Argh, just two days left for me at the conference.

Friday 13th

Friday was a slow day, after the great stuff going on on Thursday. There were talks on the status of hardware support in Debian, laptop support and jamesh did a quick demo on PyGTK programing.

When work ended, people started doing fun stuff. Some went off to drink a bit getting prepared to swallow Antitrust. Others stayed at some rooms hacking and generally wasting time. Mako and I started to do plans for a great xmame game, but faced some problems (like a *huge* compile and total lack of roms) and postponed until some time later. Went to bed way too late, after not training at all.

Saturday 14th

On Saturday, breakfast ended at 10AM, which was a pain. I spent most of the morning in zombie mode, while Colin took a few dudes to Cambridge to spend the day. Those who stayed at Oxford had a quick lunch at the bar, consisting of hamburger (my first shit-food-like hamburger in about 5 years) with bacon, while I made arrangements with my friend Graham from Loughsborough to meet in Oxford. Around 15:30, Graham appeared and we went down to town, where we parked his car (I was horrified by the parking fares in England) and started walking around the city, after rejecting the idea of taking a tourist bus, as most of the interesting stuff is actually in the pedestrian-only areas of the city centre. We visited the University area, with the old library and church, which were very cool, and then went down to the Cathedral, which was interesting because it's so different to a common Spanish cathedral. In Spain, they tend to be tall but not so large. Oxford's isn't tall, but it occupies a very large block. Furthermore, it's located in one of the ends of the city, so just outside of it there's just countryside, with large areas of grass where people can stay. Looks a lot more friendly to me than the evil church in Spain at least. We didn't go inside the Cathedral because we had to pay, and most of the stuff seemed to be closed anyway. Back at the centre, we had a tea somewhere, and then decided to stay to have dinner, and managed to find The Turf Tavern, near the Bodleian Library, and just off the Venecian arch, very well hidden in a tiny alley.

The Turf Tavern is awesome. It's a very old, historic pub located in a building dating the 14th century, and it really feels like a traditional English pub (I guess, anyway ;). Graham said I should try their cider, which was very cool. The pub's backyard has a few ilustrations which talk about what famous people like Bill Clinton did there when they were young. Clinton assures he "didn't inhale", just filled his mouth with some, let's say not legal substance. Let's believe him... Those that are staying for the rest of the week in Oxford should not miss this place. Try the cider, too (but only if you don't have to drive back)!

We finally had dinner at some Italian restaurant near the bus station, as Graham's foot injury was starting to hurt again and we preferred not to walk too much more. The pizza was great, but I can't remember the restaurant's name. We briefly visited a pub in the same street, which was full of people quite older than us (30's/40's). I liked the music a lot more than the music you find in a normal pub in Spain, which kinda sucks. Graham objected though, as he said it's always the same music from the 80's. I guess it can get boring, yes. Not much later we were back at the hotel, where I showed him the conference centre a bit and where all the Canonical stuff is taking place, and finally Graham left at 23:00 or so, as he had a bit more than one hour of car to get home. I'm glad we managed to meet, I hadn't seen him in the last 3 months since he left València and we had a great time at Oxford. Oh, I got a very nice British Triathlon T-Shirt too, with long-sleeves. Perfect for the air-conditioning freezing hell here at the hotel.

Sunday 15th

Slow day again, after getting little sleep. After going down at 10 for breakfast, I went up to the room again to see if I could catch some interesting Olympics stuff on the BBC, but after gymnastics finished, they started doing boxing, which I fucking don't understand why it's an olympic sport. Bleh. It sucks that I'm not following the Olympic games at all, I don't even know when the nice swimming stuff is, or when athletics start. I just know the Olympic triathlon is next week, which should be perfect for me to watch on TV. Learned that not only Greece lost their two better athletes under doping suspect, but they also got beaten by *Mali* on football. Fun...

