Those not following Debian development closely might have missed the Debian release team opening the doors for a GNOME 2.8 upload to unstable. Today, the first libraries have started hitting incoming and are building in the buildd network. The end goal is, of course, to ship sarge with GNOME 2.8.

We hope to have the whole thing uploaded by chunks in the next few days. While seb128 is confident about everything going well, I can't help being quite nervous about it, given how some past experiences went. We're doing uploads with extreme care, though. Everything should be alright.

Due to some concerns expressed by Kamion and vorlon, we'll have to leave out a few new GNOME 2.8 modules from the default install. Most noticeably, evolution won't be installed by default when someone does a desktop install. Also, gnome-volume-manager won't replace magicdev as the default automounting device for now, as sarge's official kernel is 2.4, and gnome-volume-manager depends on Linux 2.6 features. All of this is because the space in the first Sarge CD is a bit too tight for us to add all the new GNOME modules. It'll be easy to install the missing bits though.

We'll post more stuff as it happens. :)

My 16 year old bike was stolen around 3 hours ago, and I'm really going to miss it... It's not the first time this happens, as 3 years ago my new bike was stolen just 6 months after buying it, but this one was special. It had been my bike for 16 years, and I've been using it as my main urban vehicle for nearly 9 years.

Today we had a triathlon club meeting, and I had to go back to fetch the bike to my mother's street, where I had tied it to a sign post. When I got there, the bicycle was there. I went up to leave my bag and a chair I was carrying, and 3 minutes later when I came down it was gone. A man in the street said someone had cut the thick lock and run away with it just one minute before, but he didn't manage to see his face.

Probably it was one of the many drug-addicts that live around the area near the neighbourhood, and will try to sell it in the Sunday market. I'll be there. Fucking assholes.

[ Completely irrelevant story below, unless you were around that night ]

The other day I wrote about my stay at Madrid for the Jornadas GNOME Hispano, and said we were going to Madrid to have dinner and then go out.

My fears weren't unfounded. I was forced (ok, maybe not forced, say... induced) by hordes of evil Madrileños to drink, as they probably know I succumb quite easily to that drug. First, Grex prepared a dinner in a tapas bar near the Plaza de España.

This dinner basically consisted in eating little and drinking quite a bit. After I (voluntarily) had my first beer, my glass of wine would never be empty, as there was someone around who would quickly refill it as soon as I finished it. Anyway, after a while we went to a pub, where among other things, acs challenged me to a press-ups contest. I managed to win (you suck, acs!) even if I didn't feel my arms. At one point we were out on the street again, and I was missing my wallet. 5 minutes later, it was found in acs' pocket, who was probably more drunk than me (and that has its merit).

Garnacho was kind enough to take me to the hostal, which I would have never found alone, and offered to translate my attempts to communicate with the hostal guy to get my room opened. Nothing to exciting until here, besides I really don't like being drunk. What an image must I have given around Madrid...

Ok, so my train back home was at 9:00AM. At 8:27 or so, Carlos managed to wake me up. "Dude, it's 8:30". I think I managed to be ready in about two minutes, rushed down and hoped that I didn't have to change trains in the tube to get to Atocha. The hangover was quite bad, or probably I was still drunk... at the station, I waited a few minutes for the next train, and kept looking at my mobile phone. "11 minutes, 3 stops. I can make it still".

There were two men with suitcases and luggage in the same wagon, and when we arrived to the Atocha tube station, they stepped out of the train. My spinning head managed to connect two events: "men with luggage stepping out" = "I'm at the Puerta de Atocha RENFE station". I followed them, and after a few seconds. I realised there was no indication of how to get to the railroad station. I ask the men... "Oh, that the next tube station", and at that exact moment the doors in the train close. FUCK!

Next train went by 5 minutes later. 4 minutes to go. I rush out of the tube, carrying heavy bags with me, rush to the railroad station and when I get there, I am told the train has left one minute ago. The rest of the morning involved waiting 2.5h for the next train, suffering a horrible hangover alone, in a stupid station, not being able to read my book or study any Valencian and getting a smoking ticket for the next train. D'oh! At least I saw a nice demonstration of a support group for the Saharaui people, which was nice.

In the train, I managed to find a seat in the non-smoking wagon after an hour. An American couple sitting right next to me demonstrated how sucky you Americans are at spelling. "How do you spell 'recommend'?". The guy thinks for a few seconds... "Two c's, 'reccomend'". Ugh!

I arrived at Valencia at 3PM, and at home at 4, way too late for lunch. After the horrible train trip, I needed a 3 hour long nap.

Yesterday I came to Madrid to attend to the GNOME Hispano meeting. After a few hours of train, I arrived here, and have been attending to the different talks and workshops scheduled.

