back in touch with non-leaf GNOME packaging, which was all I was doing for a while due to being super-busy lately with studies. It also reminds me of the privilege of working side by side with some awesome people, not only Joss, Michael, Sjoerd, Laurent or Gustavo, to name just a few Debian GNOME team members, but also the receptive release team members like Julien or Cyril, and NEW-processing record-breaking ftp-master Luca. Without them, we might be trying to figure out the Nautilus transition since last Summer.

We really hope GNOME 3.4 will be a piece of cake compared to this. ;)

Installing GNOME 3 in Debian

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 01:46:00 +0000

The following is a quick HOWTO for the brave Debian users who want to upgrade to GNOME 3. Assuming you have an up to date system running sid, and experimental listed in your APT sources, perform the following complicated steps to end up having a functional GNOME 3 desktop:

apt-get install -t experimental gnome

Thanks go to Joss for putting together new GNOME 3 meta-packages, and the rest of the Debian GNOME people for months of hard planning and packaging work, and painful testing transition handling.

Before you ask, yeah, not all of GNOME 3.x is in unstable yet, but will soon be, as precedent transitions start clearing the way. And yeah, GNOME 3.2 will come just after the two remaining package sets enter testing. To compensate, you’ll find that you have some GNOME leaf packages pending an upgrade to 3.2.0-1 while you read this.

Not going to DebConf 11

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 13:47:00 +0000

3 months ago, I was positive I would be attending DebConf 11 in Banja Luka, but as the time to buy tickets and plan the trip came closer, I began to realise I don’t have lots and lots of vacation, and I probably prefer spending them doing something that absolutely rocks my world. I’ve always enjoyed the Debian conferences when I’ve been lucky to be there, but last year’s experience in the Pyrenees was nothing a DebConf can compare to, and I’ve decided to spend time seeking similar experiences this summer.

With much regret, because I love meeting the wonderful people that make up Debian and DebConfs, I have to say that after all and once again, I won’t make it.

Cinema d'Estiu de Benimaclet 2011

Thu, 30 Jun 2011 23:24:00 +0000

Yeah! It’s this time of the year: Friday evenings after work with your friends having some cool beer on the streets, Saturdays around the nearby mountains for a good hike and swimming in a lake or river, and good beach Sunday in a Valencian beach. And for a great ending of a Summer weekend, a good indie movie in your neighbourhood, reclaiming the streets and going back to our roots, when people perceived the public spaces as theirs, and would bring foldable chairs out, would gather with their neighbours and had a good after-dinner chat a la fresca.

The always active Associació de Veïns i Veïnes de Benimaclet has organized, for the fifth year four cinema projections in Benimaclet’s square, which are open for anyone who wants to share good moments with us. The program this year includes Soul Kitchen (3rd of July), When the Wind Blows (10th), Concursante (17th) and Moon (24th).

Before every movie, we’ll enjoy live music by local bands, and projections of good short films. We’ll be happy to see you there, and remember you only need a chair and some dinner… but be sure to be there a bit before 22:00: last year this got so popular some people started having issues to find good spots for their chairs!

Quinze de maig

Tue, 31 May 2011 23:11:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, I was lucky to celebrate my 33th birthday with my closest friends in l’Alqueria. When asked to wish something before blowing the candles on Victor’s delicious apple cake, I thought I have basically everything I’d want, but it’d be cool if some real changes happened in this world.

Not long after, big demonstrations asking for “Real Democracy Now” happened throughout the Spanish state, and today, that Sunday seems to be an eternity away. Huge assemblies, thousands of strangers working together, more demonstrations, an election campaign eclipsed by #15m, hundreds of well thought, plausible claims published, the movement crossing the Spanish borders and leaking into France and Greece, the feeling that this is the good one, the basis for a fresh start that can make our lives better, our society a fair one and the possibility to stand in front of the fuckers who have made our lives a lot harder, to tell them it’s not going to work like that anymore. All of this in 15 days.

Unfortunately, revolution came when I’m in a crucial month to finish my studies and swamped with other little things, so I’ve been unable to be in the Valencian camp site for more than 3 days. Hopefully when I’m done on the 22nd people will still be taking the square, because Mako and Mika will be visiting then. Yay!

GNOME 3.0

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 23:14:00 +0000

Yesterday one of my free software halves was very, very happy, because after a lot of work, GNOME 3 was released!

I’ve been following GNOME 3.0’s development since Debian got the first GNOME Shell snapshots uploaded to experimental. While my first experience, on an old, 2 or 3 generations behind Athlon 800MHz with 512MB of RAM was horrid due to the lack of features (it wasn’t even an alpha!) and the incredible slowness due to the crappy Radeon 9200, I’ve seen it evolve to the gem that was released yesterday.

I haven’t been so excited about GNOME since GTK+ and GNOME 2.0 were released after their eternal development cycle, and was happy to see how positive the atmosphere in #gnome-hackers was last night when vuntz sent the email and everyone was able to relax after a very long sprint of hard work.

Congratulations everyone, because not only this a great, solid release, but it’s also a brave one. Change does not come without resistance, but I am very sure the path GNOME opened last night has a bright and innovative future. I will be delighted to walk this path to enjoy it!

A tale of Tristània and its Quadrennial Royal Ball

Thu, 31 Mar 2011 23:40:00 +0000

In one of the corners of what is now know as Europa, there was a rich, prosperous and beautiful kingdom known as Tristània. In the past, not that long ago, it had been a number of smaller kingdoms and caliphates, all with their own cultures, religions and ways of life. Wars, and series of marriages of convenience eventually configured what ended up being the united kingdom of Tristània. Throughout the years, some of the unified cultures grew and flourished, while others struggled to survive in their ever-shrinking areas of influence.

A required introduction

Sometimes, the minor cultures would suffer due to oppression coming from the delegates of the King, who would ban any expression of these cultures, as they were seen as a potential threat to the kingdom’s stability and unity. For example, just a few decades before the main subject of this tale, the predecessor of the incumbent King took power by force, after crushing everyone who opposed his uprise during a bloody and hard civil war. His reign was ruthless and he imposed draconian laws uppon his people: usage and teaching of the minor languages was banned, and everyone was forced to use the language of the Centràlia region, in public or private.

After four decades, the majority of the Tristanian people were sick enough of the situation to consider standing against their fear of the regime and demand freedom, but repression prevailed until the old general died. His place was taken by the King’s grandson even if the people had expressed, just before the Great War, that they had had enough kings and demanded a ruler they could choose directly. Of course, the new King seemed a lot nicer than who they had been suffering for ages, so when asked if they accepted the new situation, an overwhelming majority said “yes”.

However, there was a region, Verdàlia, where the majority said “no”. Things were actually more complicated. Verdalians formed a traditional, proud society, and while the years of oppression had undoubtedly weakened it, they had managed to preserve their very unique culture, language and traditions healthy. The Verdal language was really weird to the ears of Centràlians and even other minor cultures of the Kingdom, and erudites struggled to find its real origins, not being able to reach plausible conclusions.

Verdanians, as we already know, were a traditional society, living in a land of deep and poorly connected valleys. Little they knew or cared about the complicated matters of Centràlia and other regions. What made them happy was to take care their sheep and cows, keep a good fire in their living room and, every now and then, enjoy one of their log cutting contests. The impositions of the former dictator were too much for them, and some of them started sabotaging, assaulting and killing some of the dictator’s soldiers, agents and officers. This was a huge risk at the time; getting caught meant death penalty for sure, and at first, even people from other regions were in favour of these actions. However, this popular support greatly diminished when the new King took the throne, as these minority continued with the killings, while most of the people saw it was no longer justified.

The Royal Ball

One of the very first measures the young King introduced was to organise the “Royal Ball of Tristània”, a major event through which the people of the different regions would be able to elect their delegates to the Crown. Every four years, a Great Ball contest would happen in Centràlia, and the winners would be able to decide by their own on some of the matters that affected their region. Verdanians would send a few teams of dancers, each of which came from different towns or areas. Some Verdanian teams were happy about the King and the new political situation, but other teams weren’t so much. And some others, while being simple non-violent dancers, were known to be supporters of the violent minority who kept on harassing, assaulting and even killing in their struggle for “freedom of Verdània”.

The Verdanian groups aligned with the “different” culture of Verdània (including those who were said to support the violent) tended to get a lot more points in the dancing contest, and a majority of the elected delegates were appointed by them, making it easier to pass laws and edicts that favoured protection of their ways, traditions and language.

