València clearly leaves no room for mistakes when it comes to bicycles, I just got reminded of this the hard way today.

Last night I came out of the institute just 15 minutes before the closing of the supermarket, and I wanted to buy some stuff for dinner. I rushed back home, and decided I had no time to go up to drop my backpack and bicycle before they would close, so I just tied it to a street lamp outside the supermarket door. I ended up buying a few heavy things like milk so when I went out I then realised I wouldn't be able to carry the four bags, plus the backpack, plus the bicycle up, and the easiest would be to drop the stuff at home and then go down again for the bicycle. Great plan, except after placing the food in the cabinets, I totally forgot about the bike and did the usual cooking-laundry-computer-bed ritual.

Only when I was ready to go to work today I realised the bike was not up in the flat, and I suddenly realised about my fuckup. A quick glance from the balcony revealed what I suspected: the bike was no longer there.

This is quite annoying because there are at least three bikes that sleep outside on the street every single day, although they look “old” and value-less. Ironically, I value old bikes more than any new mountain-bike like mine, which I got for free from my bank, and was pretty crappy, even if at first glance it appeared to be quite ok Orbea (the gears were crappy Shimano, the back wheel was deformed, and a long etc. of quirks).

As I feel quite impaired without a bike, I'll try to get my mother's Orbea Laida, fixed ASAP, something I should have done 7 months ago. For now, I'll just run home/to work; I really need it anyway.

People tell me I should just get one from the stolen bicycle market in València, and I get mad at them. These people are the reason there's such a big offer for stolen bikes, and they get stolen nearly professionally in València. Sigh.

Via Quico Llach's blog, I just learned about Google no longer hiring independent translators to work on their many web applications. Since Quico was hired by them to do their Catalan translators, a few millions of users have been benefitting from his very professional work in Google's most used services: mail, maps, search...

Like Quico, I really hope they already have deals with translation companies to take care of minorised and minority language translations. When Catalan translations were made by random volunteers, I remember the results were quite... unsatisfying, as each one of them used their own glossary and style. When Quico took over, the interfaces were normalised using the Guia d'estil and everything improved dramatically (this problem is something people involved in Rosetta as a developer, translator and team leader know well, and is tricky to solve). Having Google suddenly drop Catalan as a “supported” language would be a huge step back for Catalan on technology. Either way, we'll find out soon.

On this happy day, there's some big news coming from the Ubuntu Catalan Community. Today's Community Council meeting approved the Catalan LoCo team, with lots of praise from the council members.

<mako> this is a fantastic application
<mako> the ultimate sign of a great team is that makes people want to
       move to their community to participate, +1 from me :)
<jono> this team is setting a standard for approval applications

Ubuntaires, my apologies for not being able to attend the meeting to offer my support. It clearly wasn't needed at all, though, thanks to the amazing work you're been doing during the last months. What I like most about the Catalan LoCo is that it's the first culture-based team, as opposed to the traditional model of state, country or territory LoCo's. Quoting the wiki,

[The] Ubuntu Catalan User community gathers Catalan-speaking users of Ubuntu in all its varieties. The scope of the Catalan LoCo Team is mainly the Catalan Countries, that is, the territories where Catalan is traditionally spoken, where members and volunteers are spread practically all over their geography.

Endavant!

Turning 29 means I'm really near the age of 30, becoming grumpy and watching how the 40's keep getting closer and closer. Oh no!

On the more positive side, it also means I've been getting calls from the people who love me all day long, and I'll celebrate with my friends tonight, at Terra. Thanks everyone!

pusa, a server I administer at uni, suffered a massive data accident on Wednesday. When I went to see why it didn't come up from a reboot on Friday, I found out the initrd hadn't been able to mount /. Weird...

Luckily, the two new disks were already installed in the host and waiting for me to finish the migration to the RAID1 and the new Linux-VServer setup, but unfortunately I've been way too busy and it was too late for some of our data. A fsck of /dev/hda1 resulted on large portions of the data going to /lost+found. Discovering this made me feel like a great fool after not having dd'd the device before doing this (a dry-run of fsck had not reported anything useful). I found out some of the lost data in random directories, but in general lots were missing, and others made no sense:

/oldpusa/etc: gzip compressed data, was "libpng.txt", from Unix, last modified: Wed Dec 20 00:58:51 2006, max compression

I hoped for my PostgreSQL stuff being intact, so after dd'ing /dev/hda5, I fsck'd the image. The result was an empty filesystem, and a lost+found full of stuff. I can't find a directory with stuff that resembles postgresql data at all. I did find a directory with a PG_VERSION file in it, but the rest of the files in it (around 100) had numeric names and little more. If anyone thinks I might be able to rebuild my /var/lib/postgresql from this, I'll be infinitely grateful.

