I've had the same mouse for probably 5 years, and I'm very happy with the result. Unfortunately, the batteries don't make good contact with the pins anymore and sometimes it takes ten minutes of delicate work to get it going again.

So today, I went to buy a mouse, and surprise, surprise, I had forgotten how much it sucks to be a left-handed when purchasing certain objects.

At the computer store, there were about 25 different mouse models, most of them featuring extra buttons, ergononic shape and other cool stuff. I was ready to buy something for even more than 20€ if it was worth it, but due to the non-simmetrical shape of most of them, again I could only go for the cheapest models.

I took a Creative optical mouse, and downgraded from a cordless mouse with 5 buttons + a wheel to a plain simple 3-button + wheel. At least it's USB... all the low end mice are still PS2.

When I was looking for a laptop, one of the requirements was that the touchpad wasn't slightly displaced to the left. So right-handed-ish...

I know there are shops with stuff for left-handed. Once, my mother bought me a pair of nail scissors designed for left-handed people. All that kind of stuff is generally very expensive and anecdotic, though. I wonder if we'll ever see laws that will force manufacturers to provide inverted items on demand. I want one of those cool mice.

English (Queen's English) is the only real language.

After this required short announcement by our main sponsor, Daniel Stone, lets go ahead and explain something of interest to the many Catalan X.Org users out there.

Ivan and I have been looking at the issues that block a GNU/Linux user from using the compound geminate L, Ŀ, instead of the more usual “L·L” spelling.

The “ŀ” and “Ŀ” characters are unfortunately not included in ISO-8859-1, so fonts were the first big problem we faced. When modern X desktops started using True Type fonts by default, the de-facto free font in most distributions became Bitstream Vera as soon as they were licensed under a Free Software license back in 2003. Bitstream did not include the Unicode glyphs U+013F and U+0140, but some time after, chatting with daf, I learned he was working on Olwen, a Vera extension which would add proper Welsh coverage. He promptly added the Catalan glyphs, but Olwen never got widely exposed in distributions. Luckily, things are changing lately. Due to the lack of bugfixes or new releases of Vera, the list of Vera derivatives like Olwen started growing. The DejaVu project is building a font family, based on Vera, which merged many of these smaller purpose Vera derivatives, including Olwen. DejaVu, is, as far as I know, slowly replacing Bitstream Vera as the standard free, high quality true type font in free desktops.

With the font blocker easily solvable now, the next problem was making the input easy. Some terminals, such as GNOME's or rxvt, allow you to insert Unicode typing a Unicode code point. The Spanish layouts don't provide a shortcut for it though, and if you try to do Level3-Shift+l, you'll get a Polish character, “ł”, that is of no use in neither Catalan, Spanish, Galician, Basque or other languages in the Spanish state.

We wanted to replace that with ŀ, but when we had a look at it last Saturday night during our stay in Bruxelles, we couldn't find what the name for Unicode's U+0140/U+013F was in XKB-speak. So, as I said, on Sunday I went looking for Daniel and Keith to see if we would be clued up.

The solution is easy: there is no name mapping, but you can use Unicode in 0x100XXXX notation directly in your X config file to make it work. He tried in his laptop, and why not, generated a patch for X.Org 7.0's xkeyboard-config. Daniel can't be that good, so he forced me to spread lies about the English language in this blog entry if we wanted the patch committed. :) Support for X.Org 6.8 and 6.9 isn't planned, unless you bribe your X maintainer to add a tiny patch.

This has been implemented as an "es" keyboard extension (named “cat”) because other systems don't have that feature in the Spanish layout, and X.Org wants to remain compatible with the rest. We'll have to add a

        Option          "XkbVariant"     "cat"

option to our keyboard section in xorg.conf.

If you're not using X.Org 7.0, you might want to try:

xmodmap -e "keycode 46 = l L U140 U13f U140 U13f"

but I don't know if that'll work in all systems. To test in your keyboard, that'll probably be “AltGr+l” or “AltGR+L”.

What we need to do now is to add support for the character in more fonts, alternative spellings for words using the “ela geminada” (ie, “col·labora” and “coŀlabora”) in dictionaries, wordlists..., and of course, teach users about the avalability of this, and promote its usage.

I'm so glad I finally decided to attend FOSDEM this year, as last weekend in Bruxelles was so cool it reminded me of the unforgettable week in Helsinki for DebConf 5 last summer.