No matter how hard they tried, the dancing groups closer to Centràlia kept losing to the majority. After many years of dance contests, these groups used their closeness to the King’s court to pass the Ball Law of Tristanian, that would ban any dancing group which didn’t condemn the assaults and killings that kept happening in Verdània. The unsurprising result was that, with less dancing groups participating in the following Royal Ball, the Verdanian majority was broken and new delegates, friendly of the Centralian officers, were elected.

Many people who had been in favour of assaults and killings began to question this strategy, and this political movement’s unity started to break. In the end, the dancers decided to part ways with the violent; they wanted to dance in the next ball, and to do so, they wrote a letter to the King, in which they explicitly expressed their rejection of violent ways, and their embracing of dancing as the only means to drive their political agenda. An objective reading of the new Ball Law clearly showed that this was enough: the text only said the requisite for a dancing group was to disavow all kinds of violence.

This wasn’t really expected in Centràlia, so they started to add new requirements in an attempt to keep this group from the contest: their decisive majority in Verdània was at stake.

The Royal Ball was nearing and registrations for the contest would soon close. The Centralian government first argued that the dancing group should reject the violence coming from the Verdanian extremists in particular. The dancers did it. Then they argued that the dancers were the same people who had been supporting violence in Verdània for years, and “obviously” their violence rejection statement was a lie. The dancers struggled to find new dancers who had not been involved in past dances. But it was not enough. They then claimed that this dance group should be quarantined for four years, until they could prove they really were serious about their new non-violent ideas.

The dance group made a plea to the Tristànian Supreme Counsel, a group of sixteen experts in law of the Kingdom, and argued that all of these draconian requirements were not part of the law that was being enforced by the King. Their appeal to the elder counselors was in vain, though. They ruled this dancing group was as criminal as the violent minority they had once supported, and should by no means take part in the Royal Ball.

As a last, desperate measure, the dancing group reached an agreement with other Verdanian dancers to join forces. They would adopt a new name and new dancing costume colours. Many feared this would only end up in the ban of the other dancing group.

Unfortunately, the end of this story has not been written yet, but it will be completed very soon. Only time will tell if things continue being very sad and unfair in Tristània, or if the dance contest will once again be impartial, with legitimate results.

Calçotada!

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 23:22:00 +0000

This past weekend I’ve had the pleasure to join our friends from Valls, in the Camp de Tarragona, for our annual Calçotada in Picamoixon’s countryside. This was the fourth time in a row I attend, and as always, it’s been a blast, even if Enric and Clara weren’t there, and the Valencian group was reduced to just 5 of us.

Unfortunately I had my share of alcohol on Friday evening/night while partying with my workmates so when we got to Tarragona I was basically wasted. This made me not want to take a single sip of any kind of beverage not consisting of a 100% of water during the two days, but that didn’t, of course, spoil a single moment of fun.

Again, we’ve had the full traditional pack: prepare, cook and enjoy the delicious calçots; our share of mayhem just after eating them, during the calçot war, which this time resulted in a really filthy face and hair; our little walk around the area, including a visit to the “chapel of the altar boy”; play in the metres tall mountains of gravel in the quarry and a brief visit to the ruins of an abandoned house, to discover none of its floors have colapsed yet.

A great finish for a great weekend is getting to visit Jordi and Anna, after 3 years of no luck, and finally meeting their lovely 2.5 years old daughter Martina.

This weekend just rocks, and I’m already looking forward to next year’s!

FOSDEM 2011

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 22:45:00 +0000

When I returned from the first FOSDEM edition I attended, I wrote that I had liked and enjoyed that weekend in Brussels so much, that this conference had probably become a “must”.

It seems I was right. Five years later, I’m delighted to say

I’m happy to meet so many friends from the Debian, GNOME or GNU projects, and enjoy the kindness of our hosts in Brussels, Raül and Virginia. And I’m looking forward to the awesome beer, the excellent talks and discussions, and that unique FOSDEM atmosphere that makes this so special. This year, FOSDEM has the bonus of being able to enjoy the Debian “squeeze” 6.0 release as it happens, with many of the people who made it possible, and celebrate this on Saturday night. See you there!

New project to discuss

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 20:19:00 +0000

Reading Scott’s recent announcement on his move to Google was both surprising and a pleasure. Surprising, because it’ll take time to stop associating his name to Ubuntu, Canonical, and the nice experiences I had while I worked with them. A pleasure, because his blog post was full of reminiscences of the very early days of a project that ended up being way more successful in just a few years than probably anyone in the Oxford conference could imagine. Scott, best of luck for this new adventure!

Scott’s write-up includes a sentence that made me remember I had been wanting to write a blog post related to all of this, but was pending Mark Shuttleworth’s permission for posting:

Ok, Mark wasn’t really a Nigerian 419 scammer, but some people did discard his e-mail as spam!

― Scott James Remnant

Many know the story of how I ended not being part of the “Super-Secret-Debian-Startup” Scott mentions. I even wrote about it in a blog post, 3 years ago:

[…] nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let’s go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn’t have a clue on what to do with my life.
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000

[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]
I’m not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought “WTF?! Dude on crack” or I just forgot “I need to reply to this email”, but I’d swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2½ years, but that’s another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email.

During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn’t believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said “hey, you’re not going to believe this”, and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot.

I wonder if I should reply to his email today…

When the usual suspects in the secret Spanish Debian Cabal channel read this blog post, they decided Mark deserved a reply, even if it would hit his inbox more than three and a half years late. :)

With great care, we crafted an email that would look genuinely stupid in late 2007, but just arrogant and idiotic in 2004, when “Ubuntu” was just an African word, and the GNU/Linux distribution landscape was quickly evolving ―at the time, Gentoo Linux had the “posh distribution” crown, that Debian had held for quite a few years. I even took enough care to forge the X-Operating-System and User-Agent headers so they matched whatever was current in Debian in February 2004, and of course, top-posting seemed most appropriate.

So Mark woke up that Monday, fired up his email client, and got… this:

Date: Mon, 1 Mar 2004 09:47:55 +0100
From: Jordi Mallach <jordi@sindominio.net>
To: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: Re: New project to discuss
Organization: SinDominio
X-Operating-System: Debian GNU/Linux sid (Linux 2.6.3 i686)
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.5.1+cvs20040105i

Hi Mark,

Thanks for your email. I nearly deleted this e-mail because for some
reason I thought it was targetted spam.

Your project looks very interesting, almost like a dream come true.
However, I feel a bit uneasy about your proposal. Something just doesn't
fit.

Why would someone start a company to work on /yet another/ Debian
derivative? Have you heard about Progeny's sad story? I think it's a
great example to show that Debian users don't want Debian-based distros,
they want people to work on the "real thing". Besides, I don't think
there's much more place for successful commercial distros, with Red Hat
and SuSE having well-established niches in the US and Europe.

Also, why focus on Debian specifically, Why not, for example, Gentoo,
which has a lot of buzz these days, and looks poised to be the next big
distribution?

To be honest, I think only a few people have the stamina or financial
stability to undertake a project like this, so I'd like to know
a bit more about you, and details on how you plan to sustain the
expenses.

Those are the main issues that worry me about your project. Other than
that, I would be interested in taking part in it, as I'm currently
unemployed and working on something Debian-based would be just too good
to miss.

You can reach me at +34 123 45 67 89, or if you feel like flying people
around Europe, I probably can be in the UK whenever it fits you.

Thanks, and hoping to hear from you again,
Jordi

On Sun, Feb 29, 2004 at 06:33:51PM +0000, Mark Shuttleworth wrote:
> Hi Jordi
>
> We haven't met, but both Jeff Waugh and Martin Michelmayr recommended that
> I get in touch with you in connection with a new project that I'm starting.
>
> I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
> distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
> focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
> it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
>
> Would you be available to discuss it by telephone? I'm in the UK, so we
> could probably find a good timezoine easily enough ;-) Let me knof if
> you're keen to discuss it, when and what number to call.
>
> Cheers,
> Mark
>
> --
> Try Debian GNU/Linux. Software freedom for the bold, at www.debian.org
> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

As you can imagine, his reaction was immediate:

Date: Mon, 22 Oct 2007 11:13:54 +0100
From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@sindominio.net>
Subject: Re: New project to discuss

Jordi! I just got this now! Did you recently flush an old mail queue?

With thanks to all the Spanish Cabal members who were involved!

