As most of you know already, there was a horrible accident in the Línia 1 of the Metrovalencia underway system of València, where I live. The death toll is, as of this writing, 41, and several more people are in critical condition in the hospitals.

Thanks to the many people who mailed, texted and msgd me on IRC to find out about my status. I am ok, as are my closest relatives and friends.

The causes for the accident are not clear yet, but officials say the southbound train, one of the oldest in the system and in service for 20 years, derailed due to an excess of speed in one of the bends of the tunnel, next to the Jesús station, after one of the iron wheels broke. The crash must have been very violent, as the number of dead has always been quite higher than the injured.

With these numbers, in a not so big city as València, you're sure to learn about the luck of people you know. In my case, one of my best friends Sabrina escaped the accident thanks to her stubborness. She had to go to the Hospital Peset a few minutes before the time of the crash, and although her two workmates were taking the Metro, she decided to cycle alone, avoiding taking the deadly train. Her two workmates are, luckily, only injured; one of them was being shown on the very early TV foootage, as she was carried on a stretcher to an ambulance. The only information I have is that one arrived in the hospital unconscious, the other needed leg surgery due to the wounds. I think they weren't among the very grave.

TV stations have been missinforming about the status of the Metro system in València. The reality is that the Line 1 has been in service for 20 years, and I've been a user for at least 17, as it's the only one which connects Godella, where my father lives, and València. I've seen the infrastructure go from brand new to it's current despicable state. There are trains which are as old as the line itself, and others which are even older, as they were in use in an older, now taken over by Metrovalencia, train service which connected several towns with the North and South of the city. For more than a decade, the effort to modernise Line 1 have been inexistant, other than prettifying the old trains to make them look more like the new models in lines 3 and 5.

The railroad Unions of Metrovalencia have been denouncing the state of the infrastructure for several years, and the local government had finally announced a massive replacement of trains for later this year. Just a bit too late. I'm getting ready for the official reports making the train driver the only responsible, though. Valencians are getting used to this kind of deluding.

The needed investments for other “equally important” matters in this city, like the America's Cup or the imminent visit of Pope Ratzinger next weekend have not been delayed for years, though.

Weeks go by way too quickly lately, and GUADEC was suddenly here. So I finally got permission from work to attend, after managing to complete our milestone the required one week in advance.

So far, my first GUADEC has been fantastic. While I've tried to come here with my most "just relax" mentality and it's working pretty well, I've also tried to be around the conference for most of the day, as meeting people is, I believe, the best way to enjoy this kind of conferences. I'm staying with Josep and Jesús in one of the bungalows at the GNOME Village, which is a very nice place, althought it's a bit too far from the GUADEC site. There's a public bus service, but some days it's quite unreliable; luckily Fabrice is staying with us at the bungalow and he has a car which we can use.

An unplanned attendee was mako, who after being around the great CDG airport for the Ubuntu Conference in Paris, had a few spare days before returning to Boston and came down to Vilanova i la Geltrú for the warmup weekend and half of the first core day. Of course, having him around has introduced the usual randomness to those days.

Just after arriving in Vilanova, toniher drove us to the lighthouse area, where there were some big Sant Joan parties going in the middle of the beach. At 4AM, and after checking our flirting techniques are not too effective, we wandered off back to Vilanova Park, seeking some good sleep. In the meantime, Danilo Segan, from the Serbian team, apparently had a hard time finding a way to open his bungalow, and ended sleeping in ours as yet another guest.

Saturday morning was spent sleeping, and while we had breakfast, I put on my Komando CT training t-shirt. When mako saw it, he said "hey I have one of those!", which made me discover how kiko traded my other Komando t-shirt with mako during the Montréal conference. WTF! We headed back to Vilanova to get lunch and my talk about the Catalan GNOME localisation project. At 16:00 it's hard to get food in some places, and when we finally managed, my talk was so close we had no time at all to prepare.

Jordi Mas, Toni Hermoso and I spoke about our experience to a great audience of about 12 persons. Having decided what would each talk about two minutes before starting, I found myself with little to say at some points, but I guess the talk ended up being interesting, and we got a few interested people in assisting us with further translations.

After the conference we met with Bastien and several Debian UK people in one of the bars in the beach area, where we, just after getting in, could see how Argentina scored a fantastic goal against Mexico in extra time. A few beers later, it was time to sleep, but we still had to go through the transportation odyssey. I think we managed to get a taxi one and a half hours later.