Anyway, I haven't written to the corrupted after I fucked up the root partition. I'm very interested in knowing what could cause corruption on all partitions, making them unmountable, but still recognisable by fsck, even if the result is not good at all. Maybe a corrupted partition table? If so, what does the Dear Lazyweb recommend me to try out? I suspect the first portion of all partitions were damaged, but maybe just that. Some “partition table shift”, which makes the filesystems lose the first superblock (trying other superblocks didn't work either)? Suggestions is very welcome by comment or email, and detail on what tools and how to use to try out things, better. My backup of PostgreSQL is not so recent, and recovering some SmartList data would also be great.

As for the mandatory “where are your backups”, the answer is basically we had no resources to store them until very recently, and when we finally got the disks I've had no time until now to set it up entirely, so some bits (db, lists, web) were still not running off the new drives. The luckiest people have been the MUD owners, who have had no data loss at all, as they were living entirely on /dev/md0. Losing MUD data probably means getting angry calls at 4AM or so. :)

Last week I started the final round of Debian upgrades for the servers I maintain here and there, which is mostly complete today. I haven't been so lucky with upgrades this time, for a long list of different reasons. In the end, the smoothest upgrades were those boxes I upgraded when etch froze or so.

natura.oskuro.net is the box serving these pages. It's an old, extremely noisy Pentium 150 which I've been intending to replace for a while now. I started the upgrade early on Thursday, knowing it'd take a while (natura takes its time only to read the Dpkg database), and it had apparently finished when I was ready to leave the office.

Three issues:

• apache2's enabled modules were forgotten and I had to reenable them again, plus IIRC the default "It works!" site got reenabled, hiding the blog for a little while.
• bind didn't like some change in one of the default configs and I failed to noticed it had not started. After the reboot, the box was unreachable remotely, but that was OK as I had to go visit my dad that night for his birthday, so it was fixed after one hour or so.
• Last, my blog stopped working, and while I thought it'd have something to do with apache2.2, I had no time to have a close look as I had to leave to Lleida this weekend. Yesterday I discovered that for some reason, the old tar.gz PyBlosxom install wasn't liking the new python2.4, so I decided it was about time to move to PyBlosxom 1.3, from the Debian package. Not without the mandatory "It works!" post published in the gazillion Planets, natura was ready to go.

The very same night of last Thursday, I decided to dist-upgrade the box which serves the Spanish Debian website mirror. That's the only purpose on the box, so you can imagine the upgrade should have been pretty straight-forward. And so it seemed, until, in the middle of unpacking, dpkg died with a horrible I/O error, and I dropped into an unusable remote terminal with no working commands. Fortunately, apache2 was still up and running, and the web service has been working without interruption since the hard drive crash, albeit with no syncs from www-master.

Today, Sergio visited the campus and had a look. It was a XFS crash, which got cleanly repaired using an install CD. We have an empty partition in the box, and will probably move the system to it temporarily, and back to the RAID, but on ext3. When the box was back online, I just had to resume the upgrade process, make mdadm happy and update lilo.conf before rebooting into the new kernel.

This box uses LILO for some obscure reason I can't remember too clearly anymore. The box has just one partition on a md array, on two SCSI disks on a aic7xxx-based controller. Can anyone hint me why GRUB would have failed on us back in sarge, and if any fixes in the etch version would work any better? Using LILO here is error prone, and basically feels like a step back. Anyway, www.es.debian.org is now back up and running with updated content.

Sindominio.net had its bi-annual upgrading party last monday, but unfortunately I wasn't able to help much as when I tried to log into the server, I must have caught the system in the middle of some key lib upgrade or something, and again I was locked in a unusable shell which would only segfault. Given my previous experience, I assumed that something had gone wrong and the box would need to be fixed at the console, and after 20 minutes I gave up helping on that front. Until I noticed, quite a long while later that I was still getting mail from the server. I managed to log in to discover the upgrade was done, with just a few bits remaining to be done. The major issues were encountered with our pam and ldap setup, plus nscd kept dying causing quite a lot of mayhem all over the place. Great work from Seajob, Syvic, nogates, apardo and the rest of the people who handled it! With etch, we can finally move back to an official Debian kernel, something we've been longing to do for a long time. The only pending upgrade issue is that we need to move from our old jabber server to either the traditional jabberd 1.x or ejabberd; our current implementation is no longer supported in Debian.

