Last Monday was the official start of the new triathlon season for the team. Some of the team people had started way before, early in September, but I decided to wait for the first official day.

This year we've got quite a few newcomers, including two Italians and two very young athletes (a 17 y/o boy and a 18 y/o girl), and they seem to like the team. Probably this is because the training is very easy right now: no swimming yet (we're looking for a suitable new swimming pool) and no cycling yet for many as they lack road bicycles. I'm pretty unmotivated to train right now, for a number of reasons, but attended the first to days to more or less welcome them and to see if I got thrilled to start a new season. But not really... I guess the reasons for this lack of motivation are not easy to ignore.

During the two years I've been on the team I've mostly subtituted my friends with new ones, all related to the triathlon world. I mostly didn't find time to visit or do things with my other friends, even if I kept thinking about phoning them or going to their places to see what they were up to. Most of the time I never did, because I just forgot, having too many things in my head, or no time at all to do it. I want to change this, and the only solution is to focus triathlon in some other way that doesn't require most of my free time for trainings. After all, I'm not going to win races or feel better with myself even if I train 10 hours each day, so there's no need to...

Also, my schedule is going to be a lot tighter this year, with work and uni getting quite intense, so that means less free time. My closer teammates progressed a lot last year, and they have grand training plans for this new season. One day we met to talk about these plans and I couldn't help feeling completely out of the group, as the objectives were completely different.

But on the other hand, my flatmates are triathletes, so that might help me going out to train every now and then. We'll see soon, when the training starts getting serious. For now, I'll just try to go out for a run when I feel like it, and avoid it when it feels like an obligation.

Andrew, good luck with your new sport!

Yesterday I wasn't able to log into my home server from the office, and I assumed the load had skyrocketed again, as it happens every now and then. Timing was quite bad because I'm very busy in the evenings these days, but I went to my father's house to see what was going on, and when I got there I saw the server was mostly idling. WTF? Shortly after I noticed my local named wouldn't resolve barely anything, and I couldn't ssh out, as the connection would hang in the middle of the handshakes. I started looking at my 3com router configuration, seemed ok; rebooted the box, nothing changed; started cursing, which changed nothing either... until I realized it was probably a telco thing. I told my father "it'll probably be fixed automagically" and left the house.

When I came back from training, I managed to ssh in and quickly tested the downstream speed. As I suspected, the downtime was caused by Telefónica tweaking our stuff to upgrade the ADSL's of the area from 256/128 to 512/128. Uplink still sucks, but oh well, we got this for "free" (ie, we still pay way to much for crappy connections in Spain, but we're slowly getting what the rest of Europe seems to have).

Moreover, today the cable company finally opened up the street and installed their stuff to offer their service. 5 or 6 years late...

This evening I went with Kiko and Kike to see an exposition about the thousands of children from the areas loyal to the Spanish Republic who were evacuated to different destinations outside of Spain during the Spanish Civil War.

I'm passionate about anything regarding this war, and I really don't know why. At the time of the uprising of the fascists led, the National Labour Confederation, of libertarian socialist ideals had a lot of support in Spain, and led much of the resistance against Franco's forces in Madrid, Barcelona and València. That's probably one reason that makes the Civil War so fascinating to me, but there are others, like the stories of things that happened in Catalunya during those hard years, as told by my grandmother, or the awful life the defeated had after Franco won the war and the long dictatorship started.

The exposition has a lot of material regarding the fate of all these children who's parents sent outside so they could avoid the bombings, hunger and horror of the war. Of the 32.000 children that were evacuated, 20.000 went to France, some other few thousands to England, Wales and Scotland, Belgium, USSR and Mexico. Denmark and Norway didn't recieve any, but funded a few colonies in France. Other non-official initiatives from Switzerland, USA and other countries also sent money in to help them. Of course, this doesn't count the many which crossed the French border to exile with their families, which probably would add a few 300.000 more.

