Via Mako and Mika I learned about the discovery of a living close relative of GNOME's GEGL. Her name is GECS for obvious reasons, lives in China and she seems to be very happy with her blue daddy.

Cow or goat, equally cute!

(Brought to you by yet another shocking URL posted by mika)

The computer which hosts this blog is a venerable Pentium 150Mhz, with 64Mb of physical memory and two decently sized disks. It has been running non-stop mostly without hiccups for several years, and I'm quite happy with it, even if the processing power is so scarce I've been having to tune down some services as Debian has gotten more resource hungry, dist-upgrade after dist-upgrade.

Natura is my 2nd oldest Debian install, coming back from Ham, and after a while it became a home server when it was replaced by an Athlon 700Mhz at my father's house. The only hardware incidents are all related to blackouts or storms: two dead disks and one power supply. The CPU died years ago, but I discovered that many months later. I guess it wasn't so necessary. :)

It is time to replace natura, though. The components are aging and they have become quite noisy, despite my attempts to cleanup the dust. Lately it is so loud that I can't understand how my dad can actually get work done with that persistent noise in the room. Besides, it'd be good to get just a little bit more of CPU power to do a few things that have been postponed for a while now. I have been looking for offerings in the embedded devices market.

I am looking for a device with the following characteristics:

• Silent: this is a must. If fans aren't involved, that's great, but I know there are some devices with just one fan for the hard drives, etc. which are really silent too. Noise is the #1 reason I want to get a replacement.
• CPU power and RAM: it doesn't need to be too powerful, but of course an improvement over a Pentium 150 Mhz is expected. :) The minimal RAM would be 128Mb, I guess, and if it's expandable/replaceable, that'd be a big plus.
• Power consumption: I have other boxes around which I haven't used to replace natura to get more CPU power because I've always assumed that it'd be hard to match the Pentium's power consumption. As it's up 24/7, I want it to be good in this area. AFAIK, the devices I'm looking for do quite well there, though.
• Hard drives: many offerings accept two or four HDs inside the case. I won't need four, but the possibility of setting up RAID is quite attractive.
• Hackable: should be supported by GNU/Linux, and if d-i does a good job on it, bonus!
• Price: last, but not least, I'm willing to spend some money on this, but I probably don't aim for the most expensive devices...

I've found that the Thecus YES Box N2100 is one of the most interesting offerings: 2 Gigabit ethernet ports, two internal SATA HD bays, 3 USB ports... but is a bit too expensive: 350€ (without disks). tbm also told me to look at some cheaper PowerPC devices, but I forgot the name right now.

So, dear Lazyweb, what would you recommend as a natura replacement for a home server?

I just came back home. I feel like I've been beaten up, my backbone is about to crack in two pieces, and I've been sodomized by a few people.

But we made it. We've learned a few things in the process:

1. Teruel-València arent 150 kilometres if you cycle through the Vía Verde Ojos Negros and the Via Augusta. It is exactly 200.
2. Full moon light is good enough to spots rocks and other obstacles on the patch ahead, but mixed with extreme sleepiness, its usefulness decreases significantly
3. At some point, it doesn't matter if you cycle 150 or 200 kilometres. You just don't feel your legs that much. Also, you stop being sleepy, and could go on for more and more hours. I don't want to test the hard limits though. :)

Good night!

For a few years, the probably most intrepid group of triathletes in my club have been doing cycling tours during the long weekend of the 9 d'Octubre in València. We once did a good chunk of the Ruta del Cid, covering around 550 kilometres in 3 days and a half, carrying aproximately 25 kilograms of sleeping bag, food and clothes on our bikes, and going from Teruel to Albarracín, back to Teruel, then to Morella and back to Albocàsser and through the Serra d'Espadà. The next year, we started the trip in La Sènia, and crossed the Valencian Country all the way to Requena, through Linares and Rubielos de Mora.

