jabberd2 2.2.4 packages for etch
Last weekend I created a set of backports of jabberd and its unfulfilled
dependencies for etch, for use in my jabber server which has been suffering
s2s problems for way too long.
The packages are a bit quick and dirty, but good enough for my personal use
(a known issue is the lack of shlibs bump in gsasl) and are available from
this non-apt-get enabled repository.
If I can help the XMPP team in any way to help these packages get into
unstable or experimental, I'm totally willing to help.
19:43 |
[freesoftware] |
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(comments: 0)
A horrible Valencian tradition
My workmate Pep was kind enough to drive me home back from work today.
Ideally I would have cycled home as always, however today my bike was stolen
again. It's not the
first time or
the second one, not even
the third. My
red Orbea is the fourth bicycle that gets stolen since cycling became
my primary means of transportation more than 10 years ago.
Sadly, in València, the norm is to get your bicycle stolen every few years,
if you need to leave it unattended during work hours. In this case, its even
worse as the bike stays inside the University
campus all day, supposedly guarded by security personnel, and in a place where
dozens of people tie their bicycles, with constant presence of the people
who work in the CPI complex.
This bicycle was given to me by Cherry when she left València, just a week
after the previous one had been stolen. She had bought it to cycle around
the Valencian mountains during her 6 month stay in Clara's lab, and was
immensely kind to give it to me when she learned what happened to mine.
I planned using the mountain bike during the long 9 d'octubre
weekend, but I'll have to see if someone can lend one for this year's cycling
trip.
It seems I'll have to resort, again, to my 29 year old Laida to
move around València, which will need an extensive repair of both wheels and
brakes. Time to visit Benimaclet's bicycle workshop.
17:02 |
[life] |
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(comments: 14)
Mouth Freedom
Today I got the brackets attached to my lower jaw teeth removed. What I'm
experiencing now is something like mouth freedom. I mean, I can even move my
tongue around my mouth painlessly!
04:12 |
[life] |
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(comments: 1)
Festa!
The word is out! Carles, Jonathan, Sabri and I will be throwing a hopefully
great 30th anniversary party next weekend. It will start at 12:00 on Saturday
and finish at some point during the next day. We have planned fun games during
our “30thlon”, prepared infinite hours of all kinds of music (including
Chimo Bayo, NO LESS!),
bought a supermarket worth of drinks. Do not miss!
Uno, que no pare ninguno!
02:16 |
[life] |
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(comments: 0)
Pyrenees and Mallorca
This is the last thing I type before I leave office, pick up my backpack
and drive all the way to Espot, in the Catalan Pyrenees, to hike around the
GR 11 during 7 or 8 days. After that, we'll take a plane to
Mallorca, to spend another week with Jeroni and others in a small town
(I always forget its name).
I'm really looking forward to this, it's been two years since my last
trip to the Pyrenees, and I've been wanting to visit Mallorca for a long
time.
I'm glad I'll be completely incommunicado, so see you on my return on the
18th. Have a nice DebConf,
you lucky ones!
12:04 |
[travel] |
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(comments: 2)
Cinema de Barri in Benimaclet
Last summer we tried to organise a Cinema d'estiu movie projections
in Benimaclet's Church Square, in an attempt to promote social activities
in the street done by the neighbours, for the neighbours. The response was
very positive, and the first two projections attracted many people, who would
bring a chair and their dinner to the old town's square to watch a movie.
Unfortunately, the authorities, who were completely out of the loop, weren't
happy and on the 3rd week the Local police appeared and said that
that kind of activities needed official permits, and disallowed the
projection.
For this year's summer, we decided we'd try to do the projections once
again, and learned that only a legally-established organisation can do the
paperwork to get an authorisation. In parallel, some neighbours of Benimaclet,
who had liked last year's idea, were working on their own to repeat the
experience, and somehow Clara was contacted by them, and we ended up
collaborating. As these people are members of the Associació de veïns
of Benimaclet, there were legally able to do the paperwork, and soon we
agreed on the four movies for this year, to be played every Sunday of July
at 22:00h.
Our pick for Sunday 6th was Giuseppe Tornatore's
Cinema Paradiso, followed
on the 13th by
Elling, a Norwegian comical
drama by Petter Næss which I hadn't seen and I can totally recommend. Last
week we saw
Poniente, a Spanish film
by Chus Gutiérrez that focus on immigration issues in the South East of Spain,
based on the racist happenings of El Ejido of 2000. Finally, next Sunday is
the turn for some political action with
V for Vendetta. A note for
Benimaclet neighbours: if you don't come to see the movie, be aware that we
plan to pump up the volume a lot for this one. You're definitely going
to hear it from home. ;)
We're very happy about the response of the neighbours this year. Not having
done any effort to announce this around the city, except for a few posters
around Benimaclet during the last week of June, people clearly remembered
last year's experience and the plaça de Beni was full of chairs for
all three weekends. It really helps to turn around during a projection and see
so many people behind you participating in something you've invested some of
your own time and money. It's probably too late now, but there's some talk of
extending this to the Sundays in August, so we'll see. Also, we plan to do a
picaeta for attendees as a small closing party for this year's
cycle.