Went to the mini-pool just before lunch, when everyone else were stuck to the bar's TV sets watching F1. Of course, Schumacher won again, what a surprise. I tried getting some swim, but it was quite hard, with just around 12 metres of swimming pool. I got quite tired as I only could do around 6 strokes before turning around and going back, losing much breath, so after a while I just ended having fun or doing some short technique exercises. When I went out I was quickly reminded that the changing rooms at the gym are the maximum example of air-con hell in this hotel. There is air-conditioning inside the changing rooms, with a quite cold setup, which just makes you freeze when you get out of the shower all wet. This is just crazy. Thom says the hotel is just trying to show off. Well, it shows off stupidity. :) After more hamburger for lunch, Mako and I finally started playing some X-Mame, as he finally found the needed roms. "Man, this game's great" or "I'm... Batman!", he kept saying. We started a Captain Commando game, which we didn't finish, as we were called by Fabio to go down to the swimming pool again. We had a nice time there, doing races and stuff. Shortly after Enrico, Teo and seb128 joined.

We went to the Trout Inn after dinner (instead of looking at what we wanted to do with the i18n BOF on Monday morning), which is just at the opposite side of the Thames Path, just along the road to Wytham. The inn is huge, and we had a few beers and a nice time, until we were kicked out at a ridicolous time, bah! Lu, doko and I agreed to go running at another ridiculous time, 7:30AM, next morning, but that's another story.

I'm half-way into Friday and it seems I just arrived yesterday. I'm having a great time at the conference.

Yesterday was the most intensive day until now. As expected, I overslept a bit, just around 30 minutes. :) The program for the morning was interesting. It started with a one hour Desktop BOF which ended up lasting for around 4.5 hours. It was great to see the Desktop team discuss every single detail to an extreme, with some people saying "absolutely not!" and others "anything else would be un-con-sis-tent!". There are very cool ideas being thrown into this area of Ubuntu. I hope they can implement them all, it will plainly rock if they do. This BOF let me make up an idea of how the teams work at Canonical, I think I learned a lot just in this meeting. A website BOF followed, and Lulu and limi seemed to have things under control and very well thought. And at that time it was past 18:00 and I intended to go running. As I was heading to the stairs, Daf and Lulu grabbed me and I found locked up in another room, for the Translation BOF. Of course, I had entirely missed this one on the schedule, so I ended cancelling my plans and staying. The BOF involved all kinds of Debian translations, so I guess I was a bit helpful there.

And finally, it was 19:00, or dinner time. But I really wanted to go running, so I asked if I would be given food if I got back late to the restaurant, got a yes and rushed to change clothes and go out. Scott had suggested me that I went down the Thames Path which I had also spotted in my return during Tuesday's run. So I went out, barely warmed up and started running from the hotel road. Went down to the Trout Inn and the smell of nice food made me reconsider my decission of postponing food. I managed to defeat my stomach and continued. When I crossed the bridge, I understood that many of those gates I saw on Tuesday are actually not private property, and I could just open them. A few minutes after running along the canal I learned there's a zillion gates to open, actually. Every 200 metres. Luckily that was just at the beginning and soon I found myself running on a very nice path, after going past an old, abandoned church, with the Oxford Canal at my left. There were many people rowing in the canal, and others having walks or running too. The path was full of huge puddles, so I found myself practicing some obstacle jumps for Athens 2004. At some point the path widened and the grass was filled with lots of rabbit warrens. Lovely wabbits! I kept going on and on, delighted by the amount of animals that basically don't give a shit about you passing by half a metre away from them. There are cows, horses, ducks, some other aquatic black bird which is quite dumb and insisted in running ahead of me, and of course rabbits, which every now and then you found in the middle of the path before they slowly got out of the way. You don't see things like this in Spain too easily. Ahead of me there was a church tower which I decided to explore. I must have misscalculated the distance, because when I got there it was probably after half an hour of running (and after getting slightly lost, when I missed a signal saying that the path continued at the other side of the canal, going over a bridge), and the sun was nearly gone.

I went into the "town", saw it was probably bigger than a simple town (e.g, it was some part of Oxford, actually, but I didn't dare ask anyone "Excuse me, which town is this?", I prefer to spare the odd looks), found myself near the Westgate Hotel and The White House pub. This latter establishment made me think that if Mr. Let's Invade Another Country was inside I really wanted to get my ass out of there, so I started going back to Wolvercote. One hour after going out and 5 or 6 miles later I was back in the hotel, quite hungry, but it pays because discovering the Thames Path was great. It's perfect for running, as it's not a hard surface -- kilometres of soil and grass. I discovered the rest of people had either not started having dinner (Carlos' version), or were waiting for the second plate (Rob's). but in any case, I had a quick shower and joined the dinner, and managed to catch up with the rest as they started the dessert. A nice strategy to get rid of the waiting at dinner time. :)

After dinner, mako, jamesh, daf, Enrico, seb128, Carlos, fabbione and me started the tetrinet contest, which lasted for several hours, with seb128 winning, closely followed by me. For the first time, I went to bed at a sane hour, allowing me to get up in time for the 9AM meeting.