Smoke

Fri, 31 Dec 2010 15:47:00 +0000

Last night was the last time I came back from a pub with my clothes stinking due to tobacco smoke. The Spanish congress has finally approved a real anti-smoking law which will ban smoking on public areas, with no exceptions or ways to workaround the ban. Starting on January 2nd, the Spanish state will be a smoke-free region (or mostly, it seems it’ll be permitted in open-air events like football stadiums or bullrings, and I don’t think that will be a great problem for me, specially the latter).

For years, my intolerance to smoke has been increasing and I’m really expectant to see the benefits of this law in my habits. After more than 30 years dealing with smoke around us, it’s our turn now. I’ve been speaking to a few barmans. In general they seem worried this will affect their business, but I can’t see how it will. Spain has a big culture for having mid-morning almuerzos in bars, and people are not going to give that up due to not being able to smoke. They will just do it after they get out, not during the coffee, and that’s it. The barmans of the two bars I visit most are non-smokers, but have to breath the smoke of hundreds of cigarretes every day, and can’t do anything about it. Until tomorrow, when this will end and everyone will have a right to breath better air. I hope this kind of legislation continues to be adopted throughout Europe, because the FOSDEM welcome party is probably the next smoke horror I’ll have to face soonish. :)

The unforeseen consequences of our GR 11 Summer walk

Tue, 30 Nov 2010 23:47:00 +0000

I knew walking all over the Pyrenees during a whole month would come with some side effects. I could imagine having a few muscular issues in my legs and some back pain for a while after getting back; after all we did over 7 hours of exercise every single day during a month. What I got after our hike was totally unexpected…

I should have run a half marathon in Gandia on the 21st, and instead I stayed at home doing some assignments. When we came back, I was in a really good condition, and wanted to keep the good shape we had built the month before. Given I haven’t been able to swim for nearly a year now, due to the Mysterious Shoulder Injury™ and I don’t have enough time to go out cycling regularly, I centered my efforts in running, with the idea of starting to get prepared for cross/mountain races this season.

Training had to wait a little because some days after getting back, I got a sudden pain on both knees, which even made climbing stairs difficult. It stuck for a while, and when it finally went away, more or less, I went ahead and tried going out for a run. I haven’t been training for over two years, so I indended to increase the distances proggressively. The first day I went out, I ran really nicely for the first 25 minutes, and suddenly I started getting an intense pain in the outer side of my right knee, to the point I could barely walk back home.

I’ve tried letting them rest for weeks, and every time I try them, the pain comes back. My physiotherapist says my body has developed quite a few asymmetries, probably caused by the many days I had to walk crippled by a big blister in my right foot. As time passes, I feel I’m losing all the physical improvements I had developed during the summer, and I can’t do anything about it.

The new approach to tackle this is yoga. I know my body isn’t too elastic, and the lack of stretching during the walk made it even worse, so I’ll try to forget about “real” traning during some time and focus on healing my muscles. Hopefully, this will help me resolve the nastiest physical problem I’ve ever come across.

Recipe Manager meets arròs a banda

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 00:12:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, nekohayo posted a blog entry on Recipe Manager, a (you guessed it) cooking recipe manager for GNOME. Looking good, I fetched the bzr tree from Launchpad and played a bit with it, and soon discovered it had no internationalisation support.

I’ve tried to add i18n properly, but I’ve not had enough time to do it. Before tackling that, the authors need to give it some bootstrapping love so the app can actually install, look for its files in /usr/share, etc.

My fugly, unpostable current patch does allow for a preview of how Recipe Manager will teach the world about the best rice dish ever, arròs a banda. Yum!

Recipe Manager, showing off the zenith of Valencian culture

GNOME 2.32

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:49:00 +0000

Once again, the GNOME project has released a major release on time, to the day. Congrats! While it doesn’t feel like a major release, due to the pushing back of GNOME 3.0 another 6 months in the middle of the cycle and the limited changes included, I believe it’ll be a good one because it just adds on top of the really solid GNOME 2.30.

GNOME 2.32 is out a bit too late for Debian squeeze, but the Debian GNOME team has a plan™ to incorporate new 2.32 versions for modules which don’t include big, intrussive changes like migrations to dconf, or any other dependency on the new versions of GTK or GLib. The result is that Debian 6.0 will ship with most of GNOME 2.30, plus some cherrypicked new versions of 2.32 modules.

De mar a mar, hiking across the Pyrenees

Tue, 31 Aug 2010 23:40:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, Maria and I completed one of our dreams when we arrived in Cap de Creus, where the Pyrenean range sinks in the Mediterranean. To get there, we walked hundreds of kilometres during a month, crossed dozens of steep valleys and enjoyed one of the richest experiences of our lives.

We managed to complete this challenge without facing major problems or pains, and after the first five our six days, our legs seemed to have gotten used to the daily effort and it started to be easier and easier. Our morale kept growing as days passed and we advanced east. When I started walking on a cold and rainy morning in Hondarribia, after barely no rest in the night bus to Irún, I thought for myself that it was improbable that we’d manage to get anywhere near Catalunya, that one of us would get injuried way before, or we’d just give up and go for the easy beach vacation in the Basque Country.

Biadós refuge, under Posets

But we didn’t, and after a somewhat painful start, with our boots soaking wet during the stages that crossed the enchanting Selva de Irati which ended up with me getting the biggest blister I’ve ever seen, we started to walk farther every day, extending the stages when we felt strong after reaching their official end. When we crossed from Nafarroa to Aragonese territory, the mental wall that I had built over the toughest stages in our quest started to fall apart. Days later, we found ourselves climbing down to Pineta, leaving Ordesa behind and enjoying a feeling that our adventure could not go better. The weather had been perfect for over a week and our legs and back were strong to go all over the way to the sea.

Cañón de Añisclo, on our way to Pineta

When we finally saw that huge blue stain on the horizon, the day before getting to the last mark, we got really excited. We had made it, but as we walked towards the cape, happiness slowly got mixed with melancholy. An unforgettable adventure was about to end, and we didn’t want to face our return to the city and our routines. It had been many days surrounded only by awesome landscapes, and living without watches, with only sunlight and weariness marking the time to get in our sleeping bags.

At the very last red and white mark of our journey

We’ve had plenty of time to meet great people. Starting with the Navarrian brothers we met in the early stage, which provided us with a good pace to follow while our leg muscles were still building up; or Kike and Ana, who drove from Pamplona to visit us during the first Aragonese stages (thanks for the supplies!). Tomàs and Roger, young hikers from Mataró, surprised us with their maturity and experience as mountaineers; we had the pleasure to join forces during four days, walking a really cool variant through the Infiernos and Collado del Letrero which avoided going through the ghost city of Panticosa. Roger and Tomàs, we really hope to meet you soon! Andreu, Manel, Ghandi and Gaŀla visited us at the Vall de Núria and were unlucky to suffer a frightening hail and thunder storm when they left our shelter on their way back to their car. Thanks! All of you have been a very special part of our experience!

This adventure through GR 11 has been incredibly positive for us for several reasons. We’ve learned a lot about ourselves and strengthened our relation, and now I know how powerful drive can be; to get somewhere, no matter how far, it’s really easy if you just believe you can do it and desire to get there.

Maria and I are proud of what we’ve done, and no wonder we’re looking for new challenges. An obvious one would be repeating this experience, going through the French side of the Pyrenees, but for now, the Corsican GR 20 seems the most appealing. We’ll see, next summer!

Hiking through the Pyrenean GR 11

Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:14:00 +0000

Tomorrow, at this time, I’ll probably be unsuccessfully trying to find a comfortable position on a seat of the Bilmanbus to Irun. Very early on Saturday, as soon as we get off the bus, Maria and I will quickly head to Hondarribia’s beach in Cape Higer to symbolically wet our feet in the waters of the Cantabrian Sea.

We won’t have much time to enjoy the cold waters of the ocean, though. Soon after that, we’ll have to take a deep breath, look East, and start walking if we want to achieve our utmost objective: take a bath in the beautiful beaches of the Cap de Creus, in the Mediterranean sea. In between, 30 days and 840 kilometres of thick woods, deep valleys, high peaks and cold waters, all of which shape incredible landscapes.

The Portella de Baiau, during our 2008 trip

For a whole month, we’ll be mostly disconnected from everything else that isn’t our knee ache, our blisters, the Sun over our heads or where to get food. It’s the first time I leave on a hiking trip as long and tough as this one, and I feel both uncertainty and eagerness. We’ve been so busy during the last few months that we’ve been unable to train at all for this, and I’m probably in the worst physical condition in a decade. It’s too late to take care of that now, so we’ll try to take good care of our legs and spine.

