With four plane tickets already in our hands, it's official. Clara, Sabri, Joni and I will be flying to Marrakech as 2007 languishes, spending the first hours of 2008 in the city, and then start our way to the South during the following week.

We still haven't settled on a planned route, but travelling with these friends is mostly a synonym of adventure and fun. The desert, the snow, the villages, the mosques, the souks, the spices, the hammams... I can't wait!

Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors for 2008's Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do.

Qué Valencia interviewed the little Fallera major, and then posted this:

Little Victoria learns Valencian

So, Victoria Blázquez speaks English and Valencian "nearly perfectly". Great! I think having newspapers treat Valencian as if it were just another foreign language that students are forced to learn is a great example of the dark future our language will face in just a few generations.

Sometime in August, I said I would watch the Inbox Zero talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I'm ready to mass-murder my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good boy.

In fact, I've been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn't watching the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and useful if you also have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn't being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my .procmailrc a little to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better, but not entirely better.

I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said “Enough!” to around 2580. It's still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more than a month. I tell you: I'm proud!

So Merlin gets asked in the talk what to do when you've been a naughty boy for a long time, and you've ended up with this HUGE mailbox you can't handle anymore. His answer was what some people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls it mail-DMZ, and that's probably what I'll do in a few hours, admittedly with a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I'll have my mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple!

Other Planet Debian participants like joeyh commented that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll for email. For me, that means

set daemon      1800            # Pool every 30 minutes

when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won't find myself issuing awaken commands often...

I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer.

Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I'm having some fun replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a Catalan "Mallach" family.

From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)

who discovered there was a "Jordi Mallach" other than his brother in the Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from (Mallach is all but a common surname... anywhere, and my family has always wondered where it came from).

So that's more than 6 years ago. I think I'd love to get a reply to some email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox, because "I need to reply to this sometime". I think the Mallach-Broquetas are getting one tonight.

If you think I'm dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it's probably due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don't have a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life.

From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000

[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]

I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought ”WTF?! Dude on crack” or I just forgot “I need to reply to this email”, but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2½ years, but that's another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email.

During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this", and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot.

I wonder if I should reply to his email today...

My lack of posts lately left Planet readers without yet another “yay, GNOME 2.20 released” post. I'm sure nobody missed it. However, I can report what's going on in Debian regarding its packaging.

The executive summary is: the GNOME team rocks, and having much of GNOME 2.20 available in sid on the very same day it was officially announced was possible thanks to the incredible work done by lool, Np237, slomo and other restless team members, who spent the summer tracking GNOME 2.19 releases and packaging them in experimental.

To get a better view on what's left to do, you can use the 2.20 status page, which you'll see shows lots of green at this point. Some of the outstanding blockers are gtksourceview and the new epiphany-webkit binary stuck in NEW, which block gedit and epiphany, and of course, the initial mess that the buildds need to sort out to get the dependencies installed. The rest of “red bits” will continue trickling in unstable in the next few days.

Beware of the new behaviour in control-center, which will by default use the DPI value provided by X. Some X drivers are still buggy and can provide bad values, which will cause bad font displays. If you're hit by this, you can force a DPI value in control-center, which should fix the issue. Also, you can read the relevant thread in our mailing list.

Enjoy 2.20!

Update: yeah, ftpmasters rock too, and epiphany hit incoming just a few hours after posting this entry. Yay ephy-webkit!

jordi@nubol:~$ countmail
SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR!

SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR MAIL MESSAGES!

HAHAHAHAHA!

I'll watch the talk this evening.

Ten years ago, Miguel de Icaza announced the “GNU Network Object Model Environment” project, an attempt to fix a dependency on a non-free library for free desktops.

Today, GNOME is a large, healthy and fun project with a very steady mission and personality. Congratulations to everyone who made it possible!

Last December, I went to the Delta de l'Ebre with a good number of friends to spend one of December's three-day weekends. Les Terres de l'Ebre are the southest region of Catalunya, right next to the border with the Valencian Country. The Ebre river forms a big delta as it meets the Mediterranean, and the great amount of wildlife, specially avian, in the Natural Park makes it a fantastic place to visit.

We would sleep, more or less, in Cinta's appartment in L'Ampolla. The first night we managed to fit 17 persons for dinner, and about 14 stayed to sleep in any possible corner of the flat.