The last of the etch upgrades stories involves Sofcatalà's servers. The box was running on a CentOS 4.4, which was moved away into a subdir just after booting Debian-Installer, and then lobotomised so it would run as a Linux-VServer under a new Debian etch install. I'll probably write more details about it soon though, as it could be a maybe less scary alternative to Guillem's debtakeover.

Yay for etch!

The short answer is no, but as our status page easily reflects, there has been lots of work going on during the last two weeks, once etch's release unblocked the way to upload new versions to unstable. This post intends to resume the trend of updating on the status of GNOME in Debian, after we ended up deciding we'd ship etch with 2.14 for a number of reasons, most notably some complications with the GTK 2.10 transition at that time. You'll be able to find other related news items in Debian GNOME team's website.

What has the Debian GNOME team up to during the last 6 months? Our first priority was to focus on unstable's GNOME 2.14 packages again, in an attempt to fix any outstanding remaining bugs from our packaging, and get them in the best shape possible to deliver a polished GNOME desktop for etch. I think the result is really good, and Debian's default GNOME desktop is both very usable and attractive. In parallel, the preparations for a complete set of GNOME 2.16 packages continued in our Subversion repository and kept appearing, little by little, in experimental. The most visible consequence of our 2.16 efforts translated into nobse's backport of 2.16 for etch, which can be found in the corresponding repository.

And then, with etch deep frozen and nearly ready to be released, GNOME 2.18 was released, and of course the GNOME team didn't wait too much to start working on it.

Our current status is looking good: the Developer Platform is already available in unstable, although buildd's are fighting the builds on various architectures. When the dust settles (GTK 2.10's landing has generated quite a big cloud; we have a list of packages that still haven't completed the GTK+ 2.10 transition), we'll be able to prepare and upload the more complex Desktop components like the panel, nautilus, evolution or control-center. Unstable users should probably be seeing daily progress on this front, so keep an eye on your package managers!

Although Debian 4.0 released with an old version of GNOME, vast amounts of time and work have been invested to release it with the necessary backported fixes and enhancements. The newer GNOME versions have been available in Debian official ftp archives in very reasonable timeframes; this has only been possible thanks to the restless efforts of the (fortunately) growing Debian GNOME team members: giskard, feedback, HE, lool, np237, slomo, shaka, sjoerd, xaiki and not forgetting our incredible bug triager, svena. Thanks!

On the behind the scenes department, it's a pleasure to report that Loïc Minier and Jordi Mallach very recently joined the GNOME Foundation's board of advisors in representation of the Debian Project, replacing Matthew Garrett, who has been representing us for the last few years until he left the project. Thanks, Matthew!

I've been a bit offline during the last two weeks due to being in the middle of a ISP switch at home, which took me offline for a longer time than expected. Additionally, when I finally got the connection up, it was Easter time, and I ended up going to Vall, after cancelling a cycling trip with some friends down the Via Verda Ojos Negros (but this time, not during the night and spending a few days to complete the route) in the last minute, due to the horrid weather forecast. It apparently was a good idea: the river that goes along Vall overflowed, and for some reason the mobile phone service went down for more than 3 days.

On Monday night I came back to València, and I figured that the DPL election results would be out by the time. When I opened Debian's webpage, I found out some other big news: Debian 4.0 was released the day before! Soon after, I looked for the vote results, to find Sam, my candidate of choice, was the winner, very closely followed by uncle Steve. Congrats Sam, no nos falles! And congratulations to the rest of the Debian project for yet another successful, well done release. Reading comments on news sites gives a fuzzy warm feeling. Even though we were slightly delayed, people show how etch is going to make their lives easier, or how trustable Debian is at work and at home. That's the kind of stuff that keeps me and many Debian people going.

I'm pondering improvising some Etch Release Party (as the release managers deprived me of a IRC party by secretly releasing while I wasn't looking) this weekend in Barcelona, where I will be visiting, after giving up on being able to be in A Coruña for DudesConf. Anyone up for it?

Tomorrow at 9 in the morning some officers from the Valencian regional Government will drive up to the mountains of the Bartolo, Serra Perentxissa, Montdúver and Carrasqueta to power off the set of antennas which have broadcasted the signal of TV3, the Catalan public television, during the last 20 years for the entire Valencian territory. These news have been responded with protests from most of the Valencian cultural collectives. You can sign a petition, or send an e-mail, which will be swiftly ignored by the people in charge.