You can see American and English stamps and postcards with "Help the Spanish children" messages for fundraising, and assorted objects like dresses, shoes, dolls, etc. which people kept from the day they crossed the border. The exposition is divided into different areas which explain the details of how things went for these children depending on the different destinations.

The kids sent to Mexico and the USSR probably had a very tough time, because it took a long while for them to return to Spain, if they ever did, as Mexico and the USSR didn't recognize the new Spanish government. Those sent to Russia quickly faced the siege of Leningrad, and those in Mexico lost the government support when their president was replaced. In France, many had to live in refugee camps which were quite bad, and many who were old enough to carry a gun soon went out to fight against the nazis.

Every now and then you could find a letter or two written by a child to their parents in Spain, telling them how well they were being treated, how quick they were learning French, or that they were 10kgs heavier than when they arrived. There was one letter, though, that moved me so much that I was very close to burst in tears. It's a farewell letter of a man in prison, a few hours before being shot by the fascists. He tells her daugher and wife that he's innocent and has nothing to be sorry for, and asks them to redo their lives after his death. The letter ends with a "I will die thinking about you", which made me feel my eyes a bit wet.

There's a nice website with nice pictures and information about the Spanish exile, if you're interested. If you're in València, this is a must see, though.

Getting a job meant a few things for me: getting up early, having to do a few things that go against my political views, dealing with cigarrette smoke, a severe cut in your time to do fun stuff, and a lot more. But of course, it had to happen some day, right? Not everything is bad, though. The income has helped me to finally go to live with a few friends, something I really was looking forward to, but couldn't afford at all.

We looked for a flat in Benimaclet, a neighbourhood which is in the North limit of the city and which had been an independent small town until a few decades ago, when València finally grew enough to make it part of itself. My father lived there for a few good years when I was 8 years old, and now most of my friends, triathletes and non-triathletes, live there, so I really wanted to find some house there.

We were very lucky, and found a nice flat in the area which had renewed bathrooms and kitchen, and enough room for 3 persons and 6 bicycles. I got a bit unlucky in the drawing to assign rooms and got the smaller one. It is really small, and I'll have to squeeze my brain to get all my stuff in it. I'm already considering buying a TFT monitor because the CRT will just take up too much space (and it's showing some signs of dying sometime soon anyway), and anything I want to add to the room will have to be screwed to the wall, as just the bed, wardrobe and desk fill up the floor surface.

My flatmates are two of my triathlon club teammates, Kiko and Rubén, which have moved already. I've been a bit too busy lately, but will start living there this week. We'll see how it goes... last Thursday we held an inauguration dinner with different friends, which was quite cool. Hopefully there'll be pics up on our site soonish.

I couldn't resist to publicly thank Thiemo Seufer for all the invisible work he (with others) has done to fix a series of problems in the mipsen toolchain. Thanks to his work on binutils and gcc, mozilla and offspring are now compilable on our 11 architectures, which was a quite big sarge blocker.

Sometimes I feel this kind of jobs are not rewarded by users as much as "package the latest GNOME/KDE/X/whatever" kind of job because it's not as visible, unless you pay attention to apt-listchanges or the BTS. But without them, there would be no GNOME or KDE packages at all!

The observative Debian developers will have noticed that the Debian ALSA team hadn't been as good as usual at delivering new upstream versions a few days^H^H^H^Hweeks after it was released.

There were several reasons for this. The three team members (StevenK, ElectricElf and me) got busy in other fronts, and the bug count didn't stop going up. At one point, the BTS was too full of ALSA bugs for us to be able to handle it, which just added a bit more to the problem, because we never found time to sit down and do triage.

Also, when we started the Alioth project, SVN or Arch weren't available, so we went for a CVS setup which involved importing the upstream sources to CVS and then working on top of that. I never quite understood why we needed the whole sources in CVS, but as I never got involved in the import business, I was more or less ok with the setup. We would then use cvs-buildpackage to build the stuff, and it worked quite well.