The first surprise came when during the lunch someone said I should talk about "something" in the unallocated space available due to a talk that had been cancelled. As Carlos could use a bit more time to prepare his Ubuntu talk, I accepted to babble about how the Debian GNOME team was formed and how we coordinate to package the GNOME Desktop releases and other related packages. Despite barely no preparation (half an hour before the talk, people could see me asking "so, what should I talk about" in #gnome-debian), people say it went ok and I managed to fill 45 minutes without talking about totally uninteresting stuff.

When we left Uni, we pretended to have dinner at Fresc Co, but we spent around one hour to get the car parked in Madrid, so we couldn't make it. Instead, we decided to have a tiny Kebab near the hostal and after that we quickly went to bed.

Today I had to get up way too early, but the day has been quite productive. I, as a LliureX team member, have made interesting contacts with the folks from Guadalinex and Linex, and probably we'll be able to come to some agreement to fund a few Free Software projects that really interest us, libburn probably being one of them, along with it's GNOME frontend, and maybe Mergeant, for database manipulation. We're also in touch now to do a11y work and other stuff that we all badly need.

I also had the inevitable debate about the goodness of Componentised Linux with Ismael, which ended up with me not being too convinced about its advantages... we'll have to keep an eye on it though, as it seems our brother projects from Andalucía and Extremadura are moving towards it.

In the evening, we had cool talks about a variety of topics like freedesktop.org, Linex, GNOME System Tools and a general What would you change in GNOME? BOF that ended up being very interesting, all directed by Garnacho, Fer and Carlos García Campos. It's been a pleasure to be around here and meet them all.

The meeting is about to end at this point (as soon as the ongoing GNOME backup talk finishes), and we'll go to Madrid to have dinner, and after that, who knows. I need to be in Atocha at 9:00 to fetch my train so I hope the night doesn't get too complicated...

We've got a cool new Linksys wireless router at the flat, so I started looking for a PCI wireless adapter. This kind of hardware is that kind of stuff you've really want to be sure about before buying, because Linux support for the different chipsets varies a lot depending on minor details. Unfortunately, the boxes of the products in the stores never give specific details and you never know what you've got until you get home and stick it into your computer.

Nearly three weeks ago, after having waited for over two weeks to get a Conceptronics card in my usual computer store, I went to a big electronics shop and got a D-Link card. Of course, there was no indication of what kind of chip this would be, and I didn't carry a printed list of supported stuff with me, so I decided to buy it and try my luck. When I got home, I discovered in horror it was a Broadcom, and quickly went back and got another one, as these cards only work with evil binary-only drivers.

The second try revealed an Atheros chip inside. Even if this was looking better, the available Linux driver doesn't seem to be included in the stock Debian kernel image. Probably because there's some non-free/binary part to it.

At this point, the local show finally got stock of the Conceptronic cards, which besides being very cheap, were reportedly working for most people. The one I got, a new revision, had a RaLink chip, which at first sight appeared to be supported for Linux by upstream directly. Too bad: the current 2.6 kernel froze my box everytime I started pumping some traffic through the card. Argh!

Two days ago I went to the big store again to return the second card, and saw they had new stuff, including SMC2802W. After assuring this couldn't fail (Prism logo in the box and high success rate from other users), I decided to have another go. GAH! Sure, the card is a Prism, but it's not the same SMC2802W everyone's using. Those are V1, while mine is V2:

0000:00:09.0 Network controller: Intersil Corporation Intersil ISL3890 [Prism GT/Prism Duette] (rev 01)
0000:00:09.0 0280: 1260:3890 (rev 01)
        Subsystem: 1113:ee03

The driver loads, but when you configure the interface, the kernel starts spitting stuff and you get no link at all:

eth1: mgmt tx queue is still full

Oh well. At this point, I'm considering conceeding a little bit to ugly solutions like using ndiswrapper for a while, as people report that more or less work, while the prism54 driver is fixed or enhanced to support this new hardware. I'm open to suggestions and advice too, as I'm a bit fed up of all of this story. Does anyone know if it's a safe bet to wait for a better driver? Should I expect for this to take a long time? If I need to return the card to the store, I should do it at the end of next week, so I have a bit of time to decide still. TIA!

Last night I stayed up until 4AM listening to the SER radio station and looking at websites with live coverage of the US elections. Despite the predictions, at 3:45 or so, the radio started saying things were looking bad, and being completely exhausted, I decided to went to bed and learn the (suspectingly terrible) outcome in the morning.

This morning my mother came in to wake me up and the first thing I said was "It's Bush, right?". Nearly two hour laters I still can make up my mind to accept this reality. It's just not right: how can someone that has fucked up so many things be elected (let's not talk of re-election because that's just not true) again?