As soon as the Valencian group arrived, we tried to meet the people coming from the North, but apparently they got lost and we stayed on a sightseeing spot admiring how easily the weather changes here. In an hour or so, we went from a sunny day to a quick but heavy shower and back to sunny. When we finally found each other, we decided it was a bit too late to do anything too special, given the short days in December, so we walked South along the beach, on our way to the Salines, the salt processing facility, in the Punta de la Banya.

Agua para todos...

During the walk, we witnessed what the people from the Delta have been warning about for decades: the Delta is disappearing. The progressive overuse of the river's flow, excessive irrigation, damm construction and degradation is killing this unique place. The waters are slowly claiming what once was theirs. An electricity line, at the beginning of our trip being at the end of the beach starts approaching the sea, or viceversa, as you move southward, to end up many metres inside the water. The old people in the Delta still remember the 200m tall lighthouse in the Illa de Buda, which the sea managed to devour.

Sunset at the salines del Delta

When we reached the Punta we could watch a beautiful sunset over the mountains of Els Ports, and when it got dark and cold we headed to Tortosa, the area's capital, which I had recently visited for the first time for one of Softcatalà's meetings. There, we had dinner at a bar and met Jordi and Anna for a while, before going back to Ampolla, going to bed relatively early due to everyone being very tired.

On Saturday, we decided to have a look at the Delta... from above. So we drove to the top of the Cim del Caro, where we could admire a great view over the flat farmlands of the Delta, and then found a nice trail which took us to a nice forest, where we had lunch. After a visit to Alfara de Carles, we went back to the house, had a great dinner and played fun games at the table.

Unfortunately, Sunday morning was dedicated to cleaning up the mess in the appartment and packing, as part of the group, the Jordis from Alcoi and the twins, had to leave early. The remaining four Valencians decided to go to Deltebre to have a local paella. It was quite good, although the bar tender laughed at our request to eat directly from the paella, rejecting dishes. Small cultural clash. ;)

I remember downloading and viewing the pictures of the trip a few days after getting back in València, and then losing track of them. Last week, while testing an EPIA board with some random hard drive, I suddenly realised there was a big chance the pictures would be on that drive, and after some search, I found them; I had been close to mkfs the disk a few minutes before. I hadn't stopped blaming myself for misplacing these pictures, as they remind me of this wonderful weekend. Luckily, they are back!

Going back to the state of the Delta, experts say it will be mostly gone in 200 years. All of the Terres de l'Ebre have fought against the previous government's "PHN" plan to divert part of the river's flow to the North and South, to supply Barcelona, and specially the South of València, where the developing of the coastal areas is out of control. I fear that whenever PP regains power in Madrid, they will retake this idea. There is a lot of money involved in building a 700 km long scar in our land. The Delta de l'Ebre is a fantastic place which doesn't deserve a terrible fate like this, only for the benefit of the usual suspects. As the good people of this land would say...

Lo riu és vida. No al transvasament!

I've cursed myself quite a bit during the last two or three weeks, because there probably are no good excuses for not attending DebConf this year, it's just that I didn't plan it at all. Sorry to everyone who expected me there, and thanks to those who have insisted me lately to book tickets, and even planned my arrival by sea. :) Unfortunately, last minute plans won't work this time, as my new job doesn't permit. I hope you all have a great time, and unlike me, will POP THE TRUNK, all week.

Oil delivery will resume... maybe in Argentina? Or Birmingham, why not!

19:12 < Данило> jordim: btw, you should look up what 'dude' means in Serbian :)
19:13 < Данило> jordim: (old slang for 'boobs', but don't tell anyone I told 
                you that)

(danilo's name obfuscated in cyrillic so he can't blame me)

Update:

20:52 < kaol> jordi: dude, you fail at obfuscation

1:00 AM. València celebrates with big fireworks, and drivers sound their horns along Blasco Ibánez. People are happy; we will have our urban F1 circuit after all. Our city will continue growing and becoming the very best of Europe. Our land will continue to be developed, and finally becoming the new Côte d'Azur, for the great benefit of a few.

The slow but unstoppable process of degrading a culture to something that can be admired by tourists during Fallas just reached a new milestone.

Welcome to my ex-country. The land of golf, sailing and open-wheel racing.