Sunday has been the most intense day so far. Up at a reasonable time, mako, danilo and I planned going to spend the day at Sitges, one of the most famous towns in the Catalan coast which is just one train stop away. Mako was thrilled about the idea of visiting the Gay Capital of Southern Europe, and we set off for the train station.

Visiting Sitges was not meant to be too funny for me, but mostly quite emotional. My initial plan was to go alone during the week, but I figured that mako and others would really enjoy being in such a beautiful town as this one. Sitges is where my Catalan grandmother was born, and where she lived for much of her life. Some will remember that wrote about how important she was for me when she died one year ago. I hadn't been in Sitges for years already, and I feared my emotions when I went back to her house in the middle of the town.

We walked from the train station down to the Santiago Rusinyol street, while I tried to show them some of the details I always enjoy about Sitges, including the No embruteu les parets tiles which are all over the place. We arrived at my grandparent's place and we entered the house. Having danilo and mako with me probably helped to not get too many memories back, and also, seeing the house so dismantled, and empty of life made it hard to feel "at home".

“Don't dirty the walls. Cleanness is a great signal of civilisation”

When we went down to the Platja de Sant Sebastià and I spoke to my cousin Bego on the phone I was unable to stop the tears when my grandma appeared in the conversation, though. That beach was her favourite, and I remember how she would take us to spend the day there when we were little more than babies.

I took danilo and mako around the town's center and enchanting corners, and after having lunch, we headed to the beach going through the “gay streets”. At the beach, we had our share of sunbathing and swimming, and around 18:00 I told them we should probably head back to Vilanova, as I had to be ready to play football at 19:00.

We were lucky and the train arrived as soon as we got to the station, and also when Fabrice gave us a lift to the stadium with his car. The GNOME World Cup had already started, and someone had taken the last red shirt to substitute me, so I quickly neglected my ex-team and joined the Blue Team. We found ourselves in the final after a dramatic penalty kickout, to play against the mighty Black Team led by Bastien Nocera, who had *destroyed* the White Team with 16 goals or something equally insane.

It was a very even final, though, and after 40 minutes of non-stop running, our team scored the decisive goal just three minutes before the end.

Champions!

The day would not end up there, as I had to meet my cousin Laia and her boyfriend Marc in Barcelona, to have dinner with them. So off I went, with a hurt calf and dressed like a tramp, to fetch yet another train. I had dinner at a nice place near the Plaça de Catalunya, and after that we were all so sleepy that we went straight to bed at my cousin's place, at 2AM or so. Then, there was the fight against the mosquitos at 4AM, and an early wake up to go back to Vilanova, in time for the grand opening of the Core GUADEC.

So to make a long story short, last night at GUADEC featured a great Fluendo party at one of Vilanova's great beaches. At some point, people had drunk enough to finally consider getting a good swim in the warm waters of the Mediterranean. David Reveman, from the Novell crowd, was one of them.

I learned from Anna that in the US it is illegal to show your nipples (ie, go top-less) or any “reproductive organs” in public. WTF!? The GNOME Hispano crowd did have no problems at all, and went in completely naked, reminding me of the great nights at Helsinki during Debconf 5.

I thought it was a good opportunity to POP THE TRUNK, if only a little bit, so I swam to the buoy and came back, in complete darkness, and acs watching out for me from the distance. When we were back, most people were getting dressed already, and I managed to lose my micro suimming suit, which is a PITA as I need it to train.

The phone had more sand than silicon, I guess.

Anyway, I wasn't the only one leaving stuff behind. David, if you mind your valuable wallet and mobile phone, find me around the conference. :)

Other GUADEC stories will need to wait for another entry...

I arrived in Sevilla this morning to attend tecnimap 2006, and I will be staying in the city until Friday evening. I'd love to hook up with the Sevillan Free Software community after the show ends during the week, so if you're in the area, please contact me by phone (there's plenty of Debian people who know my number) or by email and we can try to make up some plans.

I'm staying in the Sevilla Congresos hotel in the outskirts, so going out to the city involves taxis, busses or other non-trivial means of transportation, so have that in mind!

Getting here has been quite stressful, but that's no news anymore. At 00:00 last night, not only I had not packed at all, but all my clothes were scattered around thre different flats in the city, and I had no car to go pick the stuff up. Luckily, this morning my sister could give me a lift to pick things up and then took me to the airport.

The flight revealed a very dry landscape as we headed south, and some irrigated areas in the middle of pure desert. There are also some very characteristic circular fields that show very cool patterns when looked from the heights. It's pretty hot in here, but still bearable. I don't want to imagine August around the place.