The problems came when ElectricElf started to be busy and away from IRC. I dared not try to import the new upstream versions myself, as I had managed to break the import twice in the past (no, it's not so trivial), requiring Elf intervention to cleanup after me. StevenK more or less managed to do stuff, but when something went wrong, he also needed ElectricElf to look after the repo. In short, we were depending on the Elf, who was just too busy to do the stuff.

ALSA 1.0.6 was released over a month ago, and we hadn't tried seriously to update the packages until now, because nobody was stepping up to do the import stuff. So the three of us recently considered adding new blood to the ALSA group, and we asked Thomas Hood, who had been very helpful doing some BTS work on our bugs in the past, to join us.

The last week has seen new vitality in pkg-alsa activity thanks to him, but again the CVS issue was a showstopper. We managed to do more or less sane alsa-oss and alsa-utils uploads, but importing alsa-driver, which is always the bitch, failed again. Thomas and I agreed that the setup was way overegineered for a few packages that never touch the upstream sources directly anyway, as we use dpatch, and I considered switching to SVN. StevenK is an Arch dude though, and was reluctant. This morning, to my surprise, he told us we could try SVN so I rushed to import our stuff in.

The result is that after the quick and clean import of just our debian/ dirs into our new SVN repo, we've done 1.0.6 uploads of the alsa-foo packages in less than one day. And we've got more fixes on the way...

Hmm. This was a long way of saying "ALSA packaging moved to SVN". Procrastination is sometimes like this... :)

Manoj: sorry if I moaned about cvs-buildpackage before... nothing wrong with that, it's just our ex-setup which was quite inconvenient...

Time flies and today was the day.

I went to the dentist to get the first of my wisdom teeth removed. I went in a bit nervous, like a 10 year old, but I was more annoyed than frightened about the removal. I was quite happy of having grown up with no teeth decay and with all my teeth in good shape, and now I had to get some removed even if they are healthy.

Anyway, it all lasted for about 25 minutes, including the short wait for my turn and the wait for the anesthesia to do its job. After that, the doctor started pulling and doing stuff and voilà, it was out, and my mouth full of blood. He gave me my tooth so I can do whatever I want with it. It's long, and the part that was exposed is cleaner than what wasn't. I'm keeping it for a while, maybe I get a great idea of what to do with four long Wisdom teeth. I tried to get two teeth out at once, but the doctor said it wasn't possible, as that would involve both sides of the mouth, and that can get annoying when eating. The next two to go out will involve surgery. That won't be as easy as today...

The rest of the evening was spent at Kike's house and trying to go to the bicycle demonstration for the "Day without cars", but we got to the starting point late and never found them. So, while we looked for it, Kike told me Ferran Torrent is about to publish the third part of the book saga "Societat limitada" and "Espècies protegides". Not finding the group of bicycles, we moved to FNAC to look for the new book, but it isn't out yet. I'll raid the "Tres i quatre" bookstore to get it as soon as it's out. I can't wait.

Oh, before the dentist I met Kike and Raúl to plan our next cycling trip during the October 9-12 long weekend. The route is decided, and it's going to be *tough* once again!

Even if I said I had finished season 2004, I ended signing up for the last triathlon of the 2004 calendar, in Pinedo (hey, it was free after all!). This was a wild idea, even if the triathlon is sprint distance and oriented to attract new people to triathlon, with easy courses for the bike and run. I have not trained at all since I came back from Oxford, and today it showed a bit...

First, I went to Pinedo after having very, very little sleep during the whole weekend, and very tired. I was one of the first guys to get boxes setup, so 40 minutes before the start I was walking around half naked in the cold of dawn.

