It's not only a bunch of students with hippy ideals thinking that the Feds could have done a bit more before and after Katrina's hit. It seems the Mayor is a bit fed up of promises coming from DC. The lack of any kind of rescue operation for the people that are starving and dehidrating all around the city of New Orleans and the violent scenes taking place resulted in a quite powerful interview on a local radio. And yes, this comes from CNN.

A small quote from the transcript:

Ray Nagin: I have no idea what they're doing.

Emperor Palpatine says I'm silly because I blame dubya for a massive hurricane basically destroying a major US city. Well, no, and don't put words in my mouth, thanks.

My point is not only that if all you can do is sign a few cheques, at least have the respect for the victims and show up on TV having fun a few hours later of reporting the most destructive natural disaster in your country. Appearing to care a bit about what's going on seems like a good idea, when you're POTUS.

Besides the appearances, there's other stuff you can do before the hurricane hits. For example, you can try not to divert flood-control funds to your little adventure in the Middle East. It's sad to learn that most of the money earmarked to the Southeast Louisiana Urban Flood Control Project (SELA) suddenly got diverted to Iraq when things started to go too wrong around the Persian Gulf.

The ongoing repairs to levees and other flood control measures in the area were not finished when they should have, and now the nice city of New Orleans is a deadly lake. I'm not saying levees and dams are the ultimate solution but they surely would have helped in this case, as the tsunami alert systems in the Pacific help when they need to.

But I guess Jaldhar thinks all the war stuff was really necessary, and the money was worth it. Probably what the American voter really cares about, according to him. I have this utopia in my head, it could have been used for other matters, like fixing some of the social problems in the US that make your urgent rescue operations a problem because with the amount of guns out of control in the US, your helicopters get shot. Or helping getting rid of famine, plagues and epidemies in those spots of the world where the poverty situation only generates what you call "terrorism". Or simply helping your economy to be less polluting, so your country doesn't contribute half of the emissions to the atmosphere that are causing global warming, and, for example, make hurricanes and typhoons like Katrina even more deadly.

This is self-explanatory.

When I saw the images of what's going on in New Orleans, the first thing I thought is that if the news had been talking about Asia or Africa, I would have very well believed those images were shot there. It's obvious that when it comes to extreme natural disasters like Katrina, the first and third world are quite alike.

I hope all our community people in the area are ok, even if not thanks to dubya. Some day he'll realise that saying "God bless you" isn't enough.

When I looked at the definition for "cockroach" in dict.org, I thought I found an entry that was either meant to be a bad joke by one of the WordNet database authors or some kind of easter egg in the dict web interface. It took me three reads to realise my error.

I really, absolutely dislike cockroaches. The thought of having them as my domestic pets made me feel ill.

I'm happy to report that GNOME 2.12 is now completely translated to Catalan thanks to the hard work of Softcatalà's GNOME division. Of the four of five currently active contributors, I think Xavi Conde deserves a special mention, as he has been taking care of big modules like evolution for some time now, and I think completing this task every six months would be quite difficult without him.

It's the first time since 2.4, I think, that we hit a complete 100% coverage. Lately, we had done a few releases where we got very near the number, but a handful of strings out of 30.000 would leave us at the gates with something 99.97% or so. Sure, it's just a silly number, and it has little value when you have the core of GNOME translated. That's why since the 2.9 series, the team has focused on polishing. We've gone over most of the modules trying to find old translation errors and GNOME 2.12 in Catalan is surely going to be a high quality release on the gramatical and spelling front.

With the translation momentum I've gathered while completing GNOME, I've now started a Catalan translation of MoinMoin, the wiki software I probably like most. I hope to have it ready in a few days. After that, I should have a look at finishing my update of GnuPG's translation, which is pending a few months already.

A few days ago, Mikel, from softastur, requested the creation of an Asturian team to translate Ubuntu. As I'm quite passionate about minority and minorised languages, I quickly googled around and mailed him to find out what the state of Asturian (ISO 639 code "ast") was.

While their webpage seems a bit stale, it appears they are trying to gain a bit of momentum by translating Ubuntu. They already have some Mozilla and other free Windows programs translated, but AFAIK, they had never started a plan to translate one of the two major free desktops, GNOME or KDE. If they are going to start a Ubuntu translation, that means we'll soon see a nice GNOME translation coming up, so that's pretty cool.