Anyway, if you're in Sevilla, I hope to be able to meet you any of the four evenings or nights I'll be around. I need some natives to walk me around the place, and in some cases, translate the very special Andalusian spoken here. :) Momona people, I also mean you!

There are programs that get installed with defaults that annoy me day after day, but I never care to do anything to fix the configuration files across all the boxes where I use it.

For example, emacs in Debian creates stupid backup~ files by default, which after a while accumulate in my homedirs.

It's so cool when these backups I always grumble at save 2 hours of work, after misstyping “rm” instead of “less”...

It's this time of the year again.

It's a bit disappointing that I'm not going to celebrate my birthday having lots of fun somewhere in Mexico, but things tend to suck every now and then.

Still, I've had quite a good time this last weekend, meeting lots of friends at the Fira Alternativa de València, where I got a few old CDs I hadn't seen around in a while, and a pair of thingies to decorate the house.

On Saturday I even went flying with my uncle on a small 4-seat airplane over València and the south. The Albufera looks fantastic in Spring from up there, even if the sky wasn't too clear. Too bad the America's Cup idiots were out on the sea and the air route we wanted to take along the Valencian coast was closed to low traffic, I guess because there were helicopters filming the stuff. Another reason to hate all this America's Cup business.

Today, my step-sister also gave birth to a child, with whom I now share my birthday. Fun :)

So, I'm not going to Debconf. I suspected this long ago, when the dates were changed to early May, but you never know. During the last month, I've been finding daily pink notification alerts on my irssi window, with different people asking me to start swimming to Mexico, to book a last minute flight, to work overhours so I can justify leaving office for a whole week. In short, to POP THE TRUNK.

But unfortunately, it doesn't look like I'll make it, being Thursday, and when I was planning a hypothetical departure on Saturday in the same flight as other Spanish Debian people. So, I've spent some time reading the blog entries that start flooding Planet Debian from people who are already attending Debcamp. NO NO NO! I can't believe there are even 10m diving platforms.

There's talk at the office about me maybe having to go to some conference in Seville. jacobo and ana had an opinion on that.

12:06 < ana> jordi: dude, mexico es mucho mas interesante que sevilla
12:07 < jacobo> en vez de decirte "quillo" te dicen "cuate"

I still have 1 and a half days to take some wild decision and get there by surprise. That would be fair with azeem. :)

Everyone knows IRC is a very useful resource. Today, #gnome-hackers had the basic tips to survive GUADEC moment.

16:23 <@davyd> you can then teach us how to order drinks
16:23 <@davyd> because I can't speak spanish
16:23 < miguel> They dont speak spanish in that down Davyd
16:23 < miguel> They speak Catalan
16:24 < miguel> Which is sort of Spanish - arabic words + a little bit of
                french thrown in
16:24 < jdub> estic cercant els meus pantalons!
16:24 < Ankh> I always thought catalan was a network file access thing
16:24 < hadess> davyd: they seem to prefer somebody speaking english than
                somebody speaking castillan ;)
16:24 < miguel> I know how to order coffee
16:24 < miguel> cafe am llet

While Catalan in the computer industry slowly advances, thanks to volunteer efforts and Free Software, it's difficult to see any sign of improvement in other areas of the technology world.

Mobile phones are not an exception. In Catalunya, many people own a Siemens, Alcatel or Sagem mobile phone because they are the only companies that include Catalan as an option for their terminals. When I first got my mobile phone one and a half years ago, I chose an Alcatel, and while the phone was more or less ok, and Catalan was present in the interface, it lacked some Catalan characters like “ò”, “ú”, “í” or “ç” in the input system. The battery wasn't that good, and it was a bit slow at times, but in general I was happy.

Three weeks ago, I decided to switch to Telefónica's mobile phone provider, Movistar, because Vodafone has no network coverage in my mother's town, Vall de Almonacid, where I spend many weekends and vacations, and I was getting tired of my mobile turning into a plastic brick when I went there. I hoped the switch would be painless.

As people talked positively about Siemens, I went for one of their free Siemens offerings: the Siemens AP75. Ugh, fellow Catalans: DON'T DO IT. So, it seems Siemens has sold or merged their mobile division with BenQ. The girl in the shop said one of the cool new features was better battery lifetime. This terminal was advertised as having Bluetooth, Infrared and other goodies.