Sorry, I should have written this more than one day ago, but time flies at the Canonical conference.

As the GNOME team seems to have GNOME 2.6 more or less sorted out for Sarge, it was time to break something else. As breaking unstable is not the greatest idea now, the obvious target was experimental. :) It's not a "oh fuck, my desktop died entirely" problem, but it could affect Nautilus users quite a bit. Two days ago, gnome-vfs2 2.7.90 was uploaded, thus switching Debian's GNOME 2.7 to Free Desktop's MIME type format. Applications need to be updated to use the new system (which needs some registering in postinst) before nautilus will recognize the MIME types they provide. So the biggest problem you'll find is that stuff like gedit doesn't open when you click on a text file in nautilus, etc. This is being fixed right now, but it'll take some days to have it done. Fortunately, we have the patches Ubuntu has kindly provided, which will ease this task a lot.

On a related note, and as I said above, Sarge is now only missing gnome-games and eog to complete the GNOME 2.6 transition. These are blocked by the exif/tiff transitions right now, but are not considered critical for the Sarge release. That means, if they don't make it in in time, they won't block the Sarge release. Anyway, we hope it'll be solved soonish, still. What we do probably want to stick in Sarge whatever it takes is GIMP 2.0.x. The current version in testing is quite unacceptable.

Yesterday, mako did something really important. It's actually something this conference will be remembered for... After much planning and procrastinating, we finally moved the tetrinet.debian.net server (no, this link won't work with GNOME yet, but GTetrinet surely accepts patches, thanks ;) from my shitty Pentium 150Mhz, crappy ADSL-connected box to his very cool server at yukidoke.org. At the time of this writing, Mako probably hasn't ported the server configuration from natura to the new box, but it should happen soon. We discussed about resetting the highscores or leaving them as they are, and for now we'll not touch them. Our past tetrinet Gods can rest happily.

I guess mako and I can try to do some tetrinet contest tonight, in order to kick some ass after the Mao experience. We'll see.

Enjoy!

Tuesday 10th

Woke up at 8:15, looked out the window... DAMN IT, Still raining!

So Tuesday could have started a bit better. There was a very interesting talk by mvo and jdub on package management stuff, and then I entered NMU mode again. The tiff transitions is about to be completed, after a I uploaded a "fixed" jadetex ("fixed", because today I found out the NMU got reverted, and discussion is underway to see what needs to be done. After doing gnobog, only ivtools and grass are left. I'm currently doing a grass build, while it seems ivtools will be fixed by the maintainer. At some point in the morning, I discovered the sky is also blue in the UK, as it finally cleared. Lunch was very good, and as it's self-service, it was pretty quick too. :) During the evening I continued with some NMUs and had some fun as jdub and mdz did some test installs of some well-known commercial distros. Jeff was quite amused by the lack of polish of some parts of their installers.

One hour before lunch, I finally decided to stop sitting and eating and do something about next week's triathlon. I asked at reception if there's some nice place where I can run that isn't all asfalt (bad for my periostitis), but she said there wasn't any. They suggested me going to the right side as soon as I went out the hotel, and so I did. Just a few hundred metres away I crossed a channel filled with boats, and continued down the road, out of the urban area. There was no traffic, but still, not being used at running at the right side I jumped into a narrow trail just at the edge of the road, in an attempt to run on soft surface. That proved to be a bad idea, as not much later I stepped on a rock hiding behind the overgrown grass and I nearly break my ankle. Luckily all my body elasticity appears to be concentrated there, so it only was a warning to get out of there. Got to a small village called Wytham and continued left until I reached a big road with lots of traffic. At that point, I followed a train inside a forest, but realized I probably had been running for nearly 30 minutes and went back, stopping at Wytham for 1 minute to have a look at a monument dedicated to those dead during WWI.

