I just realised this blog made its first year online quite recently, after my first stage at Advogato. I wish I had more time to think about interesting stuff to talk about, though. Sometimes, this feels like the Debian GNOME team's announcement board. :)

Lately, my mail problems have not been only my pure lack of time to read it. My main e-mail address is jordi@sindominio.net, provided by Sindominio, an organisation which aims to create a space in the net for social and antagonistic organisations which don't want to directly depend on a company to do this. Some members of the more than 130 collectives that are in Sindominio participate in the Sindominio virtual assembly, which rules how the project works and what it does. Sindominio has celebrated its 5th anniversary just a few weeks ago.

My lack of time has prevented me of spending time on Sindominio work (mostly admin stuff), and recently, I stopped reading the lists on a daily basis, but on batches every few weeks. This has the big disadvantage that when there's a crisis (it's not that uncommon to have the Police call someone in the assembly to ask for some suspicious content in one of the hosted websites), I might not know about it until two weeks later.

Today I catched up on really old Sindominio mail, and learned a few things. It seems that ECN, one of the Italian organisations on which we based our project, is about to shut down. As Miquel explained in his post, hopefully the end of ECN will mean that people start other projects with the same spirit in Italy, or join other existing projects to make them better. I've also learned that YOMANGO keeps going without problems. That was great to read about!

Currently, Sindominio has two servers hosted at the Infoespai in Barcelona. Unfortunately, the servers don't grow but Sindominio keeps adding more and more content, and during the last few months we've been having big scalability issues with our older machine, fanelli, despite we moved the mail processing out to the more powerful box a while ago. Right now, it receives mail after it's been cleaned out of viruses and spam in the other box, ada, and runs an imapd for our users and collectives. It hosts the static web pages server, and other minor services like jabber and IRC. Still, the load is too big for this box, and during the last days, it seems to have crossed the line and we are facing OOM killer genocide every few hours.

The other box has suddenly become quite busy, and results in clamav dying every now and then, which makes our mail get stuck in a huge queue. Thus, I've been getting my mail in batches and in weird ordering, which makes it even more difficult to read. While we work on finding out what's going on with these boxes, there's talk about buying a really good box for Sindominio, which will require some serious fundraising as we've never done.

It doesn't help that on Tuesday, when I got home, I discovered that my main desktop box had died. Luckily, it was just a burned power supply, which I could replace in a few hours.

I assume I have missed some mails lately. If you are waiting for a reply from me and it's not happening, please, send it again. Currently, the amount of stuff in my main mailbox is over 1000 mails waiting for action to be taken. Ugh!

I had been thinking about getting a laptop for over one year, but never decided to do it because I had gripes on most of the models I saw here and there, or when I saw a model that seemed to be more or less decent, someone else would come and told me "No way dude!". So I just kept saving money without knowing what to buy.

Recently, I've been travelling more than usual: Málaga, Oxford, Mataró, etc. and during the Free Software conferences I've attended I saw more and more people with Apple laptops. Being used to see the normal screens in the average PC laptops, I thought these 15" powerbooks were fabulous, and started to think seriously about getting one. Very recently I finally made up my mind and settled on one of them instead of a Thinkpad, pushed by carlos and sjoerd, with elmo's approval at Mataró, and sto and Pablo at work, and finally knew what to buy exactly. It would be a 15" Powerbook with a 1.5Ghz G4 and a Superdrive.

During mako's stay in València, he suggested that he could buy the computer for me in the states and I could get Paula, one of Kiko's workmates, to bring it back just after New Year. This would apparently save me big money, because the Dollar is currently quite fucked up with respect to the Euro...

On Tuesday, I picked up the laptop at Paula's house, who told me how one of the idiots at the airport nearly tossed the laptop bag as if it was normal luggage, and stared at her like saying "hey, calm down dude!" when she started shouting at him.

The laptop is a US model, so I either need to get the keyboard replaced (not so difficult) or get used to it, and get a new power cord, as the plug is for the US plug model, and I currently have to use an adapter. Besides the keyboard, the hard drive couldn't be upgraded in time for Paula's departure to the faster option, which is a pitty, but it's not that expensive to replace at some point in the future if I really care.

The first night, I had no Debian install CD to start setting my new system, so I played a bit with OS X. Lovely, but after a few hours, I got the same sensation of unproductiveness that you get with Windows: you have nothing useful installed by default, except for a browser and mail program that you don't really want to use. And I wasn't going to bother with Fink so early. So in the morning, I started setting up Debian, and after solving a few issues with X, I've got a GNOME desktop up and running. I feel clumsy, though.

