Naked bike ride
Knowing many people in the Debian community, I knew others would be there
too. And Gunnar
confirmed it yesterday via
Planet Debian. Yes, I participated
in the World Naked Bike Ride,
although at the time I didn't know about the campaign, I thought people were
doing it “just because we can” mostly.
So, after being invited to the ride the week before, 5 of our colla
were in the old Túria's river bed, near the Fira Alternativa's
scenary at the scheduled time. Not having done anything like this before, we
were a bit expectant to see how many people would actually do it, before
deciding to join them. After a while, more and more people seemed to gather,
and it finally took off. Pants off, and there we go!
The insane amount of photographing and filming that was going on around us
at the beginning was a bit uncomfortable, but after a while we had mostly
forgotten we were riding our bikes naked through the commercial arteries of
València. The ride was too long for my taste, covering the whole
Fira, Plaça d'Amèrica, carrer Colom just in front of “El Corte
Inglés” (I wonder how many known people saw me there), Xàtiva, Russafa, back
to Xàtiva, Town Hall, Ciutat Vella, river margin and Blasco Ibáñez.
Even if it was a sunny day, the chilly wind made me feel really cold, but
overall it was quite fun, and an interesting experience I might or might not
repeat. I'm certainly not becoming a naturism activist or anything like this.
I do think we have way too many taboos, and every time I get rid of one, I
feel a lot better. :)
19:58 |
[life] |
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(comments: 3)
Interview in El País on Debian's OpenSSL incident
Last week's edition of
Ciberpaís included a
lengthy
article
which tried to explain
Debian's and
Ubuntu's OpenSSL problem to unexperienced
computer users, it's impact, what should people do and what happens next.
Mercè Molist sent in a few
questions for me to answer, a small part of which were used in the article.
While I don't like a few bits of the article that much, I tried my best to
make it clear that Debian is not a bunch of clueless and careless Free
Software enthusiasts. The treatment that the incident had in some well known
Spanish security-related websites was in my opinion deplorable, so I want
to thank Mercè for the opportunity to clarify some of the Debian bashing.
I expect the full interview will be published either here or at Mercè's
website in the following days.
17:11 |
[freesoftware] |
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(comments: 2)
Thank you!
Last Thursday, and the few
days after, were quite intense. A series of events made me feel really loved
by a lot of people, which is always a good reminder of what kind of friends
you are surrounded by.
I could talk about Pep's gift at work,
Visenteta, a goldfish which now lives in an aquarium at home, which
in turn was donated by Cristina and Brande. While I still have mixed feelings
about keeping animals in cages, my choices were give it a better place than
the small bowl where it initially lived, give it away to someone who could
properly take care of Visenteta, or sacrifice it. I unsuccessfully tried #2,
can't do #3 myself, so I accepted Brande's offer to have a decently-sized
aquarium at home. Visenteta seems happy today, and I've learned all about
aquarium maintenance the hard way.
During the day my mobile phone didn't rest for too long intervals; everyone
was calling it to congratulate me and so on. But the bigger emotions came after
leaving work, when I went to l'Alqueria to hang around with my
friends and see if they would go have an orxata with Maria and me.
Strangely, they refused, being in the middle of an apparently very important
plant transplantation operation. When suggested going for dinner instead, the
reaction was pretty cold too, but this was understandable as we'd meet on
Friday at my place for a tiny celebration. In the end we headed off to Alboraia alone and had a delicious orxata in Toni's shop.
Maria said she had a surprise reservation in a Indo-Pakistani restaurant
near my house, so after a while we cycled back to València. As it was getting
dark and cold, we went into my house to get some clothes, and when I opened
the living room door, I was scared by a bunch of shadows suddenly shouting at
me and was buried in confetti. I couldn't react for the next 10 seconds, while
my brain quickly built relations of many details that had happened during the
week, all part of the preparations for a secret party at my own place.
Wow, the feeling is incredible. I've participated in similar surprise
parties, but had never been the target. I hope everyone reading this gets one
at least once in their lives, I really loved it!
But still, when the party ended, I slowly started to find little gifts all
over the place: a book under my pillow, a bicycle bell on my handlebar, a
cactus for my computer space...
My friends had been planning all of this for the last two weeks, and I never
suspected anything. Incredible! It really makes me feel surrounded by
people who care about and love me, and went through the hassle of coordinating
10 or 12 persons with me not noticing at all. Thank you, everyone!
The book, by the way, is
Si no plou, plourà, by
TV3's Mònica López, a fun compendium of popular weather proverbs which we
discovered in a gas station in Tarragona, during our Easter trip to la
Terra Alta.
21:43 |
[life] |
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(comments: 0)
30
And today, I finally turn 30. I've been grumpy about this day getting
closer and closer for the last three or four years, which have passed in
front of my eyes with me nearly not noticing.