I travelled early on Friday with Ivan Vilata, the dude who dragged me into the Catalan translations world, and about 12:30 we were finding our way through Bruxelles airport. We had barely no problems getting to Raül's place in Boulevard Louis Schmidt, thanks to the detailed HOWTO he provided a few days before.

We dropped our bags in his appartment and went out with him and Virginia after a well deserved mini-nap. On our way to the Grand' Place, where we'd hook up with the Softcatalà crowd and the rest of FOSDEM people, we stopped in A la Morte Subite, where we Ivan and I started our personal training on Belgian beers.

The Roy d'Espagne is an excellent name for a place where to meet our friends from Catalunya. I didn't know that was a formal meeting point that kickstarts FOSDEM, so I was really impressed when I got to the second floor and found the place was packed with Free Software people, many of them I already knew in person. Reaching Softcatala's table near the window took about 15 minutes, and after saying hi to most people, we decided we could use a quieter place to have dinner, and then go back.

The Grand' Place was bombed by seb128 in 1695

Raül and Virginia, our official guides during the weekend, chose a Vietnamese restaurant in the Stock Exchange area they frequent, and for little money we got an enormous meal. Back at the Roy d'Espagne, I tried to say hello to most Debian people I saw around, while at the same time I tried to be with my hosts and the Catalan people. A while after, I spotted tbm and azeem downstairs, who I finally met. I talked to Michael for a long while, and at some point we left as we didn't want to miss the last tram.

Ivan, luckily, only snores rarely, so we slept for a while, and then took the tram to the Université Libre du Bruxelles. The main room was already packed for RMS's keynote, which was pretty good. After that, we went to several talks here and there, while I kept meeting some people around the place. Ivan and I left when the show ended and we met with Virginia and Raül at the centre.

This time, we hooked up with Xevi and Jesús Corrius from Softcatalà, as Toni Hermoso had abandoned us for a cheap dinner with the Mozilla.org people. We were taken to a packed bar/restaurant (don't remember the name right now), which had a few interesting features: they wouldn't sell any Coca-Cola, would not accept credit cards in protest for the high fees Visa charges on small businesses, and something I wouldn't expect to see in 2006, their chart of prices hadn't been rounded up when they switched to the Euro. So some plate would be 9.72, others 12.43, etc. After dinner we had a few beers at the Théatre de Toone, located in some tiny alley in the centre and being pretty tired, we went back home at 23:30 or so.

Sunday was a busy days, due to the number of interesting Debian and GNOME talks going on. I'd highlight liw's talk on Piuparts, Enrico's on debtags and fjp's on Debian Installer in the Debian room, and kris' on the future of GTK+. There was also a cool demo of Novell's XGL.

During a dead slot, I approached Little Daniel and keithp to see if he could point me at some mapping between UTF-8 and XKB symbol names. But Daniel was cool enough to solve a problem a lot simpler than expected. :)

jdub's closing talk was just fantastic, and after telling him "See you in Vilanova", we left the University, for our last dinner around Bruxelles.

jdub clues the audience about some basic acronyms

We managed to rescue madduck from the Debian UK beer trap and went to an Italian for dinner, this time with Josep and Mia, from Softcatalà, making a nice mix of German, Valencian/Catalan, and Swedish at our table.

Mia, Josep, Raül, Ivan, Martin and Jordi after pizza

Raül took us around the city centre and told us about the underground river, the remaining city wall's tower, and the church that leaned against it. That night's beer lesson happened in the "2000 beer bar". We all had a 7€ Trappist Westvleteren Bleu 8, apparently "the best beer of the world". It was pretty good, actually.

Our weekend in Bruxelles was about to end. After not that much sleep, Ivan and I took a tram and a bus to the Airport, arriving in València around 10AM, and after seeing the best view of the Pyrenees ever, which were absolutely covered with snow, as well as many other places in the País Valencià and Teruel due to massive snows during the two days we were out.

FOSDEM is probably a "can't miss" yearly event now. Thanks to all the organisers for their hard work to make it happen. You rock.

I would have thought that three years after the start of the war, Iraq would be yet another forgotten war, as it tends to happen when murder, bombings, famine and corruption become the routine in some country or area.