In order to get back home in the Mediterranean, we’ll have to be fast, some days joining two stages and skipping a few that we know are not that interesting (sections over asphalt, etc.). It’s hard to make it in just one month, but we’ll try our best. The plan is going to sleep not long after sunset, getting up at dawn, to be able to walk for a decent time before the heat starts being a handicap and just resting at midday, when the Sun is strongest.

Of course, this means that I’m missing, yet again, this year’s edition of DebConf in New York City, which is really sad because I was looking forward hanging around with Mako, Mika, Biella, micah, Clint and the rest of the NYC/ Boston gang, but when the idea of doing a long trip this summer popped up around January, it was clear DebConf seemed unlikely this year. I hope all of you have a lot of fun, and see you in a few weeks!

Cinema d'Estiu in Benimaclet 2010

Sun, 04 Jul 2010 01:31:00 +0000

Like other years, Benimaclet’s Neighbour Association has organized a new cycle of film projections for the neighbours, by the neighbours, with the intention to get people out of their homes and share a good time with many others. Like in the other two editions, the selected films try to deliver a message to the viewers, and this year the topics are centered about labour and migration social issues. A change in this year’s edition is that there will be one more projection, for a total of 5 films, every Sunday of July, at 22:00 in the Plaça de Benimaclet.

Last week, we saw El viaje de Teo, a Mexican film describing the migration dramas going on in the Sonora Desert. This Sunday, we’ll see Arcadia, which will be followed by Recursos humanos, Hijos de los hombres and La estrategia del caracol.

Before each film, some local artists will perform live for us. Make yourself a sandwich, bring a chair to Benimaclet and enjoy some good cinema with your neighbours every Sunday in July!

32

Thu, 20 May 2010 20:33:00 +0000

On Saturday I turned 32. I haven’t been able to sit down for ten minutes and scribble the “mandatory” blog entry, a sign that I’m extremely busy (luckily not only due to academic and professional reasons; the social part of the problem is very significant). This year I was gifted with a costumes Festa de l’Horta being held on the very same day as my birthday, and it was memorable (in many ways).

Add an unexpected climbing evening on Friday, and getting to see my fantastic 2 year old niece Vida, who came from Norwich for a visit, made a great birthday weekend. I feel I’m going through a very, very sweet stage of my life; I really can’t remember the last time I generally had no big worries or black clouds all over my head. I hope it stays like this for a while…

GNOME 2.30

Wed, 31 Mar 2010 23:53:00 +0000

Congratulations to everyone involved in what looks like a very good GNOME release!

Interesting times are now ahead for the GNOME project, as on the plate is now a big release like 3.0. That will mean a lot of changes to the desktop we’ve got used to in the last decade, and I hope it ends up being successful, innovative and useful.

Debian has packages for GNOME Shell, and a special gnome3-session which starts Mutter + Shell. I experimented with it last week at my work place, and had mixed feelings with the current status.

I’m not a big fan of hard dependencies on Direct Rendering. My main computer is an Athlon 800MHz. Compiz crawls on it, and sadly Mutter is basically unusable on it. At the office, I have P4-based system with 1GB of RAM, which runs GNOME 2.28 OK. When I switched to the GNOME 3 session, it showed that it’s getting old. I also experienced X crashes and kernel oopses, apparently a classic for ATI users using a composited window manager. This being said, I consider myself lucky because both systems have ATI cards and can do DRI using free software. If I was forced to use nVidia non-free drivers, it’d probably mean I’d stick with the Panel until that wasn’t an option at all.

I am aware we’ll see improvements both in Xorg/kernel and GNOME before GNOME 3.0 is released next Autumn, and have high hopes for a release that is accepted by our users really fast (avoiding a KDE 4.0 situation). GNOME hackers have done good stuff for ages, and 3.0 will be a new example!

Tinyproxy 1.8

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 23:44:00 +0000

A while ago, I was asked to recompile Tinyproxy to enable transparent proxying support, which was not being compiled in etch’s Debian package. As it tends to happen, once I got the source and looked into doing a quick rebuild with --enable-transparent-proxy, I noticed the package was in such a bad shape, that I couldn’t just leave it like that, so I found myself doing a few more changes, which mostly involved updating the packaging so it didn’t suck a lot, and splitting the Debian patches so things could be sent upstream or dropped when new versions appeared.

However, even if Ed had asked me to go ahead and take over the package, this was meant to be a one-day effort, and soon I had forgotten about Tinyproxy, except for the ocassional bug mail getting through the PTS. It also didn’t help that Tinyproxy had been pretty much dead upstream for years.

So lately, a few bug reports were reporting a ∗gasp∗ new major Tinyproxy release, after 7 years of basically nothing. OMG, what do I see, there’s a Git repo! And an upstream Bugzilla! Somehow, feeling I owed Ed a reply to his unanswered request, I went ahead and tagged tinyproxy 1.6.3-3.2 in collab-maint, and started working on the new version. Adding myself to Uploaders, and getting rid of the “make no unnecessary changes” vetto, I rewrote most of the packaging. And for a change, I looked for and found a #tinyproxy channel on IRC and told muks and obnox that the days of Tinyproxy’s stay in the Debian/Ubuntu limbo were over.

They were happy to get a few bugs and patches forwareded upstream, and asked me why all of this hadn’t happened before. Pitty is that a few longstanding issues were well known in Debian but not so obvious for the new upstream maintainers, and are present in 1.8.0. Hopefully all will be dealt with in 1.8.1 or the next major version. The lesson is: if you work on an apparently abandoned package, after cleaning the mess in your NMU, try to spend 15 more minutes trying to contact upstream (if available), pointing them at the patch tracker and our list of bugs: chances are many are still useful. Also, contact the Debian maintainer, and if they ask you to take over, at least post a RFA so someone else can.

If you’re a Tinyproxy user, I’d be happy to hear if the current package in Debian unstable works for you. If you were having weird issues with 1.6.x, chances are 1.8 will fix them. The package can be installed on stable with no extra dependencies, so if you’re feeling adventurous, go ahead and upgrade.

Cabanyal

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:52:00 +0000

Today, I was glad to attend the biggest demonstration ever in favour of the Cabanyal neighbourhood of València, a traditional district populated by the sea people of the city. After decades of oblivion, the Valencian right-wing government is trying to execute an old plan to “open Valencia to the sea”, which means demolishing around 450 traditional houses, many of them under protection for their cultural and architectural value, to extend a big avenue until the beach. Patrimonial loss aside, neighbours would be forced to other areas in the city (sadly, this has been happening for a decade already), making Cabanyal-Canyamelar the new posh neighbourhood for the richer class, destroying its identity and replacing it with a new set of skyscrapers.

The local government of PP, led by the infamous Rita Barberá, knows that getting the anti-riot police in the neighbourhood and forcing very old men and women out of the houses where they were born isn’t what many people like to see in the evening news. They also know time is their ally; this plan is many decades old, and there’s no need to hurry now, so it’s better to apply silent mafia tactics on the problem. It’s very easy.

First, stop investing a single euro in the area and monitor the slow but effective results of the degradation. Have a bit of patience, and after quite a few years, start promoting the illegal occupation of the increasing number of empty houses by marginal collectives which will bring the associated introduction of drug dealing in the area. This will surely make even more people leave or accelerate their decease. Keep repeating this process, until the Cabanyal is really fucked up. Now, start promoting the “rehabilitation plan”, which unavoidably includes splitting the neighbourhood in two pieces, and destroying a substantial part of it. Hopefully, many of the neighbours not directly affected by the demolitions will back the plan, they can’t be blamed for being really fed up after all. Do all you can to confront those in favour to those against. In the meanwhile, start harrassing owners, make them end up selling their property at ridiculous prices and as soon as this happens, demolish it very quickly. Don’t even bother with cleaning up the rubble: an increasing number of sites like this all over the place may be what makes a few more families give up and leave.

In the end, you either have an empty neighbourhood, or you’ve managed to demolish all the annoying houses that block your shiny avenue. However, if a Supreme Court argues that the remaining houses still have some cultural value, you might want to consider changing your local law to unprotect those architectural elements.

Today, many thousands of Valencians marched around Cabanyal to say “enough!”. From the street, I saw several old women out on the balconies of their beautiful houses, their eyes wet with tears, while they observed in silence all that many people who were fighting for them. There’s still a long way to go in the courts until this is all over, but at least these people have a little more hope today than those in el Carme or La Punta, who ended up losing similar battles, years ago.

Ten years as a Debian Maintainer

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:47:00 +0000

On the 24th of November of 1999, the Debian ftpmasters processed the NEW package wmbiff, which got installed in the potato distribution. This sponsored upload by Fernando Sánchez was the first of my packages to hit the official Debian archive, thus officially making me a Debian maintainer. So, in short, today is my tenth anniversary as a Debian contributor!