See you on Sunday, and enjoy V!
21:34 |
[cinema] |
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(comments: 2)
GNOME-Mud 0.11
GNOME-Mud 0.11 was released
yesterday. This was probably something unexpected to those who follow the
mailing list, as it's the first release in over three years.
Back in 2006, Les Harris started
contributing to the project and started a major rewrite of the program.
Things looked very promising, with the program being ported to newer GNOME
technologies and standards and being basically rewritten from ground up.
However, Les got hit by Real Life™ and being the project's only real hacker,
development basically stopped for nearly two years. On June, I was tempted
to remove my irssi
subscription to #gnome-mud; all I did was
idling or telling people who popped by that nothing was being done and that
wouldn't change unless someone rolled up their sleeves and finished up the
nearly ready 0.11 release.
A few days after considering declaring GNOME-Mud dead, Les joined IRC
after more than a year of no contact, recovered his GNOME account password
and started to commit the missing bits at an awesome pace.
A few weeks later, 0.11 was done, with even more features than originally
planned (support for more advanced MUD protocols like MSP or ZMP, for example)
and I finally found the time to make a tarball and publish it. Les has lots
of plans for the next release, and I hope my old wish of seeing GNOME-Mud
becoming a MUD client that is comparable to the classic zMud will soon be a
lot closer. The foundation set by this release certainly will make it easier
to accomplish.
As always, if you want to contribute, we'll be happy to help you out on
#gnome-mud at GIMPnet, or in
gnome-mud-list@gnome.org.
20:38 |
[freesoftware] |
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(comments: 2)
Marc Belzunces' conscience objection fight
Yesterday, my friend
Marc had to visit
a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an
electoral penalty.
Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the
independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways
he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless
activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets.
For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently
this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and
Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona.
Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish
parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday,
infringing the Spanish electoral law.
He presented his
allegations to
the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine
ranging from 180 to 1800€ or community work (which he would, again, object to
perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to
object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in
court and see how it goes) is unprecedented.
While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his
dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve
in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal
debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid
creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a
process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support
Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far.
His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some
Catalan media like
VilaWeb. Some
people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine.
The response so far has been surprisingly positive.
Marc, molta sort i una abraçada!
21:20 |
[life] |
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(comments: 3)
In the news
The newspapers brought good news bits in the last two days.
Público
reports on
Paco Rivière's
ongoing quest
to get a refund for the extra money he had to pay for a Windows licence when
he bought a laptop. Paco is a well known member of the
Ubuntu Catalan community and has been
battling for this common-sense right for 3 years. The trial took place last
Monday, and hopefully he'll be able to report some good news soon.
In totally unrelated news, the Valencian caveman
Juan García Sentandreu,
leader of the right-wing “Coalición Valenciana” party, was arrested yesterday,
for still
not too clear
reasons. Being one of the biggest enemies of my language, and having a long
record of violent attacks to cultural entities and other political parties in
València, I can't say I pitty him at all. I hope he had fun sleeping with
the yonkis in the central police station last night. :)
22:31 |
[life] |
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(comments: 0)
Upgrade to PyBlosxom 1.4.3
This week I spent some time upgrading
PyBlosxom to version 1.4.3.
I was still using 1.2, which probably was insecure and buggy. This is the
first step in a bigger plan to replace Apache2 with
nginx in this server, but that will come
later.
I was lucky to find PyBlosxom's author,
Will, on IRC at the right time,
who kindly answered a few questions and helped solve a few issues with
the comments plugin and flavours. So, after a while, I had fixed a few subtle,
4 year old bugs in my XHTML templates and more notably, fixed lots of small
bits in the rss feed, which finally makes Liferea and
Advogato like my entries.
But, the biggest achievement was getting a brand new
comments.py
plugin from Will, which allows to close comments
on entries after an expiration date. So, even if I was happily using
Mako's Akismet plugin, I still was getting 5 or 6
spams each day on very old entries (favourites being one about
Alonso visiting València
and one remembering the
70th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War).
Well, not any longer.
My dear spammers, you can now go pester someone else, or pick new entries
pretty quickly before they get closed down. It's been a nice fight, but it's
a good time to wish you go away and fuck off. With love, Jordi.
Thank you, Will!
16:24 |
[site] |
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(comments: 1)
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