Some people warn me that this is perfectly possible because the news stories your average american watches on TV has nothing to do with what the rest of the world sees. I guess it's an edulcorated vision of war, total ignoring of famine in large areas of the world, propaganda about how good capitalism is for everyone, no information about global warming and what is causing it, no images, figures or statistics of how many people, both Iraqi and American are dying in the war, and so on, all mixed with the traditional patriotic stuff.

We appear to be in the same black hole we were thrown into by the US Supreme Court now. I guess we'll have to accept this and start hoping that maybe George W. Bush starts using his handful of neurons and stops being Cheney's puppet. From what I read, it'd be cool if Laura Bush started talking a bit about politics at home, maybe that helped a bit too.

Those who have closely followed the elections, is there any kind of promise from the Bush team to regulate/promote environmental policies like vehicles that consume less gas, protection of what's left of the American forests, etc.? Is Alaska safe still?

I really hope things change in the following four years, even if it's just a tiny little bit. If not, can you imagine what will be left of the middle east by 2008? Iran, Syria, Lybia, North Korea: are you prepared?

Sorry for the rant, I'm feeling somewhat better now. :/

Pretty please!

Tomorrow is the US Presidential Election, and unfortunately only US citizens can vote, although many, many aspects of our lives in the next four years will depend on its outcome. It sucks to be a de-facto US colony and be third-class citizens that aren't allowed to vote.

It sucks that after these long four years with Bush in office, with so many things done so wrong, half of the Americans are about to vote for him. Seeing this from Europe, it makes no sense at all: their economy is completely fucked, their environmental policies basically don't exist, and the brightest idea that has come out from the Oval Office during the last term has been the infamous preemtive war policy that all of these nuts have been enforcing.

Americans have been lied repeatedly during scandals like the Enron bankrupcy, the Medicare costs "underestimation" and the long series of Iraq's WMDs reports and war-related issues, including very obscure contracts for Cheney's company Halliburton. Unemployment has risen quite spectacularly, and the social differences in one of the most powerful economies are bigger today than in 2000. Despite of this and many other negative facts, people still trust these dudes, when all they look for is to further enrich themselves.

Bush and Cheney have killed over 10.000 iraqi people since the war started. How many of them were "terrorists"? How many were women and children who were bombed in their homes? Where is the promised freedom for Iraq, now that people can't even go out to avoid being torn apart by some random car bomb on their street? How many people are in prison without official charges against them in the name of this war against terror? What is terrorism, anyway?

If something terrorizes me tonight is the thought of four more years with this dumb ass leading, if leading is the word, the most powerful country in the planet. I really believe the future will be bloody if this madness continues.

And the worst part is that the only alternative, thanks to the braindead electoral system in the US, is only comparable to your average right wing European party. I can't imagine having to decide between the extreme-ultra-religious-right-wing and the right wing. I'd probably seek for refuge in Canada or Europe... (well, except France was in the same mess not to long ago ;)

As much as I dislike Kerry, I really hope to wake up on Wednesday with the relief of knowing the American people have kicked George W. Bush out of the White House. More than 70% of the Europeans (according to recent polls) probably share my wish... FOAD, Bush!

The people at Softcatalà have been awarded one of this year's National Prizes for Television, Radio Broadcast, Internet and Telecomunications of the Generalitat de Catalunya, for the Internet category.

Softcatalà is a non-profit, volunteer organization that has been working since 1997 to bring Catalan to the IT world and normalizing its usage. These people have been translating software for many years, and need to take most of the credit for the current situation of Catalan in the software world. While Softcatalà ocassionaly works on non-free software translations, with the rise of Free Software the focus of their work has clearly shifted towards it. They are responsible for the widely distributed Catalan translations of OpenOffice, Mozilla products, GNOME and even books like Stallman's Free as in Freedom. Besides the translations, one of the big achievements, in my eyes, is that their Style Guide and Wordlist are the de-facto standard policy documents when translating software into Catalan. Maybe involuntarily or as a secondary goal, they are bringing many, many people to GNU/Linux just because currently it's the only way that people have to use their computers integrally in their mother tongue.

I officially joined Softcatalà when I started working on GNOME 1.5 translations, and today's announcement has filled me, like the rest of the team, with a nice, warm feeling for this unexpected reward for many hours banging at Emacs po-mode.

Today is a big day for the Catalan Free Software communities. Congratulations, everyone!

Yesterday I took the decision to abandon the group and get back early to València, after having completed 200 kilometres of the cycling trip.