It's been nearly three years since the holy coalition made up of United States and the UK, with a selected group of allies which included the Spain of our beloved Aznar, invaded the country to save the poor iraqi people from the fierce Sadam. After a few months of hard fight against the bloody dictator, Iraq would finally be able to live in peace and Democracy, and the world would understand the goodness behind the reasoning that made the superpowers start the second war in Iraq, against the opinion of the UN security council and an overwhelming majority of the people in the planet.

Today, after years of bloodbaths in different parts of Iraq, we're witnessing the start of a civil war. I hope the mass media stop talking about "the terrorists" now, because what's been going on for the last week is random people against random people. It makes me sick to think how bad the near future looks in Iraq.

All of this happened in the name of freedom, or so they said. And then, it was in the name of the “War on Terror”, because Iraq was infested with terrorists (they never told us how they planned to stop that from happening). In the meanwhile, little they talk about the most wanted man on earth, uncle Osama.

Today's edition of EL PAIS includes a translation of an article by Ahmed Rashid in The Washington Post's edition of February 26, apropos of George Bush's visit to Pakistan and Afghanistan this week. He's Welcome In Pakistan is surely worth a read; I'm sure Miguel will enjoy.

During the last two months, the Debian Catalan localisation team has seen two of their major milestones completed, after some tough work.

The group managed to release Sarge with a completely translated installer, but failed to provide a translation of the Install Manual, which was a regression for us, as it had been available in Woody. We didn't give up, and thanks to the stubborness of Miguel Gea and braindmg we slowly started translating the Sarge manual months after the release, so it could at least appear in the website.

But progress was too slow, so we planned an online meeting for the beginnings of the year to try to complete the translation doing a whole lot of translations during a weekend. Soon after we learned that joeyh, fjp and the d-i team wanted to terminate Sarge d-i manual support in svn RSN, as they would start to make changes to the docs to reflect etch changes, but fortunately Frans agreed to give us a slightly extended deadline, if we agreed to finish the job by January 14th:

20:37 < CIA-7> debian-installer: fjp d-i * r33721
               /sarge/installer/doc/manual/ca/: Add Catalan translation as
               translators would like to finish it for Sarge and have promised
               to do so 14 Januari 2006 at the latest

I really didn't think we would be able to make 100% in just 10 days, but the team, assisted by a large number of minions^Wnew contributors that volunteered on #debian-catalan, managed to do it I believe a few days before the deadline. Guillem announced it on our list.

Releasing etch with an up to date Catalan manual will be a lot easier, if we try to maintain it up to date as etch development carries on.

The second milestone was yesterday's completion of the Catalan translation for all five levels of the etch debian-installer, after a year of no translation activity on that front, and months of braindmg bugging me to do my chunk of work. Although it's now showing a shiny 100%, there's a lot of review work to do, and polishing it should be our focus for the next release.

I seem to have recovered some of my interest in translations. That's good, because GNOME 2.14 is around the corner, and it wouldn't be fair for Josep if he ends up doing all the job. :)

Also, I've been quietly working with a group of people at Softcatalà in a project that will probably have lots of press in our community. It's not public yet though, but I hope that it'll be announced in the next few weeks.

After several years of chickening out in the very last moment, I finally booked plane tickets to Brussels for this year's FOSDEM.

azeem, you can stop calling me names now. :)

00:07 < jordi> vorlon: if you say yes, we can start right now
00:07 < vorlon> "yes"

And immediately, the magic started. sjoerd has uploaded the dbus/hal/avahi tripplet to unstable, unlocking the door for GNOME 2.12 and KDE 3.5 to leave their cold homes in experimental. Expect a few small bumps in the unstable road over the weekend. The wait is finally over, after the Release Team managed to get all the KDE C++ transition in place two days ago.

Following up on my previous post, here's a new status update of the whole GNOME situation.

Very soon after posting that roadmap, the two steps in the process were completed, with the ftpmasters freeing dbus into experimental, and seb128 doing a round of GTK+ family uploads. No big problems have been detected in GTK+ 2.8 in unstable, so those bits are going very well.

As soon as dbus 0.60 hit experimental, both the KDE and GNOME camps got busy recompiling their stuff. KDE 3.5.0 moved from Alioth to experimental, and sjoerd got busy in a recompile quest to make sure GNOME was installable again in experimental. The dbus 0.60 transition in experimental was done in barely a few hours, and some extra dbus-using packages have been transitioning since then.