I actually started a few days before, and soon after that upload, many other ITPs and uploads followed. I will always be thankful to fer for his patience with my upload sponsoring until I became a Debian developer with full rights and was able to upload myself.

During these years, I’ve been involved in many teams and different tasks, with my activity and dedication probably peaking around 2001 or 2002, when I apparently was doing a crazy amount of different stuff. I started doing plain packaging work of software packages, some of which also have come a long way (thanks for that, Chris!), but soon started to contribute in other Debian tasks. I think it’s safe to say that the task that has ended up having more impact in the people that surround me was bootstrapping the Debian Catalan community and starting the Catalan translation of Debian’s website, which soon after triggered the creation of a formal Debian Catalan translation project.

I’ve also spent a lot of time giving back to the NM team which helped me get a Debian account through the still experimental new New Maintainer process, and the QA team helping as I could with the never ending release cycles of potato and woody.

At some point I got engaged in the GNOME packaging tasks and the creation of the Debian GNOME team, and picked up the Catalan translation of GNOME 1.5.x releases, which eventually opened me the doors of Softcatalà, a Catalan non-profit devoted to the promotion of the Catalan language in technology.

I’ve believed in Debian’s values since my classmate Ulisses Alonso prodded me to install Debian on my desktop back in 1997. Even if getting X up and running on bo was a real pain in the ass, knowing that the system I was running had all been written by people driven by altruism was enlightening; months later it was time to give back.

Of course, I’ve not been able to keep my motivation or output as high as I’d like. Debian as a collective has sometimes taken some decisions which were not so easy to understand from my point of view. The outcome of the non-free votes was a bit appalling, and having debian-devel becoming more and more a battleground instead of a civilised mailing list certainly did not help at some point (unsubscribing from it made my life a lot simpler!). Joining a triathlon club, having a girlfriend and suddenly rediscovering my neglected social life didn’t help either. The result is that my dedication has been wanning noticeably since 2005 or so, but I still do my best to keep up with most of duties, even if I’m aware I’m clearly neglecting a few of them.

I am very proud of having been a part of an incredible project like Debian, and hope to be around for at least ten more years. Not only because I love and believe in Free Software; thanks to my involvement, I’ve been able to work on Debian-related jobs for all of my professional career, but above all I’ve been very lucky to make lots of real friends.

Today’s has been a nice day full of remembering and mailbox digging. Thank you, Debian!

Dead PowerBook G4

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:07:00 +0000

A few weeks ago I was trying to get GRUB2 for PowerPC back to work on my PowerBook G4 15", and had some problems getting OF doing the right thing. Not being an OF expert at all, I found myself making things a bit worse, ending up with an unbootable laptop and, what a classic, unable to boot my old rescue CD to get yaboot back in its place.

So I googled a bit and ended up deciding that, given the boot parametres and some other stuff like the system’s clock were doing strange stuff, reset-nvram would help getting things in a better shape that would at least permit CD booting. So there, reset-nvram, followed by reset-all, as found in all the OpenFirmware cheatsheets I found all over the web, and damn it, nothing changed and I was back into the OpenFirmware prompt. I used the power button to reset the laptop once again, and that was the last time I saw something functional on the PowerBook.

Now, when I start the computer, all I hear is the Apple startup sound, followed by the sound of the CD drive (which has eaten an Ubuntu 5.10 CD) trying to spin up for a pair of seconds, and then nothing. There’s nothing displayed on the LCD, or any other sign of “life”. My searches in Google indicate this is a logic board failure and you can imagine that is not cheap to get fixed by Apple support.

I’ve tried numerous keyboard combo tricks I didn’t even know about, and none seem to work. The computer doesn’t seem to be responding to the builtin keyboard, an Apple USB keyboard I borrowed, or an external display. I’m annoyed because I’ve looked after this laptop really well and it was in a really good condition, so I’m going to see if it can be fixed for a reasonable amount.

Apple care in València is not an option. They say a logic board (if this is really what is causing trouble) costs around 500€, so I’ll have to explore other ways. The first one is trying to find out if these symptoms (nothing on the display, key combos don’t appear to work, etc.) really point to a fried logic board or could be something else. I’ve tried removing the RAM and replacing it with my old one, but that didn’t work either. So, if anyone reading this has some Apple PowerPC hardware experience and can share some of their knowledge and suggestions, I’d be really, really grateful.

Plan B involves hiring a coworker, who I believe is the son of McGyver, to try to get it repaired for me. This would involve buying spare parts in eBay or some other place to try to get the replaced. Again, suggestions, donations and ideas are welcome in this front too. :)

Jose Vicente loves fixing stuff, and right before the Summer he already showed what he can do with a screwdriver and some patience. Some weeks before, I had managed to shatter the LCD screen of my Nokia 6500s when I lost my grip while climbing down a mountain in El Cadí, and the phone in my pocket hit a big rock. The phone worked, but I all I could see in the screen were some cracks in random colours. People suggested I should get a new phone, but I really don’t want to generate even more polluting waste when all that was needed was replacing a cheap component.

My phone during its stay in McGyver’s hideout

Flags and outrages

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:04:00 +0000

A bit more than two years ago, two young Spaniards on vacation in Latvia maybe went a bit too far during one of their night parties and decided to remove some Latvian flags that hanged from a post in the streets of Riga. They spent 1 month in prison, with charges for outraging the Latvian flag.

The Spanish media talked about the disproportionate charges, the ridiculous and “medieval” laws in Latvia and so on.

Today, we learn that Jaume d’Urgell will go to prison due to the “outraging” crime of substituting the current Spanish flag with the Republican flag of 1931 on the facade of a public building.

So much for medieval laws and institutions like the Spanish monarchy.

Operation PANTS

Thu, 20 Aug 2009 11:15:00 +0000

Debian has shown, once again, how a strong community of friends and workmates it is. Here’s a success story, not related to our common duties as Debian Developers. This has nothing to do with packages, mailing lists, PO files or britney runs. This is all about pants, and the ties that bind them.

Let’s introduce this story a little. Four years ago, if memory serves right, I had the pleasure to host Clint in my flat when he visited València for a few days. When he eventually left to go back to NYC, I was at work so I couldn’t help him check he had packed everything in his bag. It took me weeks to realise he had left his yellow pyjama pants hanging behind the door of the bathroom I never use. I couldn’t help making fun about his kidnapped pyjamas on IRC, and unfortunately this has kept going for years. I would go shopping for new speedos with my mom, and wear the pants during the shopping trip, when I needed to sample some jamón ibérico, I would always wear them. When I required lounging in the sun, his pants were a constant companion. The pants became more to me than just pants I found hanging on the bathroom hook. They became a private confidant, metalic objects would fly out of people’s hands and stick themselves to the pants. I once went outside in the middle of the night, wearing only the pants, everyone who I passed in the street got a sunburn. The pants radiated joy, they cooked eggs just by standing near them, weekly they would push out perfectly formed flan that I would enjoy while wearing the pants. People’s monitors would self-degauss when I walked by. I no longer shaved yaks, they simply were shaved seeing me in these pants. The pants were magical. They are so soft, I think they are made out of a combination of baby’s bottoms, astroturf, handlotion, cotton candy, and hair from the hide of the mystical Softasaurus, a beast so soft that if you were to look at it your eyes would soften in their sockets. I am pretty sure that the Torta del Casar from Cáceres is made from the milk of the Softasaurus. As you can imagine, I became attached to these pants, we lived together, we went out together, I would always tell Clint about it of course, but we developed our own special relationship. My girlfriend became jealous.

Of course, I took care of keeping the trousers in a safe place and I always meant to return them to Clint, if I were to meet him again. I did not want to return them, because they were my precious. But if someone came from the US who could bring them back I vowed to hand them over to them to act as a proxy. However, even if it was my best intention, somehow I kept forgetting about it when friends flew to NYC. My idea was to get them posted to Clint by someone in the city, as a nice way of returning the pyjamas… but the pants held some kind of power over me, and it never happened, I don’t understand what happened.

On July 23, I went to Debconf 9 in Cáceres. In the very last moment before leaving, the pants called out to me from the small shrine I kept them in, “take me to my leader!” I could see them glimmering in the candle light, somewhat obscured by the incense I burn there, they were pulsating, I became afraid and knew that maybe I had gone too far. Clearly, it was time to return them, and so Operation PANTS officially started!