The last year has had more downs than ups, and at times has been quite
dark. I feel things are slowly getting better, and I spend more time looking
forward than back, which certainly should help.
Tomorrow I'll hold a small party at home with some friends, but the big and
proper event will be in September, when five or six people in our
colla, born in 1978, will celebrate our 30th birthday, in
a massive, weekend-long party already dubbed La festa dels excessos.
You shouldn't miss this one!
Thanks to the many people who have phoned, texted or emailed me already.
It reminds me that I'm surrounded by people who love me and were there when
I needed them.
09:57 |
[life] |
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(comments: 16)
Filtering Planet Debian authors
Several people have been discussing what material is appropriate or not
for feeds syndicated by Planet Debian.
It's basically the same discussion that also pops up every now and then in
any big planet like GNOME's,
KDE's,
Ubuntu's or ours, with some people
advocating for Free Software or techie stuff content only, and an apparent
majority liking and defending that people write about their latest Debian
hack, but also how wonderful their vacation in Paris were, or how their
favourite politician did this or that.
For some time now, Planet Debian has a small new feature that might have
gone unnoticed by many, and could help some readers get rid of undesired
content from the post listings.
Steve Kemp added a cookie-based
per-author filtering system to Planet a few weeks ago. Next to each author
name you'll see a “−” link which can be used to collapse all entries by the
author. This setting will be saved in a browser cookie, and can be reverted by
clicking on the “+” link next to the collapsed author. To expand all hidden
posts, use the “Show all” link in the Planet's right column above the
subscription list.
So, if reading about baby Jesus annoys you, just click on “−” and be
happy.
16:03 |
[freesoftware] |
# |
(comments: 3)
Interview in El País
Today's edition of El País, the most
read Spanish newspaper, celebrates the 10th anniversary of it's
weekly technology section
Ciberpaís with a special
edition which takes a look back at the last 10 years of computing, and also
looks forward to what the future will bring us.
Mercè Molist interviewed Carlos Atarés, my mate at
Softcatalà
Jordi Mas and myself, on what
happened during the last 10 years of Free Software and where we are heading.
The paper edition features a *gasp* half page picture of me laying on the
grass, but is otherwise identical to the
online version.
I need to add, this feels a bit strange. :) It's the first time I see myself
refered to as just “Mallach”, but I realise I'm getting old...
17:00 |
[freesoftware] |
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(comments: 3)
La Ruta del Carrilet
As Josep asks for it every now and then,
and we really enjoyed this trip, it's time to write about the four days we
spent cycling from Ripoll to Girona, through the Ruta del Carrilet,
a Catalan via verda similar to the one
we completed
a year ago.
I spent this year's 9 d'Octubre cycling trip with totally different trip
mates, not related to my triathlon team. The extensive group was formed by
Sabri, Mar, Bàrbara, Carles, Desi, Adela, Núria, Amador and myself. We
started our journey by car from València to Mollet de Mar, where we parked
the cars and take a regional train to Ripoll with our bikes, where the
real journey would start.
Arrival at Ripoll
When we got to Ripoll, it was quite late and dark, but we managed to find
the start of the Ruta del Ferro rail trail which would take us to Sant
Joan de les Abadesses. It was quite cold, but especially really humid, so
we had to think twice before settling on a place to camp and setup our tents.
We had to take special care of covering the bicycles as the air was really wet,
and anything we left uncovered would appear soaking next morning. In part, my
shoes suffered from this.
Early next morning we had breakfast on the wet grass and then started our
way to Sant Joan through a deliciously well equipped and maintained cycling
track, which unfortunately only lasts for 12 kilometres through a splendind
landscape. After having breakfast in the old railway station in Sant Joan, we
abandoned the Ruta del Ferro to take a road to Olot via Sant Pau de
Seguries, where we had to climb a small mountain and then descend through the
Vall de Bianya until we got to Olot.
Sant Joan de les Abadesses' railway station
Asking the locals for the start of the Ruta del Carrilet was
fun due to the strong oriental accent in the area and we sometimes wouldn't get
a word of what we were told. An old man recommended us finding a big park in
the outskirts of the town, where we prepared our entrepans for
lunch, and after a little rest, we started cycling up the Carrilet,
which would take us to Girona in two stages. This Catalan area is of volcanic
origin, and there are several natural parks dedicated to the phenomenon. There
are many mountains covered with forests and impossible peak shapes, which due
to the time of the year were starting to go from green to brown and yellow,
making fantastic colour schemes in the landscape.