Behind the official reasoning for this attack to our freedom of choice -the broadcast is illegal- there is a set of good reasons for the usual suspects, the Valencian Partido Popular to do this. The biggest one is that two months before the local and regional elections, the right-wing are doing their math and it may not be working out too well for them. They need to scrape as many votes as they can, and an easy granary is attracting the extreme right-wing, which is a bit active but fragmented in the region, and mostly in the city of València. This social group is greatly virulent against anything which sounds like “Catalan”, especially the people known as “blaveros”, who claim our culture and language has no common root and has nothing to do with the culture and language from the North. Fortunately, the ISO 639 standard and the entire scientific community agree that they are nuts.

But back to my rant. So, how can the PP try to get a handful of votes from the right-wing? Easy, start an anti-TV3 show on the media and start scalating it until the final act -tomorrow-, where milions of citizens are deprived of one of the best channels available in our TV sets. This will surely be sold as a major victory against the “Catalan invasion” or as the end of an "alegal situation", although there are like 30 other channels in the same situation in the city of València, and the PP-controlled Canal 9 channel is broadcasted in the Balear Islands (also controled by PP) in the same legal situation.

In a time when watching Middle-East or American channels is trivial using a satellite set, some people think the best thing they can do is to end a service paid and provided for free by Acció Cultural del País Valencià, an important cultural entity, during the last 20 years, ending the right to choose one of the only channels with all the programs in our language for milions of Valencians. Their right to do it is also challenged in court, but there is no doubt that tomorrow they'll go ahead and shut it off.

We could have a reasonable government who would maybe want to accept the Catalan TV and radio channels in our territory, if the Catalan government would also accept our (crappy) channels in theirs, but they refuse this as well, because they now “feel insulted”. All in all, I had enough of PP long ago, and am hoping I am not the only one. In less than a month, Valencians will celebrate the 300^th anniversary of the Batalla d'Almansa on the 25th of April of 1707, although we seem to be fighting a new battle now in 2007.

The Batalla d'Almansa meant the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in Spain, but also the start of tough times for our culture, language, and people, when Felipe V abolished the Valencian furs. But this story can make a blog post of its own next month.

Quan el mal ve d'Almansa, a tots alcança...

Last weekend I had great fun during my first calçotada with my friends in Picamoixons, very near Valls in Tarragona. While it's already a tradition for my friends, this was the first time I went there, after having missed many other opportunities probably due to my overcommitment to triathlon training a few years ago.

So on Friday we drove up North to Catalunya, and arrived quite late to Frago's house in the center of Valls, where we slept in two packed rooms and the terrace after getting some beers in Dune. Early next morning we met Frago's friends and bought the necessary vegetables and wine for our great lunch, and soon after we were in the middle of some olive field outside Picamoixons, where we prepared a big fire and the calçots.

A calçot is a special type of onion which grows in the area, which ends up being very long and thin. After cutting part of the green leaves, they are cooked over the flames, which carbonises the first few layers of the onion, but leaves the inner part ready for consumption. After this, you just need to pull from the inner leaves to get rid of the burnt stuff and eat the rest with a delicious and typical sauce for calçots. So far, so good.

What if your group of friends has extended the tradition, allowing for extra fun bits? In our calçotades, after you've peeled the calçot, you keep the carbonised stuff. It's valuable ammo, which will soon be thrown at others' faces. Trying to remain clean is futile, you soon are covered by sauce and black stuff all over your head and clothes. This was real fun!

After eating part of the group went up a mountain to visit an arab tower, which helped me not to get totally drunk before the night. When it got dark, we were all back to our positions around the fire, chatting and listening to varied music, while we waited for the lunar eclipse.

The eclipse was impressive, seen from the country side, with absolutely no luminic contamination. My friend Jordi carefully prepared his camera to do a good photograph series of the event, and the results were impressive. When the eclipse was about to be full, it was great to see a miriad of stars appear in the sky, previously hidden by the perfect full moonlight. We were just too lucky that the weather fixed up just on time to have a completely clear sky.

The lunar eclipse, as seen from the Catalan countryside. Pics by Jordi Jover.

Many were quite tired by 3 or so, so we started setting up tents and went to sleep by 4. Sunday was a slow day, dedicated to cleaning up our stuff and eating leftovers cooked on a new fire. We were back in València at 8PM or so and even after showering and cleaning my hair with shampoo, my head still smelled like smoke. Actually, I think it might still smell a tiny bit today.

In short, a lovely weekend, which I hope to repeat next year. Too bad the lunar eclipse bit will be missing for quite a few more years. :)