During Debconf, the pants began to exert some kind of bizarre magical influence over the attendees. They were afflicted by a mania that frantically lit up their eyes, they sparkled in freakish ways. They would get cold sweats, and shake uncontrollably. Someone puked on the printer, a host of carrion birds circled above the venue and the security guard began carrying handcuffs and a billy club. People would drool on their OpenMokos and emit soft moo’ing sounds. They talked in hurried and hushed tones while always looking at me suspiciously. Something was clearly exerting a strong force. As an example, on the day that Launchpad was released with a Free Software licence, people were crying and hugging each other in the halls. It was like the ring to Gollum, but this was pants, one pair to rule them all. More than once, while someone was eyeing me askance, another Debconf attendee would grab hold of the pants and yank them from my body, laughing maniacally. I would be left naked, without my glorious pants, and it was then, crestfallen and forlorn, that I finally realised that I had hit rock-bottom. I was addicted to these pants, and it was only when I lost them did I know how powerful of an influence they had on my life. I needed help, I was addicted to pants.

I found Micah, and we began to stage interventions to free people from the powerful grasp of the pants. We would find someone, huddling in the corner with the pants, bloodshot eyes, typically with jaundice or some other malnourishment, dried drool on their chin, etc. who was doing some unholy thing with the pants. We would then use the camera flash to temporary blind them by saturating their fully dilated pupils and in that moment, we could take back the pants. We could only touch them with rubber gloves, for fear we would be tainted. Luckily, there were many cameras around, and there is evidence of our interventions that can be used to rebate denials of these happenings. Be careful, for you will find there fellow Debianistas in compromising states, at embarrassing lows in their life, you may find yourself and remember how horrible your pants addiction was, it is an unholy sight. For some this addiction was as if Hell itself opened up began spewing out MORE hells, until the universe, the cosmos and all dimensions were infinite hells stacked on top of each other and they were each individually oozing some ghastly fluid.

Micah took the pants back to NYC, in a hermetically sealed bag, illegally transporting them across international borders. Something happened along the way, Micah could not resist one last chance with the pants. So on a warm summer night in NYC, he took them to meet their rightful owner. Everything was going well. He and his handler (Karl Fogel) met Clint at a nice, quiet restaurant in the Village. They ordered food, and things were proceeding nicely, but suddenly Micah was overcome with a desire he could not withstand. This was his last chance, just one more taste of the pants! What could possibly go wrong, he just had to visit the bathroom for a quick change into the pants, and then he could give them back. He got up, under the auspices of cleansing his hands, went to the bathroom and put on the PANTS. He stood there, shivering in bliss. He exclaimed, too loudly, “They are SO SOFT!”. It was too late, he could not take them off. He left the bathroom, with them on. He returned to the table, and Clint DID NOT NOTICE!

Micah was overcome with guilt and said, “Look what I got from Jordi!” Clint still did not notice, the pants were somehow camouflaged from Clint’s gaze. Micah, was forced to vigorously point to the pants he was wearing and say, “Its your pants!”…

… at which point Clint noticed…

… and Micah was forced to take them off in the restaurant.

― Plot and execution by jordi, micah, nattie, pabs & all the people addicted to the PANTS!

Unread email

Fri, 14 Aug 2009 20:15:00 +0000

I’ve just come back from my hiking trip in Andorra, just after DebConf. This year’s summer vacation has been a mix of a fun geeky week at Cáceres where I met many old friends, immediately followed by a lovely trip around the Andorran GRP, a hiking route around the borders of the Pyrenean tiny country. The last few days were spent in several Catalan towns like Bellver de Cerdanya, Figueres, Cadaqués and Girona, before getting back to València to sadly go back to work. I’ll try to write about DebConf and Andorra in length in the following days.

The downside of all of this is when you find this in your mail.log:

Aug 13 00:47:05 nubol fetchmail[3047]: 6123 messages for jordi at flatline.sindominio.net (136533726 octets).

Sigh. Please bear with me while I work through this huge pile of spam mixed with a dozen or so of legitimate email. :/

DebConf 9

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 09:13:00 +0000

It’s taken me way too long to scribble these few lines, but I’m happy to say that in about one hour, I’ll be driving to Cáceres with Sergio. After seven hours or so, we should appear somewhere in Extremadura.

My priorities for this week are 1) having lots of fun with people I haven’t seen in ages, 2) catching up with all the Debian work I have neglected lately, be it packaging or l10n, 3) enjoying Cáceres and Extremadura’s culture, as it’s the first time I go past Madrid, and this is pretty much uncharted territory for me, and 4) doing some kind of exercise, which means letting bubulle kick my ass, and finding a decent swimming pool around the venue.

See you tonight!

Festa de les Trementinaires

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 09:50:00 +0000

Two weekends ago I went to La Seu d’Urgell again, and early on Saturday we drove to Tuixent, in the heart of the beautiful Parc Natural del Cadí-Moixeró, to participate in the Festa de les Trementinaires of the Vansa and Tuixent Valleys. Until then, I didn’t really know what a Trementinaire was, so discovering that incredible tradition in place made it a lot more fun.

A Trementinaire was a woman who, in order to bring some needed extra income to their family, collected medicinal plants found around the Vansa valley area, and used them to make remedies, medicines and other valuable goods. The Trementinaire would then leave their house for a few months every year in order to walk all over Catalunya, going from town to town selling these remedies. Some of them were really valuable for the people in the Catalan plain and coast, and thus were expensive and provided enough money to pay the state’s taxes to the Trementinaire’s family. Their name was derived from the trementina, a substance made from the resin of red pine trees, which was used to make badges against many kinds of pain and bruises.

The Festa program included lots of different activities, one of the most interesting being a botanical tour around the Josa village, which gave us a very practical idea of what plants the trementinaires used and what they were good for. On Saturday evening, we moved to Sorribes de la Vansa, where we attended a talk about women in today’s valley, and participated on a long session of traditional Pyrenean song dancing and singing, lead by the amazing Pep Lizandra. I took my time to become convinced about dancing myself, but it ended being lots of fun. Many of the songs had strong sexual content, which makes you wonder why these were acceptable two hundred years ago and are now so surprising, when not offensive.

El xotis de la relliscada

Eren les dotze ben tocades
quan la nineta va arribar,
duia la trena embolicada,
duia les calces a la mà.

Eren les dotze ben tocades,
el seu xicot la va cridar,
vine Roseta cap a casa,
ai que els meus pares han marxat!

La va abraçar es van petonejar
i la cosa aquí no va parar,
una mà aquí i una altra més enllà
i en Marià no es va poder aturar.

La va abraçar es van petonejar
i la cosa aquí no va parar,
i poc després quan ja anaven llençats
ai la marxa enrere va fallar!

Eren les dotze ben tocades
quan la Roseta va arribar,
duia un vestit de núvia blanca
i un ram de roses a la mà.

Eren les dotze ben tocades
el seu xicot ja era a l’altar
Roseta quina relliscada
haurem de dir sí al capellà

Back in Tuixent, we had dinner with some people we met during the dances and unfortunately due to the heavy rain we missed the burning of aromatic plants, but the organization relocated the concert and dance inside the town’s bar so we had our second share of dancing for hours.

On Sunday morning, there was a market of herbal remedies and natural products and a guided visit to the Museu de les Trementinaires. The museum is a must see if you visit Tuixent, they have managed to capture the conditions of life in the valley before this job and tradition extinguished only thirty years ago, when the last trementinaire left her house to walk all over Catalunya, or as they said, anar pel món.

Industrialization and a quick and progressive depopulation of the Pyrenean areas were critical for the survival of a very localized tradition, which now struggles to not fall in oblivion thanks to the interest of the people of the Vansa and Tuixent valleys. It’s sad to see how such valuable knowledge can be lost forever when all the women who did it have died…

The Festa de les Trementinaires is something I definitely want to enjoy again. Hopefully next Spring! If you are around the area, you’ll discover a new world that resembles the Middle Ages, but happened only a few years ago, and will be welcome by the people of the valley, who show real interest in passing their culture to the next generation, even if the traditions are not so much in practice nowdays.

Barcelona

Fri, 29 May 2009 02:50:00 +0000

Last weekend I finally managed to travel to Barcelona to visit my family and some friends. As my agenda was quite packed with stuff to do, I was unable to find out if any of the Ubunteros had arrived early for UDS, and I left just after lunch on Sunday.