Under a green ceiling in Olot
Just after the few first kilometres, the railroad track starts to descend
most of the way, which makes it easy for people who aren't too trained, and
easier to enjoy your way chatting with people while you cycle. As we consumed
the daylight, we came across a parish church party with lots of old and young
people from the nearby town of Sant Miquel de Pineda. Amador and I were lagging
behind a bit at that point, and when we got there, we found the rest of the
group were already off their bikes and either having a curious look over the
party, or directly following suit and dancing like the others. We had a peek
into the small church and also into a small graveyard in the back, where I was
surprised to find the “enemies” of my Catalan grandmother: «Família Matabosch»,
as one of the headstones revealed.
Partying at Sant Miquel de Pineda
As it was getting late, we eventually started off again, but luckily Bàrbara
spotted what seemed a good sleeping place for that night. To the right of the
trail there was a hermitage (devoted to Santa Cecília) up on the hill which,
for bonus points, had a porch with a recently renewed roof which would help
cover ourselves from humidity and rain, as we found soon after starting
cooking dinner.
While the cooks prepared our soup, some others went down to the
Carrilet in order to find out if the next town was close so we could
get some driking water for the dinner. Luckily, Sant Feliu was close enough,
and we found a bar where we got some water... and two bottles of wine, which
made some people back at the hermitage very happy. We were quite tired though,
so we eventually went to sleep after reading some stories from a great tale
book, with the sound of rain hitting the grass outside the porch.
The rain was still with us when we started waking up, so we had breakfast
and packed our stuff very slowly, in an attempt to avoid getting wet. But
rain didn't stop, so we made a few hacks on our bicycle bagpacks to minimise
the amount of rain wetting them. When we were finally ready to set off and
had cycled around 3 kilometres under the light rain, it finally stopped
raining, making the rest of the journey very pleasant.
Sleeping under the porch of Santa Cecília's hermitage
This part of the route is again quite beautiful, with impressive amounts
of green vegetation at both sides of the track. There's a lot of water
presence in the land, which makes the type of trees and bushes quite different
to the ones we are used to find in the Valencian Country.
After going by a few small towns, we arrived in the old railway station
of Amer, hometown of the Puigdemonts. Even if it was a bit early, we
decided to have lunch there, so a few of us went down to the centre of the
town to buy bread and some other details to eat. Being in my friend Josep's
town for the first time, I wanted to visit his
family's bakery, but unfortunately it
is closed on Mondays. We had lunch back at the cute station, and eventually
kept going on our way to Girona. Outside Amer, the Carrilet was
temporarily cut by the road, and there were two possible alternatives: using
the road, with heavy lorry traffic, or diverting through a very steep track
with very hard slopes. Most of the group preferred the road, but Mar, Amador
and I went up that track, which was hard to climb and really fun to descend.
Apparently, Amer locals call those 1.5 kilometres the “Tourmalet”. It's
probably not so bad, though. :)
Amer's railway station
Unfortunately, the Ruta del Carrilet starts getting uglier after
Amer, and as you approach the more industrialised towns near the capital
Girona. The area around Anglès wasn't that fun, with the track continuously
being invaded by cars and other vehicles. Soon after we were in the
farmland area surrounding Girona and its Devesa.
Jonathan was waiting for us in the city, after his two month stay in
Scotland, and we were all happy to meet him. We discarded continuing our
way to the coast, which was the initial plan, and instead dropped our stuff
in the house of one of Adela's friends, and went out to have dinner to a
Wok restaurant, where the poor people running it suffered our
childish behaviour involving the rotating central dish on our table and
custard sucking contests.
Jonathan guided us through the Cathedal and city wall areas of the town
centre, which are impressive, and we climbed all of the wall towers to have
great looks over the dark and quiet city. Eventually, we went to sleep, as
Adela had to leave early, and we had to pack to get our train back to
Barcelona.
Back in Mollet, we cooked our last camping-gaz lunch in the park right next
to the station, before noticing the place stinked of dog poo. After the careful
operation of filling the three cars with 9 bicycles, we were finally on our
way back to València, completing another great cycling journey. If you like
bicycle tourism and can travel to this area in Catalonia, I highly recommend
it, as there's many great places to visit, all of them accessible with
bikes.
Having lunch in Mollet
00:00 |
[travel] |
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(comments: 0)
Time for GRUB2?
My Apple Powerbook 5,4 just booted for the first time using
GRUB, with no manual
intervention, from Apple chime to GDM prompt. This is a great
milestone for GRUB2 on powerpc-ieee1275 and OpenFirmware, as until now,
multiple problems in the loader would drop you to OF console straight away,
although other PowerPC hardware with other firmware implementations did
manage to work.
Recent fixes by Pavel in the core and some other minor fixes for the
userland utils have taken grub2 to the point where it is usable on most
PowerPC hardware. On Apple, the only minor issue remaining is grub-probe
insisting on (hd) not being a valid device name, so for now I have to trick
it into believing it's really (hd1).