14:19 <@jordim> I feel kind of like a newbie these days.
14:19 <@jordim> can't type, can't config X on my own, can't middle click.
14:19 <@jordim> wtf!
14:19 < sjoerd> you just entered the world of !i386 dude :)

But it's good. :) I need to find a new pcmcia wireless card for now, and need to transfer all my stuff to the new home. I also need to urgently rethink my handling of the stuff I have in /home, because the current incarnation is a big mess, with more than 500 files and directories in the toplevel directory...

I seriously need to rethink my mail handling too, because now I'll want to have a main mail server and some way to sync the mail into and from the laptop. Given mako advertises his greatest talent a lot, I guess I will ask him for suggestions on how to fix my mail setup. Currently it's so bad, that my inbox is about to hit 1000 unclassified mails, many of them which need replying...

Remember when my bike was stolen two months ago? I was pretty pissed off, and I still remember. :)

The first thing I had to do was buy a 10 trip ticket for València's Metro system. These tickets are quite expensive, more than in Madrid or Barcelona, but fortunately I normally can go everywhere cycling and don't use the Metro much. Actually, when the bike was stolen, it had been months since the last time I took it, but I relied on its unreliable system for a week or two while I got a new bike to get going again.

The first days were a bit painful, because there's not that many trains as in other cities, so it might take either 15 minutes or 45 to do the same distance, depending on your luck with connections and timetables.

After the first week, something changed in my perception of the service. Once I had used my first five trips, I went into a Metro station and inserted the ticket. When it came out, I noticed it had marked over the fifth slot again. That happened a few more times; then the cancelling machines started printing lines somewhere not on the ticket, and finally I got my gift, when on another trip the cancelling machine said I had 128 trips left. Woot! That means free rides for a looong time. The 128 figure is suspicious. Once, I saw one of these machines open, and it was running MS-DOS, so who knows what kind of overflow my card might have caused...

I could take advantage of this when mako came visit València and we shared the ticket for a week. We started calling it the "BLUE GOLD", and people would look at us oddly inside the train when he said "YOU'VE GOT BLUE GOLD, MAN!". The effects have gotten better lately: it now never marks anything and when I use it to open the gates to get out of the Metro stations, sometimes the machines go bonkers and leave the doors open, while their display reads Error, allowing people that haven't paid for a ticket an easy escape from the station. :)

The bad news is that this will end on January 31, as the fees have changed and the old tickets will be obsoleted starting on February. I wonder if I can easily find someone that uses the Metro more than twice a day and sparing the money would help his economy a lot. Or I could try to be selfish and sell it. 51¢ x ∞ sounds like a good deal.

While this happened, I didn't manage to fix up my new bicycle, and I managed to go through the worst part of winter underground. Hopefully I'll start riding it again next week, as this has been the longest period of time with me not riding bicycles at all in the last 9 years and you end up missing it.

Following up to my previous post, last night I finished doing the Freeciv 2.0 packages for Debian. They are available in my temporary repository:

deb http://people.debian.org/~jordi/debian ./

My first tests unvelied a totally reworked and very much improved UI in the GTK client, which I hope everyone will like (everytime there's a change in the Freeciv client, there's a few users that send a few bug reports about them wanting an option to go back to the previous behaviour...), and there's a few obvious changes in the game, too.

The most noticeable was the introduction of the "Worker" unit, which apparently is a mix of Engineer and Settler, and thir areas of influence drawn in the map. People will also enjoy the fact that most of the popup windows have gone, and have been replaced by a tabbed interface similar to current browsers.

The packages won't be uploaded to Debian officially yet. I want to find out how far away the final release is.

My latest post also triggered a few comments and mails. Johan sent me a nice pic about the funny things that can happen in a Freeciv game. :)

Other plans for Freeciv in Debian include the upload of new tilesets, at last, and sorting out the licensing doubts over freeciv-sound-standard, so people can use a sound pack easily.

I'm still playing too much MAME.

I have been wasting a few good hours tonight playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 under MAME while others re-edit the Tetrinet addiction that hit Debian a few years ago already. But this is completely offtopic.

A few minutes ago I was working on packaging Freeciv 2.0beta6 for Debian and realised I have refused to do a few things while playing due to ethical issues.

Freeciv is a free clone of the good and famous DOS "Civilization II" game, for UNIX and Windows. The player starts with a small civilisation and the goal of the game is to either defeat all the enemy civilisations or launching a spaceship that reaches Alpha Centauri before any other civilisation. You do this through population and military growth, and technology advances.

At some point of the game, you discover Nuclear Fission, and soon enough your people develops a nuclear bomb. Using a nuclear bomb against another civilisation has a few effects:

• your population will be so pissed at you that you might face a civil war or big strikes that damage your economy.
• the area targetted by the nuclear bomb will be very contaminated and this will contribute to damaging the global environment.
• your enemy will be quite fucked up

Well, it's a game and all, but until now, I have not been able to use the bomb against my enemies, human or computer-controlled. I haven't been able because "it is not right", and I think if I did, I would just quit the game and start a new one. This sense of not being a total asshole while playing Freeciv has also got me to invest more researchers into developing recycling technologies to keep my contamination levels low and not contribute to global warming instead of trying to discover new, more powerful war devices that would help me not being crushed by nearby civilisations.