This year, we intended to cycle across the Pyrinees, from the Basque Country to Catalonia, but in the end my travelmates have to work on Monday, so we had to quickly settle on a one day alternative. As this is the 9 d'Octubre, the trip had to be a bit crazy, so we've decided to get the last train up to Teruel, arriving there at 21:30 or so, have a very good dinner around El Torico and soon after, start our way down to València, under the full moon.

Our itinerary for tonight

We'll be carrying a few forehead lights and a bicycle light, and will really hope that the sky isn't cloudy at all. We're really going to need the moonlight. The route follows the national road from Sagunt to Teruel, through an old train track which was turned into a cycling path. Most of the trip will be descending, so covering the 150 kilometres shouldn't be too hard, except that neither of us are specially trained now, unlike 3 years ago. If we end up having to stop and sleep, that's going to be a problem as we are carrying no sleepingbags or anything, just our winter cycling clothes. We pretend to take our time, aka most of the night, to get to our destination, as we obviously won't be able to cycle fast in the dark. But we'll manage. This is just crazy, not impossible. :)

This is already old news, but I haven't commented here yet. We already hinted this possibility in my previous blog entry on this topic, but sometime last week, we made it official.

After speaking to some people upstream, we got the impression that the GTK situation was way too risky to do a GTK 2.10 migration, with no hints on when the file selector problems would be solved. As of today, and two GTK 2.10 releases later, not all of the issues appear to have been resolved in this branch, so we may have chosen the right path.

So, with this information in our hands, we described the whole situation to the release managers, explaining what the options were, and they, of course, had no doubt on what was better for etch.

The last two months before the release, we'll try to polish the last few bits that we'd like to improve in the current 2.14 packages. For example, Joss just made a change to the session manager, to make it possible to save the user's session easily, a feature which was present until GNOME 2.12, then removed in 2.14 with apparently no sane replacement of saving sessions available for the user.

I must admit I'm a bit disappointed about not being to ship all the work we've been doing with GNOME 2.16 in experimental, although I believe it was the right choice. If the etch release is delayed for some major reason, and let's hope it's not, that might open a window to see a transition going on, if the fixes are finally in and we consider our packages release quality. If not, we're sorry, but we won't be able to sell the “latest GNOME version” argument in our release PR. ;)

The Debian GNOME team has already been talking about doing a “semi-official” 2.16 backport for etch though, so people can use stable with the current GNOME, at least for a few months. We'll see how it goes...

Today I went to the hospital to visit the opthalmologist. The good news: as expected, what happened the other day was just a case of optical migraine, which needs no treatment and I shouldn't worry about. Thanks to everyone who mailed me or commented in the blog giving advice or wishing me luck!

The doctor examined my retina, and found nothing wrong with them that would cause “lights” or total blindness. He did find what he described as “the start of retinal folding”, which might be congenite, but I should keep an eye on in case it becomes a real problem. Apparently I should be vigilant to objects appearing with deformed shapes, etc.

So I came back earlier that expected to office, but I really can't do anything here due to the pupil dilation. Everything is blurry, light is extremely annoying, and I'm writing this using a ridiculously big terminal font.

The “get decent sleep” plan continues, and I've been sleeping the expected amount of hours since last Tuesday.

I haven't heard too many people asking if GNOME 2.16 will make etch. Maybe everyone just assumes it will, because the latest transitions have been pretty good, or maybe everyone just assumes it won't because nobody would expect Debian to ship with a current GNOME release, right? Or maybe Debian is immerse in what looks like the beginnings of a civil war, and that is more interesting.

The Debian GNOME team has been preemtively working on GNOME 2.16, though, as the release clock is ticking. Loïc has spent a big amount of time revamping the packaging of GTK+ and Pango, finally resulting in sane source packages people can look at. Joss, Guilherme, Loïc and others have worked on the rest of the Developer Platform packages, which is now ready for testing in experimental. The evolution team has also been rocking and all the associated packages are ready to go in experimental as well.

The GNOME 2.16 status page still shows quite some red for Desktop packages, which are now being worked on, with GTK+ 2.10 in place.