When it was finally time to get into water to warm up, I started waking into the sea and came across a large rock that was hiding inside the dirty sea water (Pinedo's is the first beach near the entrance to Valencia's big sea harbour, and it sucks), and hit my knee quite hard. I didn't give this much importance besides the usual loud cursing and swearing, and went swimming for a while. When I came out to get ready for the triathlon start, someone told me "hey, what the fuck is that?", pointing at my leg. Eww, it was completely red, from the blood coming out of my knee. It didn't hurt, so I just cleaned it with some water and a few minutes later the race started.

As usual, I got many blows until I got to the first buoy, and I wasn't getting any good sensations. I came out of the sea quite behind my normal positions, I guess, and quickly came out for the cycling. I managed to link with the pack ahead of me and all was well until I completed the second lap of four. Then, the knee started to hurt a little, then a bit more, until I lost my group and a few others that came from behind. I was very close to abandon the race after the third lap, but decided to do the last 5 kilometres to see if the run was ok with my knee.

As soon as I started running, I realized my knee hurted still, so I abandoned after the first 500m because I didn't want to run the full 5 kilometres just to finish. I would if the triathlon was a bit interesting, but not this one...

A pitty, it's the first time I don't finish a triathlon I've started, and I've had worse injuries in other races...

After the race, there was a very cool race, an aquathlon, with phisically disabled people from the Valencian Disabled Sports Federation. It was great to see people who can't walk or have other mobility disorders swim some good 400 metres, get out of water and then race with their wheel chairs down the promenade.

After the adapted race, there were a series of aquathlons for children. I served as "buoy man" for the smaller ones (around 7 years), which had to swim 50 metres, so I stood in the middle of the sea with my teammate Montxi watching them come. That was great too, watching very young kids being introduced to this kind of sports that early.

The aquathlons were the only positive moments of a quite bad morning. I was quite fond of not having abandoned any race until now... :|

For a long time I had been thinking about abandoning my old nick Oskuro and start using something simple like jordi.

I picked up Oskuro 8 years ago, when I got involved in a MUD at University. As I came in just a few days after Josep and Raúl started the project, I was given the chance of participating in the development, so I had to pick a nickname. As I had no experience at all in role-playing, I found it difficult to come up with a cool nickname for my Demi-God character, and at some point someone suggested me "Oskuro", as I was going to play the role of the God with bad alignment. Well, how could I imagine at that time that this nickname would follow me until mid-2004 and that so many people would know me by my nick and not for my real name...

I was directly involved in the MUD development until a bit more than 3 years ago, when I joined Debian and the time I could use for mudding activities quickly vanished. I got in touch with Debian's IRC while I was mudding though, so the nick stuck with me in the Debian world. But hey, it's a stupid nick (translates to dark in English, if you don't mind the spelling mistake), and it doesn't make much sense anymore. Many people think I'm dark-skinned when my skin is pale and my hair slightly blonde... :)

I made this change on my jabber profile months ago, and today I finally changed my nick on OpenProjects and OFTC, not yet on GIMPnet as "jordi" is owned by Jordi Mas in that network. I guess I'll stick to jordim there, which is my *.gnome.org user name. I'll keep using both randomly as a transition, but at some point I'll abandon my old nickname for good. In short, look for me at jordi@OPN/OFTC on IRC!

Today's testing run finally allowed eog 2.6 to enter testing, which was the only missing piece of the GNOME meta-packages in testing. Sarge users will get a few new packages pulled by the gnome-desktop-environment and gnome packages, and new Sarge installs will finally get a complete GNOME 2.6 desktop installed.

The only big missing bit now is gdm 2.6, which is missing an arm build (already built, just not uploaded) of libselinux. With this version of GDM in Sarge, GNOME users will be able to shutdown the computer directly when they close their session, which is probably a feature many want to see in the release. And that's about it... I guess I'll do a final sarge upload with a few minor tweaks (version bumps and other tightening), and then will start to work on updating the dependencies for the GNOME 2.7/2.8 packages in experimental.

So, in short, Sarge finally has completed the GNOME 2.6 transition. Even before GNOME 2.8 is released upstream!