I guess this makes me a bad Freeciv player. :)

Another year is gone... 2004 has been quite good for me: a job, another triathlon session, being more happy than unhappy, government change at last, moving to a new house...

But I can't forget the few things that have been worrying me throughout the year: the horrible situation that some people provoked in Iraq, the 11-M terrorist attack in Madrid, the death of my grandmother (the first close relative I lose), and very recently, the terrible tsunamis in southern Asia.

I expect that things can go a bit better in 2005. There's a lot of open doors ahead!

Anyway, I wish you all a happy 2005!

I've been with a bad cold since Tuesday, one day after Mako arrived to València. It started as a slight throat annoyance and has ended with a total dependency on a variety of pills which has been going for 3 days now.

Despite of this, Mako's visit was quite nice. I think we managed to let him go after having shown most of what one wants to see in València, and focusing on the historical monuments in the centre.

When he arrived, he had plenty of hours to explore the centre alone, as I hadn't arrived yet. He (and I, when told about it) was quite amazed about what he found at the top of the Micalet tower of the cathedral. At sunset, apparently everyone up there was smoking pot, which I guess is something you don't expect too much. On Sunday, we had a Christmas family meeting at my father's house, and just after that we went with Kiko, Brande and Marta to the Albufera, a quite unique lake we still have just a few kilometres away from València, to see his second sunset in a row. I think I hadn't seen a sunset in the Albufera, and it was pretty cool, despite the horrible cold wind, and no pot involved.

On Monday, I accidentally left him trapped in the flat, as I forgot to leave my keys with him. Oops! During the morning he would stay at home doing work while I was at office, and in the evening we'd try to do something. We visited the Glop, had tapas for dinner with Carlos, and went for food to a cool Kebab place near the stadium one night, and to the buffet another one. In Radio City, he showed how the American dudes attract the girls, and it worked quite well...

On Thursday, Kike gave us a tour through the centre of the city, and explained (with me as translator) the history of València since the pre-arab era. The explanations were very cool, because we walked into the buildings, and he gave us both architectonic and historic background for the Lonja de la Seda, the Mercat Central or the Cathedral. I don't know if he did, but I did enjoy the small facts that I didn't know yet about these buildings.

The last night, I was just too ill to go out, so after a brief visit to Terra, Kiko and Mako went to some Brazilian salsa club where according to the reports, they found HOT women all around.

Hopefully, soon it'll be our turn to cross the ocean and visit NYC. I'm really looking forward to that!

Last Friday I attended to the dinner Softcatalà organised for all of the members and supporters. Just 3 days after coming back from Mataró, I was on a train again for my shortest trip ever: less than 24 hours.

Softcatalà organises a dinner every year that helps all the contributors to put faces to names and nicknames, discuss a few of our problems in person and in general have a nice time. After two years of being heavily involved in the organisation, it was the first time I went to Barcelona to meet them.

Núria, one of the LliureX translators, came with me, as she's currently working on the OpenOffice 2.0 documentation Catalan translation. I arrived a bit early to the train station (for the second time in two weeks I arrived early to some place!), and while I waited for Núria to show up, I saw two police men asking two immigrants for their documentation. I guess I couldn't help looking at them (the policemen) in dislike as I passed near them. They apparently noticed, and 10 minutes later they came over to where I was standing and asked for my documentation, and searched my bag and pockets, for absolutely no reason. One of them took my ID card away and spent 10 good minutes asking about my background through the radio. After a while, he handed the card back and they went away, not even saying "thanks" or anything. As this brings some old memories back, they managed to piss me for the following half hour.

Just as the policemen went away, Núria appeared and we got on the train, which left the station 30 minutes late for apparently no reason. After a long chat, we arrived at Benicarló, where an 80 year old man got on the train and sat next to us. As he sat, he started talking to us, and at first we didn't react too much, as we didn't know what the stuff was about. He talked about how sucky people are now in our society, as they only think about things that benefit themselves. He asked "What do you do to help the rest of the world?". Of course, I didn't even try to explain what Free Software is about... :)

He linked this topic to explain us how fucked his life was, and how his family ignored him. Honestly, I couldn't feel too sorry, because just listening at him you could tell he was a very conservative man, with very sexist ideas and all of that, but neither Núria and I found a polite way to stop him and get rid of him. He kept talking, and every once in a while, Núria turned her head slightly to see how I was reacting, as she was about to explode in laughter. Everytime she did this, I thought I would burst in laughter myself, but we managed to show some respect for the man. In the end, we said we were going to the cafeteria to have some food, and fleed the wagon.