Back in the hotel, dinner was very good again, and this time we had pre-ordered, so it was kinda fast. The rest of the night we spent exploring a few more distros, and me doing the last few NMU's of the day. Most libtiff3g-using packages were fixed at that time. At 2AM, I finally went up to the room, leaving jdub and matt behind.

Wednesday 11th

Carlos woke up quite early, but I managed to oversleep and missed the daily meeting. LaMont was looking for attendees for the first of his BOF's and finally managed to get some. The last tiff transition NMU really didn't want to compile as it uses an *insane* amount of diskspace that I don't have available. I finally found somewhere else where to build & upload the NMU, thanks to LaMont's magic. This time, before dinner, Keybuk, Teo and I went to the gym and did some exercise. I just did static cycling, for the first time. It's not too cool. It's boring, and it's very unlike real cycling, because the resistance for the pedals is always the same (unless you change it, of course). Real cycling has lots of effort changes, depending on the terrain's steepness, etc. In the gym, all of that was constant, so I'm not sure how good of a cycling training for a triathlon it makes. After 20kms in around 38 mins (I guess), the machine said I had produced an average of 213 watts. I guess you can charge a laptop battery with that. :) Tomorrow's running again, and I'll explore a small trail near the main channel which seemed to be cool, but I just discovered on my way back on Tuesday. It seems Lu also goes running outside, so maybe we can make a group of sane people to go out tomorrow. :)

Dinner involved Indian food, and was buffett again. It looked very good, so I asked for a bit of everything. My surprise when I started eating... dude, that's _hot_! I had to drink 3 cups of water to get my mouth sensivity back, ate the less hot food (with the advantage that my tongue wasn't feeling any taste anymore) and went for a second plate with the least hot stuff. The other people sitting at my table were largely amused by me shouting foul words in Spanish.

And finally, after dinner, Keybuk organized his Evil Game Of Mao. Dafydd, LaMont, Scott and a few others started a game with seb128 and me, the lonely virgin players. The first rounds were horrible. The bastards just don't explain anything, and the only stupid rule they do explain you forget almost instantly, as you expect it'll be repeated if you ask. Not quite so. The game is full of rules, but the intrepid new player needs to learn them by himself. Of course, in the learning process, the rest of the players keep pointing out they have broken this or that rule, and they keep drawing cards. After a few minutes I had something like 20 cards in my hand, and you start with 5. After a while, when I had started to get some clue, jdub, Martin Pitt and mdz joined the game, being the first game for all of them. I had quite a nice time watching their faces saying "What the fuck" every time the bastards gave them another card for their collection. And the worst thing was when you started feeling a bit confident about the rules, because every time one of the good players won, they were allowed to add a new rule to the game, which of course they didn't explain, you just found out the hard way.

The day ended with some major GNOME 2.7 breakage in Debian experimental, which I'll start to take care of tomorrow, hopefully helped by JHM and others. It's probably bedtime now, and oversleeping tomorrow seems quite inevitable at this point already. I'll try not to...

Oh, before I forget. The weather, again... the day was quite ok in the morning, but it has been raining for several hours now. Right now it's kinda pouring. Sigh, I want my Summer back. I want my 35ºC!

[ This was written on Monday, not uploaded until Wednesday, sorry. ]

In case you don't know, I was lucky enough to be invited by Canonical to their August Warthogs meeting in Oxford. Carlos and I arrived last night, too late for dinner, after two hours of flight and another two of bus ride through a busy highway. The last and only time I had been to the UK was like 12 years ago, so it's great to be here again.

As soon as the taxi dropped us in the hotel, I started meeting many people I didn't know in real life yet, which always is the best part of conferences. Had "dinner" (gas-station food, heh) with Teo and Daf outside the hotel, the only place not air-conditioned. Temperature was comparable to València's, which was a surprise. Then we went to the meeting room for a while, where I found out little Daniel isn't so little after all. Carlos and I are in the same room, and after a few tries through the endless hotel corridors, we found it. The hotel is huge, apparently divided into different wings and quite nice in general. All we had time to do last night was go into the main meeting room and test the wireless link (after DanielS aggressively tossed a wifi card at me) before going to bed.