Unfortunately, I had totally missed that before UDS, Canonical held their allhands meeting, and it would have been easy to meet them on Friday night after I got in the city. What a pitty, and sorry about this, mdz, I would have loved to meet… :(

In other Barcelona news, I’m sure that UDS attendees will be astonished (or fed up!) by the football crazyness going on right now. Last night I went to a culer bar near Woody and enjoyed watching how Barça claimed brilliantly their 3rd Champions Cup. For someone who normally doesn’t care that much about football, the last few weeks have been incredible.

Today I visited my 96 year old grandfather, and even if he has lost much of his expressiveness and energy since the last few months, today he was visibly happy and proud of what his Barça has managed to accomplish this season. Three titles, plus literally going over Real Madrid in Santiago Bernabeu. Barça is definitely més que un club, and I’m happy that my grandfather was able to enjoy it.

31

Fri, 15 May 2009 17:16:00 +0000

So, today I turn 31. Fortunately I’ve had a year to learn that the thirties change nothing, and looking back, I can easily say I’ve enjoyed one of the best years I remember.

Today, a bit of protesting in the Plaça de l’Ajuntament against the old menaces of the Valencian Botanical Garden, and just after that, beer time around the Cedre area.

The amount of email, Facebook stuff and calls I’ve been getting today since I woke up is impressive. Thanks everyone! ;)

Spanish Cup final in València

Wed, 13 May 2009 20:21:00 +0000

València is again taken over by football fans, who have come from all over the Basque Country and Catalunya to watch the Copa de España final in Mestalla stadium. The city is literally tinted in red, white, blue and maroon and thousands of supporters (more than 60.000) have flooded the streets.

If you can’t beat them, join them, so for a change, I’m going to join the crazyness and will go to the Athletic Hiria to watch the game in the middle of the leonera.

I can’t wait to see how the Basque and Catalan supporters who have tickets for the game will react when the King of Spain enters the VIP area in Mestalla. Apparently, more powerful loudspeakers have been installed in the stadium in an attempt to mitigate what I expect to be the biggest catcall in a Spanish football stadium since we have a King…

Gora Barça, Visca l’Athletic!

Words

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 00:41:00 +0000

Some days I wish I could selectively get rid of some memories. I would probably cut out a small chunk of today’s evening, to avoid remembering some tough words that I’ve been told. On the other hand, I feel I have lots of things to learn from these moments, given enough time, after the dust has settled. El tiempo todo lo cura…

An update on GRUB2

Sat, 28 Mar 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Some time ago I wrote about the the state of GRUB2 and a milestone on getting it boot my Apple PowerBook G4 without manual intervention. More than a year later, GRUB2 has changed and improved a lot, as the community keeps growing and patches and ideas are continously being posted.

Some months and commits after my previous post, GRUB broke again on Apple OpenFirmware and I’d get dropped to OF console, the amount of commits since the last known working version and the current SVN was quite big, and although I was able to narrow it to a few suspicious changes, I had no time to bisect it properly, and sadly I had to go back to yaboot for a while.

But procrastinating sometimes helps, and when I should have been writing and studying, on December I gave GRUB a new try on my laptop to see if a few important changes to memory allocation would have changed anything. And it did! So after fighting quite a few problems, I was able to report partial success to grub-devel.

Again, getting GRUB installed correctly was a bit challenging and needed some hackery, due to incorrectly generated device.map, and the linux module mysteriously not getting loaded. Luckily, Michel Dänzer found out that this was due to a bug in sort ordering in the HFS module, which broke the lookup of files with underscores like _linux.mod, and for which he posted a possible fix by taking Linux’s table of character ordering, which is a blob of hex values.

GRUB developers didn’t seem too happy about applying the patch: they argument that a blob like that should be well documented or written in some other more readable way, and there’s a possible problem with the mix of Linux GPLv2 and GRUB GPLv3+ codebases, if a table of data like what Michel posted is actually copyrightable. The discussion ended up dying and nothing was done… until Pavel Roskin picked it up weeks later and posted a new patch, based on hfsutils GPLv2+ code, which addressed these issues. The new patch seems to have a few issues, which makes it fail as before, but hopefully it’ll be fixed soon.

Additionally, I wasn’t able to boot using UUIDs as the search commands fails to detect the correct boot device on my system (but not on Michel’s), so I had to disable that in /etc/default/grub.

To workaround the linux module loading bug while the patch is fixed, I just added this ugly hack to /etc/grub.d/09_local_prelinux:

#! /bin/sh -e

# Work-around for bugs in the hfs module which makes the load of
# linux.mod fail.

cat << EOF
insmod (hd,3)/usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275/_linux.mod
insmod linux
EOF

This is enough to get the initrd and linux commands available. However, update-grub will still add search commands to your menu entries even if you disabled UUID support; I can’t understand why, but I know it breaks on my PowerBook due to some OF rarety. Just removing the line from the menu entry will leave me with a working config that boots without any manual editing at GRUB prompt.

The latest GRUB snapshot in Debian fixes the device.map issue, but adds one last issue: update-grub will fail due to some gfxterm detection code, a workaround is to replace an exit 1 with exit 0 when this happens in /etc/grub.d/00_header.

On the “weird architectures” front, it’s worth noting that this month Dave Miller popped up on the list and started posting patches to fix the rotten SPARC port, and I think it’s safe to assume that it’ll be on an usable state really soon. Impressive!

GNOME 2.24 in Debian unstable, and the road ahead

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 00:32:00 +0000

GNOME 2.26 was released last week, and I couldn’t help adding myself to the long list of celebrating posts in Planet GNOME. Looking at the release notes, it looks like this release adds a good number of very visible features, and also keeps improving on ongoing transitions like gvfs.

The Debian GNOME team is obviously not ignoring this fact and started to work very hard on updating GNOME for squeeze as soon as the lenny freeze was over.

First, the new versions of GLib and GTK+ were uploaded to unstable, and managed to transition to testing very easily. The rest of GNOME 2.24 bits, which had been patiently waiting on experimental for months, has been uploaded with care not to disrupt any of the many transitions the Debian release team is currently dealing with. You can have a quick glance at how things are going in our 2.24 status page, but the summary is that most of GNOME 2.24 is in unstable, with a few notable exceptions which are held back by ongoing testing transitions. Namedly, evolution-data-server is trying to trickle into testing, which is in turn holding the final bits: gnome-panel, nautilus and related packages, but we think this will be over soon.

As soon as GNOME 2.24 is safe in squeeze, we’ll immediately turn our focus to the new GNOME 2.26 release. Our initial plan is to package the trivial bits and leaf packages which can’t break stuff for unstable, and herd the more complex modules via experimental, to avoid breaking unstable at all. There are some exceptions; we plan to keep gnome-session 2.22 in unstable/testing until 2.26.1 is released to avoid getting a broken session saving in Debian.

People might wonder why we insist on hitting what would seem a dead horse by first dealing with 2.24 and not 2.26 directly. The main reason is that these packages had been ready for a long time, and were in good shape to transition to testing quickly and with little pain. Preparing 2.26 directly would mean throwing away a lot of hours of packaging and polishing effort, and it’s not like we’re releasing squeeze any time soon anyway.

Enjoy the hopefully not too bumpy road to 2.26!

Stepping down as the GNOME Catalan translations coordinator

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 19:21:00 +0000

As of this morning, Damned Lies finally reflects what has been the de-facto reality for at least four major GNOME releases. I started to invest a lot of time on translating GNOME to Catalan in the middle of the long 1.5 journey towards GNOME 2.0. That was a long time ago, and somehow was the way I ended being abduced by Softcatalà to eventually work with them on the localisation of some other projects.

However, I’ve been watching how my free time and motivation has been slowly shrinking, until the point I was no longer doing some of the stuff I was expected to do, or was doing it badly and late. Luckily, Softcatalà’s GNOME team, a model for our organisation, has been able to smoothly replace heavily contributing members with a constant stream of new blood. In my case, I first stopped having that many modules assigned, then focused on coordination and finally stopped doing even that.

Gil Forcada has filled the gap perfectly and has been the main lead of effort for a pair of years. Passing the baton was long overdue; I think GNOME is lucky to count on Gil’s amazing drive and motivation. Gil, congrats on earning yet another marronet! ;)

Calçotada in Valls

Fri, 06 Mar 2009 01:20:00 +0000

It’s here! This weekend is again the time to go up to Valls, my friend Frago’s town, to meet his friends and enjoy a new edition of their calçotada. Like other years, this will be a crazy event that will cover the whole weekend. I’m looking forward to our traditional calçot war, and spending tomorrow’s night around a big fire in the middle of the country side of Tarragona.