Once in Barcelona, we got to the place quite easily, a Via Fora! in the barri de Gràcia, where most of the attendees were already waiting around the table. We met Jordi Mas, Jesús, Mireia, Toni, Marc, Òscar and others and we had a nice meal, even if we were quite tired and sleepy and the place was very noisy.

After the dinner, most of the people quickly left the place and for a moment, it was just Núria, Toni and me. Núria and I would be sleeping at the house of one of her friends, who lived quite far away, and worked until 3:30 in a pub. Our idea was to go to the place to wait for her, but then we found Jordi Mas and a bunch more that hadn't gone yet, and decided to have a drink in some bar. At 2, we were kicked out, and it was too late to take the Metro, so Toni came with us to the barri del Raval, which meant a a 1:30h walk. We got there, and Toni had to leave, but unfortunately Ana wasn't home yet, so Núria and I had to sit on the street for like one hour until she appeared. At that point, I was freezing, and quickly went to sleep, at around 5 in the morning.

I woke up at 10 and got out of the sleeping bag at 11, just as Ana's flatmate left her room too. She seemed pretty puzzled, as she didn't have a clue of what I was doing there, but anyway... I left the flat before Núria got up (even if she said she'd wake up when she heard noises) and phoned my uncles, which luckily were around the Plaça de Catalunya area. At their house I had a nice shower, downloaded a Ubuntu CD for my cousin and had lunch with them.

Unfortunately not long after I left for the train station, as my train left at 16:00, and there was no way I could get one a bit later: Mako was already in València waiting for my arrival.

Oh well, the 8 days quickly expired and yesterday I had to return to València. I wish I could have stayed until the end of the show, I always miss the last day's party...

I spent Monday reminding myself that it was my last day at the Conference, which made me feel a bit sad. Mixing that with the remains of the Ubuntu virus, made my last day at the conference not the greatests of all...

I woke up around 10 minutes late for the group session, and a series of laptop lockups made time fly until 13:00, where we had our great "lunchpack". The cheese sandwich was delicious :P and I managed to steal a few extra bananas to compensate the lack of "bocadillo". I discovered some clever dudes ordering pizza in the lobby, but it was too late.

The rest of the evening was spent packing up, doing a few Debian packages and filling in the paperwork for travel expenses and then trying to print it using the printer lu had previously broken (according to LaMont, at least). After unbreaking it (ie, removing the plastic protector to the new toner). When it was dinner time, kiko and I agreed that going to the same place we had gone the night before was a great idea, and soon had a few people that would follow us. Too bad Mark had other plans for the Launchpad people: their fate involved pizza in the hack room that night. Of course, there was no swimming that day either. Oh well.

Another group joined us in the lobby, and then another one outside the hotel, and then another one as we walked to the centre. Suddenly, we were a group of 18, not 6, but we still managed to fit in a long table in the restaurant. During dinner, Jeff was loud enough to annoy the waiter, who ended up yelling at him "Shut up!". Of course, Jeff did. The food at this restaurant is very good, but I didn't expect that my first plate, a salad crepe, would be so big, so I couldn't finish the spaguettis.

I had a very nice chat with lulu at the restaurant, I think I'm going to miss her quite a bit in the next conference, and I really wish her luck in her new adventures! She introduced me to Charles, the South African dude that was around the conference who speaks a variety of South African languages. Of special interest was one which lots of "clicks" phonemas, which are totally impossible to pronounce for me. It'd be very cool to learn an African language. But I guess Arabic is first on the list...

Back at the hotel, I said goodbye to everyone at the hackroom, and thanked Mark for this new opportunity. It's been a fantastic week! Erinn said she'd go up to my room to exchange signatures, but she never did, even if I was awake well after 2AM. Boo, helix! After finishing the packing up (and realising I really had lost one of my gloves), I went to sleep, after asking Sjoerd to put his alarm clock at 5AM too, as I could not oversleep at all.

Just a few hours later the alarms went off and a long day started: of course, there was no breakfast for anyone at 5:20 in the hotel, but the lobby man suggested that I went early to the train station, where the cafe should be open at that time. Having nothing better to do, I left the hotel, and discovered everything was closed at the station too. So, hungry and very sleepy, took the 5:56 train to Barcelona, arriving to Sants with more than enough time to fetch my 7AM train to València.

3 hours later, I was in the Metro to get to work, and uppon arriving there, I discovered my clothing wasn't the best for the ocassion: we had to go to see the LliureX presentation by the Valencian Minister of Education. At least, I could go home slightly early, although I never got a well deserved nap.