Real stuff started today at 9AM with a meeting of all the workgroups, where people briefly explained who they were and why they were there. The team Mark has brought together is simply impressive. Soon after, people started introducing the different projects Canonical is working on. Malone, HCT, Rosetta... they talked about features that are just going to rock, and the best thing is that it's all going to be publically available. I won't say much more for now, as I don't know how private this is still.

I spent the day in some of their meetings and generally trying to help around #debian-release fixing as many bugs as possible. I pretended to go out to run a bit before dinner, but unfortunately it didn't stop raining during all day, so no luck with that. The swimming pool is small and not too appropriate for real training, it's more a place where to take a relaxing bath. The gym appears to be well equipped, so I'll be able to "run" on one of those machines if necessary, and do some cycling in the static bicycles. The food in the hotel's restaurant is quite good, but we spent more than two hours to get our two dishes served. I guess they can optimize that. :) lamont and I are having a fierce fight over temperature in the rooms. ;) Most of the guys want it quite cool, and I ended up getting a long t-shit to not get a cold. I'm ending the day typing stuff at 1AM from our room, where we have a very weak wireless link in the room's door area. I've just discovered wireless rocks.

gnome-applets (plus a number of other less important packages depending on libgtop2) has finally made it into testing. The only two remaining packages that keep the metapackages for GNOME 2.6 out of testing are eog, which is stuck in a libexif transition, and gnome-games, which is affected by all the transitions you can imagine: gcc-3.4, gnutls11, tiff (via gtk+2.0) and librsvg2. It'll take a while to get that one in, I'm afraid. Fortunately, the most important packages are all in testing by now, although joeyh is tracking an important bugfix in gnome-session for the installer team. The fixed gnome-session is, unluckily, trapped in the tiff transition too, so it'll also take some time.

Update: Sigh, again I show that I shouldn't write so late at night. gnome-media is also trying to get in testing still. It was ready to go, but a critical bug prevents it. Unfortunately, fixing the rc bug will mean it'll get into all the transition hell.

::: [signoff/#debian-devel] Osk_epic (goodbye, epic) [01:35]

After many years using EPIC as my IRC client, I just moved to irssi, which probably has a more active development community and a lot more plugins. I never found an epic4 script that completely satisfied me, and for now, I feel a bit lost with irssi, but it's probably a matter of time.

Probably the most uninteresting blog entry ever. Sorry. :)

Last night I finally went to see Michael Moore's new documentary. I really wanted to see this film, after enjoying Bowling for Columbine and Stupid White Men a lot. And it didn't deceive me. Fahrenheit 9/11 is probably a better film than Bowling overall, and the first part, where he connects the Bushes with the Saudi elite, is very well conducted. The scene with Bush sitting in Florida during the 7 most terrible minutes in the US history, doing nothing and with an empty expression in his face was both very funny and scary. One could imagine this guy is a fool. But that was just too much.

What I didn't enjoy so much was the part where he shows the US troops in Iraq having a bad time. Moore focuses a lot in the American casualties, and sometimes gave me the impression that the thousands of Iraqi civilians killed were second class deaths. There was also a bit too much of patriotism, but as I guess the ultimate goal of this film is (besides making Michael Moore very rich) enlightening a few millions of Americans before the November election, I guess I can ignore it a bit.

In short, there aren't many facts in the film that I didn't know or assumed, but they are presented in a very intelligent way (call it populism or whatever, yesterday I was open to swallowing some of that). I haven't talked to American people on IRC about what they think, but I'd really like that F9/11 helps to kick Bush out of office. As murrayc said, these elections will have a massive impact in the lives of most of us around the world, so here's hoping they come out as most of the rest of the world (I suspect) wants.

I went to the dentist on Tuesday and the doctor insisted on what I've been trying to ignore during the last two years: I need to have my four Teeth of Wisdom extracted.

A pitty, because I never had any kind of pain as they grew in 8 years ago or so and I thought I'd have no problems with them. Unfortunately, they never got to get out entirely, and now they are basically useless for my bite, and a potential risk area for teeth decay. They have pushed the rest of the teeth out of alignment, so I may have to get dental braces to correct this. I'm defering all of this until October, though. I don't want to be bothered during Summer with this...