As soon as I got it (and couldn't give it back), I found out the extensive language list in BenQ mobile phones doesn't include Catalan anymore. Actually, it just offers Spanish and English. Had I known this, I would have quickly got a Nokia, which I believe are the best phones out there. But I'm silly enough not to pick the best just to support some practices, in the same way I won't but nVidia unless they do something about their drivers.

Anyway, ignoring the lack of Catalan fact, the mobile was supossed to be quite good, or so I thought, until I tried to transfer my contacts list via Bluetooth. My mobile phone wasn't able to find other devices at all, and the interface doesn't list IrDA at all. What's the story? Yesterday I had the opportunity to go to the Movistar shop, and I was told a tale about the mobile phone having those features built in, but they are deactivated by the telco.

This is pretty difficult to believe, and googling around, I haven't seen any proof about the AP75 having any Bluetooth support for anything other than voice transmission (ie, for use with headphones, etc). It plain sucks.

So, dear Catalan readers, if you're getting new phones, avoid these BenQ-Siemens idiots, as they don't have a clue about Catalan. Either choose Alcatel, Sagem, or one of the older real Siemens mobiles.

Softcatalà has a Catalan mobile phones Wiki page with detailed information of the current situation. I'll have to update it to warn about current Siemens practices. In a happy future, Nokia will hopefully support Catalan and things will be a lot easier.

Recently Spain remembered the 65th anniversary of our tragic Civil War, an episode which broke the state in two halves which still today haven't been glued together at all.

The origin of that nightmare is the dream of many Spanish people of the early 20th Century. In the morning of the 14th of April, 1931, the Second Spanish Republic was proclaimed in Madrid, after two days before, a majority of republican and leftist parties won the local elections; many people celebrated throughout the Spanish territory, and the tricolour flag was shown in many town hall buildings. With the king in exile after these quick happenings, Spain was again a Republic, as decided by the election results.

The Republic brought many social measures to Spain: women suffrage, eight-hour day and many other labour related improvements. The nobility titles were abolished, and those properties were confiscated by the government. And this was just the provisional government. All of this is regarded like a big social and cultural revolution, which was just starting.

Not everyone was happy about this, of course. The newly approved Constitution of December 9 gave the government power to confiscate many of the Church's properties, and limit their great power in political matters. Soon, the episcopacy came with a strategy to defeat the Republic in any possible way. The Royalists were also not happy. There were a series of revolts in the South, and an attempt of coup d'etat by General Sanjurjo. These attacks were repealed; the Republic was still strong.

In 1933, the Anarchists started to be seriously unhappy about the moderate path the government was leading and started striking, which led to violent repression by the Government. The General elections of November brought a victory of the right and extreme-right, and many social and anti-church measures were repealed. Riots and strikes spread throughout the territory.

The Martial Law proclaimed by the right wing government resulted in thousands beings imprisoned. Things went even worse when three ministers of the fascist CEDA entered the Republican Government. A big worker uprise started the 1st of October in Asturies, and Catalunya proclaimed the Catalan Republic.

The revolts were supressed by General Franco, who would be well known in the world just a few years later. Thousands were killed and injuried during the few weeks of revolt, and the Socialist Party was dissolved, leaving the Spanish Courts with barely no left representation.

The next years saw a very unstable government from the right due to internal disputes within the parties that formed it. New elections were called in 1936, and the left united under the Popular Front, which won by a slight margin; Manuel Azaña was the new president. The right, the church and the army continued to undermine the Republic in any possible way. In an attempt to make the military heads more loyal to the established government, the fascist Falange Española was dissolved.

The 2nd Spanish Republic received a massive blow on the 17th of July, 1936 when Franco and other generals attempted a new coup d'etat in the Northern African territories. The Republic started to die as people started fighting the coup back, and the Spanish Civil War started throughout the territory. With the aid of Fascist Germany and Italy, Franco managed to seize control of more and more areas of Spain during the nearly three years of war, and the Government of the Republic had to move a number of times, to València and Barcelona. In January 1939, most of Spain was in Franco's hands, and Catalunya soon fell. Two months later, the fascist troops entered Madrid, and hours later, València surrended.

Still today, people talk about “dos Españas”, the victorious and the defeated. Still today, the is much difficulty in having official recognition for the thousands who died while defending what a majority of people had voted for in a democratic way. Still today, one of the major political parties in Spain refuses to acknowledge what the forty years of Franco meant for the disidents, for the exiled, and for the dead. They are the legacy of Franco.

Today Spain celebrates the 75th anniversary of our Second Republic, with many events in many cities, which will be ongoing for a few weeks. Izquierda Republicana has a good list of events.