In parallel, many other GRUB2 improvements haven't stopped hitting CVS
in the last months, which have seen how new contributors joined
grub-devel
and helped GRUB2 get the great momentum it's enjoying
right now. Vesa, Robert and Bean have been really active lately, and have fixed
long standing issues or written a lot of new code. One of the features GRUB2
acquired recently was image loading for background images. Much more powerful
than the implementation in GRUB Legacy, GRUB2 can now read images in multiple
formats, can handle up to 24bit colour and render a menu in arbitrary
resolutions. The menu can now show UTF-8, and the Debian package will
configure a pretty theme that matches the rest of the system if
desktop-base
is installed:
GRUB2 speaking UTF-8 Catalan
Although I'm not sure if GRUB2 is completely up-to-par with GRUB Legacy
on i386/amd64, it seems the tricky bits, like video, LVM, RAID and the
standard filesystems are supported and working. What GRUB2 needs now,
in order to finally replace the aging and upstream-lacking GRUB Legacy
you probably have installed, is massive testing. Debian has traditionally been
a testbed for GRUB Legacy patches, and is also the platform where GRUB2 is
being more widely tested. Having GRUB2 included in lenny's debian-installer
would be a great step forward, and by the looks, I think we're well on time
to manage this.
Replacing GRUB Legacy with GRUB2 is trivial. On PCs, just install the
grub-pc
package. You'll be offered to keep GRUB Legacy, but with
an added menu entry to chainload GRUB2. If you're worried that GRUB2 might
fail on your hardware, accept this, and try to load GRUB2 from GRUB. If it
works, you then know you can get rid of GRUB Legacy completely and keep GRUB2
in the MBR.
On PowerPC-based Macs, you'll have to work around the small issue I
mentioned above. Install the grub-ieee1275
package. You also
need a very recent powerpc-ibm-utils
package, which was just
uploaded to unstable.
Mount your bootstrap partition, probably /dev/hda2
in
/boot/grub
, and generate a device.map
file with
grub-mkdevicemap
. Check the contents. If your first device name
lacks a drive number such as (hd), it's probably correct, although this will
make things fail later. Change it to (hd0) for now. As
grub-install
relies on grub-probe
, you'll have to
generate your grub image by hand.
Copy all .mod
files in /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275 to your
bootstrap partition, and generate a core.img
:
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# grub-mkimage -d . -o /boot/grub/core.img *.mod
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# update-grub
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# nvsetenv boot-device hd:2,core.img
The generated grub.cfg
will have references to (hd0,X), which
you'll have to correct back to (hd,X) if necessary for your OpenFirmware.
After this, you are probably ready to reboot, cross two fingers and get a
warm "Welcome to GNU GRUB!" message at boot, which will then be followed by
a standard GRUB menu, but on your nice PowerPC box. Unfortunately, the
eye candy in the screenshot above isn't available yet in this platform, as
it lacks VESA. Does someone in the audience want to contribute a video driver
for powerpc? :)
17:53 |
[freesoftware] |
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(comments: 15)
FOSDEM 2008
As part of a sad trend that pulls me away from my healthy travel habits,
I just booked plane tickets to Brussels for February 22nd. Note this is 1.5
months of planning ahead. madduck, your
turn!
Additionally, two weeks ago I got tickets for a one week long trip around
parts of Germany at the end of the month. The travel plan is totally
undefined, so I don't know what cities I'll be visiting yet. Fun!
14:52 |
[travel] |
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(comments: 0)
Black screens in Alacant
Six months ago, a political group in Spain made a big fuss and noise when
the Government of Venezuela closed down the anti-chavist RCTV TV station,
and waved the flag of freedom of speech, called the democratically elected
government a “regime”, and called their president a “dictator”.
On Sunday night, these very same people, following orders from the leaders
of the Valencian government —or should I say regime—, drove up to the top of
the Carrasqueta peak in Xixona, in the South of the Valencian Country,
and protected by the winter's darkness, proceeded to force open two locks,
broke into ACPV's property and unplugged
and precincted the equipment which had been broadcasting the signal of
TV3 and the rest of the public Catalan
TV channels to the South of our land, for the last 21 years.
Although
this wasn't unexpected
it is probably one of the biggest attacks to freedom of speech, choice and
plurality since democracy was restored in the state. The political benefit
PP is planning to obtain from this attack is clear: pleasing the regional
right-wing cavemen who think we have nothing to do with the Catalan culture
just 2 months away from some very decisive elections will probably give them a
handful of extra votes. There are also economical interests involved, like
having right-wing media groups control even more digital TV channels that
they already do, but that's really anecdotic now.
Two nights ago, it was the South. In a matter of days, the antennas in the
Bartolo, in the North of the Valencian territory, will also be
unplugged, blackening the screens of thousands of Valencians who think they
have the right to watch decent quality TV in their mother tongue. Thank you,
fascists.
23:15 |
[life] |
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(comments: 14)
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