The first day was very tough, as we started nearly at sea level and went up to 1.400 metres at some points. Most of Saturday's journey was climbing up, sometimes during 15 kilometres without a single small rest in the road, and when the bicycle bags were heavy and full of food. We should have tried to find a lighter route for the first day, but it's quite difficult in that area. We already changed it slightly to avoid climbing the road to Fredes and went to Boxar, discovering that the route to Boxar wasn't easy either. After lunch and a few more hours of steep roads, we arrived at Morella, which was packed with tourists... we had to open our way through the crowded streets on our way to the square where we wanted to rest. Not long after, we set off for our final destination, Iglesuelas del Cid, and found that the road from Morella to Cinctorres was a lot harder than we imagined. We stopped in Cinctorres for a few minutes to eat some chocolate cookies, which are the secret to keep on pushing the pedals, and continued our way up, after being warned by the people in the town that we had some 6 or 7 bad kilometres ahead until Portell.

After the first 3 or so it was clear we wouldn't make it to Iglesuelas, as the Sun was quite low already. When we were mostly there, the real problems started for me, as it seems I had too many cookies and my stomach didn't like it. Also, given the lack of real cycling training in the last too many months, my left quadricep started to get annoyed by the constant activity, and hurted quite a bit. In Portell de Morella, we had dinner and looked for some shelter where to sleep, and found a nice place with a roof in the main square of the town.

At 11 or so the three of us were inside the sleeping bags, but we were too near the town's bar, and there was a lot of sound. Also, we discovered that the square was used by the young people to meet before going to other towns spend the night, so we couldn't sleep until they all were gone. At 4AM or so, two girls came back from their night, one of them crying loudly because some boy had been bad to her. They didn't notice us, so they kept talking loudly and crying, until I kindly asked them to go away, which luckily they did.

A few hours later, at dawn, we got up, packed again and set off to Iglesuelas without having much breakfast. The landscape in this area was beautiful, and after climbing up a mountain, we could enjoy the sight as we descended. I didn't know Iglesuelas is so cool, it's full of small palaces, streets made of stone and cool buildings. We had breakfast there and continued our way towards Gúdar and Rubielos de Mora. In the middle of this was Linares de Mora, which we couldn't imagine would be so terrible.

An hour or so after leaving Iglesuelas, we finally met with Kiko, who joined the group, and started to climb the Puerto de Linares. We started to have strong wind against us, and my quadricep said "enough" after 1 hour of cycling on the steep roads with very cold wind.

When we finally made it, going down to Linares was nearly worse than the climbing, as the wind literally blew us from one side of the road to the other one. I have never ridden a bicycle I had so little control over, it was really scary, but luckily the heavy bags behind us probably made less difficult to stay on top of the bicycles.

At that point, I was completely out of fuel, with a very bad cold and muscular problems in my legs, but above all, my morale was at minimum. I started thinking about the possibility of abandoning, as Kiko's parents were near the area and could easily pick me up at some point in the road. When we stopped in Rubielos to have lunch and I thought how much I had suffered, I took the decision to end the adventure there, not being too sure of how my legs would react to the third day.

Once I was back at home I've realized I took the correct decision because the cold is quite bad and my stomach isn't getting any better. Too bad I'll have to deal with some mockery when the rest come back, but I already knew that when I took the decision...

Next year, I hope we retake our plan to do the trip to Mallorca, which will be quite plain and nice...

Early on Saturday we'll set off for what will probably be the craziest and biggest adventure ever. Kike, Kiko, Raúl and I will start a cycling trip during all of the long weekend we have in Spain, travelling through four Spanish provinces in just four days.

Last year, we did something similar (Catalan) when we followed part of the route El Cid Campeador took while he conquered all of this land, centuries ago. The experience marked me a lot, because I had never travelled without knowing where I would sleep, or if we'd find something to eat that night. During 4 days and nights, we crossed the provinces of Teruel and Castelló, carrying all we needed on our bikes. In total, we completed something like 420 kms, after sleeping three nights under the stars.

This year, it's the same story, with a few major differences. The route is different, of course. We'll go to Vinaròs by car, kindly lifted by Raúl's dad, and from there, we'll travel to Ulldecona, Fredes, Morella, Camarilla, Alcalá de la Selva, Javalambre, Ademúz and Requena, where we'll fetch a train to València. In total, that's over 510 kms to complete in less than four days, which is pretty crazy.

If this isn't enough, Raúl is talking about not carrying a camping tent, to save some kilograms in our "luggage". Normally we wouldn't use it anyway, but it's good to know you have it behind you just in case you come across a storm.

And this takes us to the worst part. The weather forecasts say we're going to be soaking wet pretty soon after we start, and rain will be a constant all over the four days. I can imagine the cold getting inside my wet maillot already and not being able to change clothes... or getting to a village and not finding some dry place where we can sleep.

We're prepared to do it, anyway. It's going to be tough, but I'm very looking forward to my first computer-free vacation in the last many months.