But we still haven't decided if we can go ahead and attempt a 2.14 -> 2.16 transition in time for etch. Our biggest concern are the known problems of GTK 2.10's file chooser regarding cancelling of operations. Apparently, other distributions are getting bad bug reports due to these, so we need to be very careful about it. We know there are people working on an upstream fix as I write, but we don't know when there'll be a patch for GTK+ and libgnomeui available. If we learn it's due soon, we might start speaking to our release managers about the possibility of starting a transition. If we have no news, it'll probably be too late.

The other day I had an “incident” involving my vision. It has nothing to do with the vision problems many people had the other day, when someone posted some pr0n on various Planets.

For some time already, maybe two or three years, I've had this weird vision problem at times, when I'd start seeing some black stains with some flashing “lights“, even with my eyes closed. These symptoms would go away after a few minutes, and washing my eyes with a good amount of water also helped. It happened a lot during mornings, and I somehow connected it to showering with too hot water, using a certain brand of shampoo (Say no to Revlon!) and shower vapour. When I described the symptoms to my mother, the reaction was the expected in a house of doctors and nurses: indiference. En casa del herrero, cuchillo de palo, for those who understand it.

On Sunday I stayed up helping Belén with her DEA paper until 5AM. I woke up at 7:30AM, and stayed at work like a zombie, until I had a chance to have a needed nap at 6PM. The problem was my nap was a bit longer than I wanted, and woke up at 9:15PM, still tired but no longer sleepy. I wasn't sleepy until 4AM, and next morning I accidentally overslept, and rushed out of the bed to get to work as soon as possible.

While preparing, I suddenly noticed my vision went a bit blurry and strange. I thought it just was one of those ”stains”, until I closed my right eye to rub it and all I saw was darkness.

I totally freaked out. “OMFG, I'm fucking BLIND”. I wanted to phone someone, but wireless had broken down and I didn't have my mobile phone with me, so I tried looking at a text file I have in the laptop with some numbers on, when it ran out of battery. I grabbed my old mobile and failed to introduce the correct PIN three times.

I went to the bathroom, covered my right eye, and yeah, there was darkness. If I waved my hand over my blind eye, I would barely notice some movement on the left side, but that was all. Still very frightened, I washed my eye thoroughly and to my relief, I was able to see the upper part of my field of vision. After some more, I had recovered all my sight. Whew.

I managed to speak to Raül on the phone, who told me this probably wasn't too bad, just the optic nerve being tired due to stress and so on. My mother also asked an opthalmologist at her hospital the day after, who confirmed this. It's probably caused by my recent whacky sleeping habits (basically non-existing), general stress, and long exposures to computer monitors. The doctor asked her if I had a headache, which I didn't the day before, but I had one the day after, when she asked. “How do you know?”, I replied.

Last night I went to bed at 00:05 and managed to sleep eight hours for the first time in many months. I'm really going to make an effort to fix my sleeping habits, because they were quite fucked up lately, not catching up sleep even during weekends. On Monday I'll visit the doctor anyway, just to confirm all of this.

Coincidentally, Russel Coker also had similar symptoms this week, and also blogged about it.

GNOME 2.16 was released this week, delivering, once again to the day, the usual catalogue of improvements and polishing. Congratulations, everyone!

Catalan is, once again, very well covered in this release (99.87% completed as of this writing) thanks to the fantastic GNOME group at Softcatalà. I have only been able to contribute an update to Sound Juicer and little more, due to lack of time and, admittedly, motivation, so I'm very glad to see the group continues to be healthy and active thanks to Xavi, Jordi, Maria (from WSOP fame!), Gil (awesome GUADEC organiser) and others, under the leadership of Josep. Moltes gràcies, equip!

GTetrinet 0.7.10 is out. This release fixes a security hole (CVE-2006-3125), so you're advised to update ASAP.

The last release was assembled during UbuntuDownUnder, back in April 2005, which is a good indication about GTetrinet's development health. If you're interested in writing new features or fixing the many bugs in GTetrinet, please consider joining the mailing list. GTetrinet really needs your help!

Debian binaries are on the way to unstable; Ubuntu will hopefully suck them up soonish. Get the hot tarball from the GNOME FTP mirrors.