Frago and I, after last year’s calçot war

natura upgraded to lenny

Sat, 28 Feb 2009 00:13:00 +0000

natura.oskuro.net, the home server which still serves this blog, has been suffering hardware problems for some weeks. Apparently the hard drive is failing intermittently, so every now the kernel starts spewing out noisy errors about its main disk dying. If I notice this quickly, it can be rebooted and that normally fixes it for a few more days. But if I don’t, it’ll end up giving nasty bus errors which will make remote logins a challenge. Most processes still work, but the filesystem appears to be gone. It’s easy to know what’s going on if you visit the blog’s url and get some 404, and in that case I can only phone my father and tell him to press the reset button (I’ve tried sysrqd, but I need to open the port in the router and haven’t had chance to do that yet).

So it was time to do something about it, and the other day I installed a dirty 40GB drive on the second IDE controller, in case I could find the time to do somethng about it. Being with an endless pharyngitis that doesn’t seem to get cured entirely, I’ve had some time today to look at it. This evening, I was about to transfer all the system to the new disk (it’s half the size as the broken one, and probably slower, but it hopefully has no bad sectors), but I decided to upgrade the system first.

natura was first installed in late 1997 or at the beginning of 1998, using the Debian bo install media on a Pentium 150MHz, and has gone through seven dist-upgrades which, as far as I can remember, have always worked out without major problems.

The upgrade to lenny hasn’t been an exception. The server has gradually lost many of the services it once hosted, so there aren’t too many services to take care of anymore. All the mail services I setup for my father ended up being deprecated as they started to get used to Hotmail, GMail and so on, and the frequent hardware crashes made me switch them to the Linksys based DHCP server. In the end, the problems I saw after the upgrade were very similar to what I faced when I upgraded to etch:

apache2 restored the 000-default symlink in the sites-enabled dir, which resulted in my website showing the classic “It works” message for a while.
Apache’s suexec support had moved to its own package, and was very well documented in the NEWS file, but I somehow failed to notice for some time and kept wondering what was going on.
The Python upgrade again affected my Pyblosxom install. Fortunately it was a minor problem; I just had to add a coding=utf-8 line to the beginning of my config.py to get it working.
dhcp3-server apparently restored its init scripts and got started again. This time, it got removed.

Such an ancient install will clearly have old, obsolete packages. I installed apt-show-versions to find out what didn’t match my package sources. I found I had every single version of cpp, gcc and g++ from 2.95 to 4.3, and a myriad of obsolete libs. But there were also real gems:

defrag 0.73pjm1-7 installed: No available version in archive
figlet 2.2.1-3 installed: No available version in archive
ipmasqadm 0.4.2-2 installed: No available version in archive
isapnptools 1.26-5 installed: No available version in archive
ms-sys 2.1.0-1 installed: No available version in archive
queso 0.980922b-3 installed: No available version in archive
update 2.11-4 installed: No available version in archive

Spaniards will remember “queso” because it was written by Jordi Murgó and became a classic tool to find out what OS was running on a remote host. “update” was apparently needed to flush your filesystems prior to Linux 2.2.8, and “defrag” is obvious, although leaves me wondering why it was needed at the time.

With the upgrade done successfully, next step is trying to get the system transfered to the spare hard drive. For this, I first partitioned it creating a primary partition using up more or less half of the available space, and setup a LVM volume, leaving some free PE’s in the volume group just in case I want to do snapshots in the future, and formatted it using ext3. I then transfered the system to the new disk and now face the boot challenge.

I haven’t created a boot partition and that should be a double problem: the BIOS is buggy and will only boot from the first 1024 cylinders, and my root is on LVM and GRUB legacy might not like it (but I’m not sure). However, I’ve become a big fan of GRUB2, and know I will be able to boot no matter what my BIOS thinks of my disks and regardless the complex root partition setup I throw at it. The plan is to install GRUB onto the new drive’s MBR, and set it up using the ata module, which should allow to ignore what the BIOS says, and read beyond cylinder 1024 or even boot from CD-ROM. However, this isn’t a setup I haven’t tried before, and a single failure will result in me taking a train to fix it on-site.

So, GRUB experts out there, any suggestions? Of course, for now I guess I can install GRUB in the current drive’s MBR and make it boot the old kernel using the new system as root, but that’s dirty and would just postpone the problem.

FOSDEM 2009

Sun, 18 Jan 2009 16:07:00 +0000

I’m glad to announce that I’ll be again in Brussels for this year’s FOSDEM. Ivan and I will fly from Zaragoza (!) on Friday, just on time for the beer event, and come back on Monday evening. I know azeem would have not been happy otherwise!

Iruña

Mon, 01 Dec 2008 20:37:00 +0000

This weekend I had the pleasure of visiting my friend Kike in Iruña, a city I really like but had not been able to visit in five years. I spent three days with him, after a really awful Bilman trip during Friday night.

The first thing that happened on Friday morning was quite unexpected. I went out, crossed a pair of streets to get to Carlos III, and going past the corner I found myself surrounded by all kinds of policemen: red, blue, green and yellow. There were press reporters all over the place, with TV and photo cameras ready to record something big. What the hell? I looked around, and there it was: a huge blue sign read Populares de Navarra, and Mariano Rajoy was seconds away from getting out of the new PP headquarters in Nafarroa. With a few dozen policemen looking at me in suspicion, and realising my current hair dress wasn’t the most appropriate for that scenario, I decided to disappear as quickly as possible.

Populares aside, the weekend was really productive. I had a great time trying to find the places I visited 9 and 5 years ago. It was sad to see the fantastic Iruñako Gaztetxea turned into an iron building surrounded by old, traditional houses in the centre of the city. With Kike, I had enough time to learn more about the origins of Iruña and the three cities from which it originated, and visit the Ciudadela.

On Saturday, Kike, Ana and I went to have some fun on a snowy day around Orreaga and had dinner in a small town around the area, maybe Lintzoain? I’m afraid I forgot due to the mix of basque names in my head. We had dinner in lo viejo, where I spotted a poster of Solidari@s con Itoiz for the “Itoitz hustu arte” campaign, a copy of which I unsuccessfully tried to get in several places in the city.

On Sunday, Kike and I took a bus to Donosti, and I travelled across the most beautiful highway I’ve seen. But of course, that was from my perspective seated in a bus. I can imagine the Leitzaran highway project must have been greatly contested by the people of the tiny towns nearby. The spoiled valleys and views must have been really impressive in the past and seem now irreversibly ruined by a scar and holes through the mountains.

This was my first visit to Donosti, which held its annual Marathon, and were lucky to meet our friend Rubén when he was around kilometre 25 of his race. He managed to finish under 2:50, which was a bit better than what he aimed for in his first Marathon. Well done! The weather was horrible, and our visit to La Concha, the old harbour and the Casco Viejo was short, we were freezing and getting our feet wet.

While I visited Donosti for the first time, Mikel Laboa, one of the most respected singers in the basque culture, was ebbing away. Laboa’s songs always give me goosebumps, even if I need to read a translation for the basque lyrics. Many will remember his music from Julio Medem’s documentary, La pelota vasca, featuring Txoria txori, which has become a symbol of basque culture over the years. Youtube has quite a few videos, and I’d recommend watching Txoria txori, Gure bazterrak, Lili bat or Baga biga higa performed by the Orfeón Donostiarra to name a few.

Mikel Laboa, goian bego.

Chimo Bayo... live!

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 21:17:00 +0000

Wow, in an hour or so I’ll be heading to The Mill, where the unique Chimo Bayo will be performing live. HUA!

Turkey

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:35:00 +0000

I only start believing I’m visiting some new place when I’ve finally spent way too many hours looking at flight websites in an attempt to find a flight that is slightly cheaper than the only option everyone else is offering you, and after a few days prices have gone up enough so you give up and end up buying.

And, two weeks ago, I finally did. Barcelona-Istanbul means the third chapter of the unplanned saga “Chistmas in Islam”. Two years ago I started 2007 visiting Tunisia, and last year we enjoyed a 10 day trip around the South of Morocco, which was absolutely fantastic (and I’ve still haven’t blogged about).

This year I’ll be discovering Istanbul, Cappadocia and other parts of Turkey with Maria. The idea is to try to avoid visiting too many places in a rush, and follow the good advice of our Moroccan friends, “La prisa mata, amigo”. We have plenty of days to explore Turkey’s secrets, but I want to be able to enjoy them, and avoid being in a constant hurry.

As always, I’ll be glad to get suggestions on “must not miss” places or things, and advice on how to move around, where to stay, what to do or what not to do is extremely welcome. I’m totally looking forward to this, after I missed this years’s GUADEC!