One of the problems I saw from the beginning is that even if they have an ISO 639 code assigned (albeit a three letter, 639-2 code, instead a two letter code, for which they pass the requisites even better than many other languages out there), they lacked a Glibc locale data file for Asturian. In an attempt to have Ubuntu Breezy's libc support Asturian as soon as it releases next month, I spent some time writing this data file for them, as I did in the past with the Aragonese (an_ES) locale. The result is cool:

                             2005

       xineru               febreru                marzu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6      1  2  3  4  5  6
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   7  8  9 10 11 12 13
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  14 15 16 17 18 19 20
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  21 22 23 24 25 26 27
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28                    28 29 30 31
31
       abril                  mayu                  xunu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3                     1         1  2  3  4  5
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   2  3  4  5  6  7  8   6  7  8  9 10 11 12
11 12 13 14 15 16 17   9 10 11 12 13 14 15  13 14 15 16 17 18 19
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  16 17 18 19 20 21 22  20 21 22 23 24 25 26
25 26 27 28 29 30     23 24 25 26 27 28 29  27 28 29 30
                      30 31
       xunetu                agostu              setiembre
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
             1  2  3   1  2  3  4  5  6  7            1  2  3  4
 4  5  6  7  8  9 10   8  9 10 11 12 13 14   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
11 12 13 14 15 16 17  15 16 17 18 19 20 21  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
18 19 20 21 22 23 24  22 23 24 25 26 27 28  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
25 26 27 28 29 30 31  29 30 31              26 27 28 29 30

      ochobre               payares               avientu
ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do  ll ma mi xu vi sá do
                1  2      1  2  3  4  5  6            1  2  3  4
 3  4  5  6  7  8  9   7  8  9 10 11 12 13   5  6  7  8  9 10 11
10 11 12 13 14 15 16  14 15 16 17 18 19 20  12 13 14 15 16 17 18
17 18 19 20 21 22 23  21 22 23 24 25 26 27  19 20 21 22 23 24 25
24 25 26 27 28 29 30  28 29 30              26 27 28 29 30 31
31

This will probably go in the next revision of Ubuntu's libc, while I hope Denis Barbier will include it quickly in belocs for Debian. Eventually I'll submit to the glibc upstream list, but getting them accepted upstream takes a bit more usually.

Hopefully Mikel will find enough volunteers to complete this task soon enough. I dream that it'll help promoting Asturian, one of the most endangered languages in the Iberian Peninsula. Read more about Asturian in the Wikipedia.

During our week around the Pyrenees, our meals consisted on dehydrated pasta, rice and soups, along with the little sandwich bread we could carry, and little more, really. Any extra gram sums up in your backpack and if you carry more than you need, you end up paying with exhaustion.

When I got back to Vàlencia I was really looking forward to eating real food, in a plate. I suspected that with that kind of food, I might have lost some weight, and wanted to find out how much. Unfortunately, I've been forgetting to do get on the scale everyday since, until today.

After 5 days of being well fed (and I have surely regained some of my normal weight), I remembered to weight myself before getting lunch and after going to the toilet. The result was alarming, even for me.

Now I'm so ready to be the Debian Skinny subproject leader!

Note this pic was taken after lunch, naked but holding the camera. On my first measurement, I got something like 53.2kg, way less than my usual 57-58kg range. I should probably get serious about gaining weight, even if that means mdz and moray discrown me in our unofficial "lighter DD" contest.

But I like this one a bit more than the average. :)

Oh yes

When I started this blog a year and a half ago, I was maintaining a blog in my team's webpage, in Catalan, to write about my triathlon-oriented stuff. The momentum this webpage had acquired is now mostly lost, and I have no energy to promote its use among my team members once more.

Recently, some Softcatalà people started a Planeta Softcatalà for the blogs of all the organisation's members. If you have a look, you'll see that my blog entries are clearly distinct to the rest of my friends in there: I'm the only one with an English blog.

For some time I've been wondering about dividing this blog in two sections, en and ca, and point the different planets to the appropriate languages. I think I would still give English posts some priority, but there are some things I'd rather write in Catalan (I think I feel like posting about my recent stay in the Pirineus in Catalan, for example). What do people do with respect to multi-language blogs? Catalan content probably wouldn't be too ok for Planet Debian or Planet GNOME, but would my Catalan readers want to continue reading my English content?

If you follow my blog, your comment is welcome.

5 months ago, I switched my shell to GNU bash on my main workstation, and slowly that change trickled to all my other UNIX accounts where I could use zsh. Incidentally, I switched to bash on debian.org boxes just a few weeks ago, not knowing what was going on the zsh-workers mailing list.

The night I was preparing to leave to the Pyrenees, the news travelled fast on IRC: the zsh-beta package in Debian's incoming directory finally had UTF-8 support. I installed zsh-beta and switched to it, so I wouldn't forget about it when I came back, and finally switched off my desktop for a week.

Now, with the new zsh in action, I can try a few simple test. Incredible, deleting a "ç" only requires one backspace.

16631:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/R\M-C\M- bia positiva$ setopt printeightbit
16632:jordi@nubol:~/ogg/Ràbia positiva$

Still feels like black magic to me! Thanks Clint and whoever was involved in this. I hope zsh will forgive me for abandoning her during five months. I am glad to be back!