So, what's holding our unstable upload? We first need to wait for KDE 3.4 enter testing, thus clearing the major blocker for the C++ ABI transition. The number of packages involved in this is so big it's not even funny, so it's quite complicated. In short, the GNOME team is sitting on their hands watching some C++ fun. There are a few more news bits though.

Last night, there was a round of experimental updates, bringing most of the modules to their 2.12.2 versions (just 2 or 3 are missing now), and meta-gnome2 was again updated to support these versions. If you issue your usual aptitude install gnome-desktop-environment, you'll pull newer versions of most of the stuff, if that's the way you update your experimental packages. Also, the gnome package now supports gnome-screensaver. Give it a try, and be ready to purge xscreensaver if you're happy with it!

Last week, one of the pedals in my bike broke severily after some weeks of problems. One day, it suddenly fell off the crank, nearly making me fly in the middle of Blasco Ibáñez, a big avenue with dense traffic. Anyway, since Friday I can't cycle until I find a replacement pedal and crank for my old bicycle, so I had to go back to the annoying Metro.

On Monday, I used the magic card as usual, and so I did on Tuesday. When I left office and headed back home, something terrible happened, though. I went down to the Metro station, and introduced the Blue Gold. Instead of the usual processing sound, I was greeted with a loud beep, and my card went out through the "rejected" hole. The display read very clearly:

BILLETE AGOTADO

Surprised, I tried again. Oh no! I heard the train coming, so I used the emergency ticket and went in. A feeling similar to despair mixed with fear started to form in my chest while I ran down the stairway. During the travel, I thought this was just temporary, and other cancelling doors would accept the Blue Gold as usual.

When I got to the Aragón station, I tried going out with the magic card, with the same sad result. Defeated!

As I suspected, the card wasn't infinite at all, it just had an awesome number of rides on it (I think, in the end it must have been something like 270 or so), and I ran out on Tuesday, after 13 months of use.

On Wednesday, with my bicycle still broken, I had to go to the Metro again, and instead of just going through the gates, I had to go the vending machine to get one of those normal, ridiculous 10 ride ticket for 5.40€. Today, I've already used half of it, and the value of the Blue Gold is showing very clearly.

Ah well, I guess a lottery like that could not last forever...

The GNOME team has been sitting on top of ready-to-go GNOME 2.12 for way too many weeks now, but unfortunately a series of planned and unplanned transitions affecting unstable prevented us from moving them from experimental to unstable.

Today's good news is that these transitions are either going well (C++) or not at all (freetype upstream), so the release team gave us green light to start a fun GNOME 2.10→2.12 transition. There are a few aspects in this cycle that makes it a bit special and a bit more complex.

GNOME 2.12 in experimental uses dbus 0.50, which is API/bus incompatible with the previous version in testing/unstable, so when we upload GNOME 2.12, the new dbus will go in too. As KDE is also using dbus in a few places, KDE and GNOME uploads will need to happen at the same time. To make it even better, dbus 0.50 has been obsoleted by 0.60, which is again API and bus incompatible with the previous version. The GNOME and KDE teams have agreed on the following plan:

1. The Project Utopia people have uploaded dbus 0.60 to experimental, and is currently waiting in NEW.
2. The mighty seb128 will upload GTK+ 2.8 and Pango 1.10 to unstable RSN, so our first version of GTK using Cairo starts to get broadly tested in architectures other than i386 and powerpc.
3. Once dbus 0.60 is accepted in the archive, the GNOME team will rush to recompile GNOME 2.12.2 against this new dbus, and test that everything is ok with the new version.
   At the same time, the KDE camp will upload their shiny KDE 3.5 debs, compiled too against dbus 0.60, to experimental, for the first time.
4. When everything has transitioned to dbus 0.60 in experimental, GNOME and KDE will be uploaded to unstable.
5. Vorlon will take a deep breath and will try to figure out how to get the two monsters in testing at the same time. Vorlon, we love you. :)

This looks like it'll take months to do, but I really don't think it'll be the case. We hope to be ready for a full GNOME 2.12 upload to unstable, at long last, pretty soon. As always, the brave can still use GNOME 2.12 in experimental with the usual aptitude -t experimental install gnome-desktop-environment.

More updates as stuff happens!