I just committed the final remaining bits of our Catalan translation for Debian installer. Finally I can be happy when the next beta comes out, as I won't feel guilty anymore. ;) Thanks to bubulle and vorlon for caring, they really made me get my ass moving and finish my already rotting translation before it was completely useless. I won't do the documentation myself. I remember doing parts of that for the Woody release notes and I remember it was quite tedious, but hopefully there'll be plenty of volunteers to do it.

Jeff Bailey asked me yesterday what is the "official" DVD-Ripper for GNOME. I don't know of any... is there one? If not, I guess it'd be cool to have one, just to piss the MPAA a bit. :) Speaking of that, I read in today's newspaper that the Oscar Awards Ceremony won't be totally live on TV, it'll have a slight delay just in case someone decides to show their penis or breast or butt in the middle. Heh, America is funny.

The Valencian exam went very well: the text was about trains (which I love), and I just had to read a few lines, and then comment a bit about the topic. After two or three minutes, the examiner said it was enough, and told me I'd have news soonish. Woot.

The silly virus appeared to be declining a bit in the last days, but today it hit my mail server very hard again. It's annoying... that box is a P150 and on normal circumstances it just idles and idles, but now it's very loaded and hitting swap most of the time, annoying me with the HD noise. If only the stupid windows users developers could get a clue and fix their crap... grrr!

Orkut is getting boring.

Last night Guillem finished setting up our new Debian l10n Catalan site at his box, and we're finally ready to go ahead with our plan to get Debian's Catalan translations a bit more organised. Tim said he's working on getting all of this setup globally for all the Debian teams who want it, but waiting for this to be operational would have probably killed the momentum we might have gathered with our announce. We're now ready to call for help on Catalan Free Software forums and start assigning translations.

On a related event, I was nudged again by bubulle about my lack of commits to d-i CVS. I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, I have been busy setting up the foundations, but I started merging some of the files today already, I'll continue with the rest tomorrow and the following days, I hope. Also, the Catalan translation of APT was finally submitted.

In other news, exams suck, my right ankle sucks even more, yesterday night I could hardly walk and our first competition this season is on Sunday...

Oh, and that virus sucks too: my mail server is getting tons of it and it's very noticeable in the mrtg graphs...

The accidental JACK upload to unstable is very probably going to be the next "big blocker" for the unstable -> testing transitions. Not everything is bad: after discovering JACK is waiting on alsa-lib (and a big bunch of other packages that still need to transition to the new libjack-dev) to enter testing, ElectricElf and I decided to upload alsa-lib, alsa-oss and alsa-utils directly to unstable, after EE had filed all the needed bugs against the packages that will now fail to build with the new alsa-lib. Many of the maintainers affected by the API change have already acknowledged their bug report, so we hope the impact of this upload will be quite small.

daf, of Welsh translations fame, wants to join Debian, and I'll probably help him with advocacy and sponsorship. I learned about this when I asked him if a mozilla-locale-cy package would be interesting, and ended concluding that him doing the package is a much better idea :) He also has ruby-gnome2 packages which we plan to upload soon, as there seems to be demand for them on the (really) old WNPP bug. I'm looking forward to see more Welsh stuff around in Debian, as it already happens in GNOME.

I planned buying an ATI Radeon 9200SE to replace my old Voodoo3 (which works very well still: does DRI ok, etc., but it's going to break with the hopefully soon to be in unstable X 4.3), and casually learned that Joy was about to buy that same card. Joy has been having a few weird problems in his box since he installed that video card, so I'm probably waiting a bit to see what I do... What I am surely not doing is buying a nVidia card. I wish I would, the choice is quite easy to make with that brand...

After managing to get up more or less on time quite early, dressing up with the cycling clothes, having copious breakfast and preparing my bike, I rushed out the garage to join my teammates at the meeting point... to find out it was raining quite heavily. Oh well.

20 minutes later, I do my daily checking of Internet stuff and what do I I find?

    - meta-gnome2 is going in after 3 days (hinted by cjwatson)

I did some Debian stuff this afternoon. In the ALSA front, I had a go at updating alsa-modules-i386 to use the 2.4.24 kernel (for those who wonder where the packages are, they are stuck in the new/ queue). Sometimes, we ALSA Psychos seem to postpone some of our ALSA duties until we're struck with a RC bug. Then it's quite likely that we react in like 2 hours. ElectricElf has been working on getting a list of packages that fail to build with alsa-lib 1.0.x, due to its switch to the new API by default. The list is, luckily for us (and the release guys) very short, and we should be uploading the missing bits of ALSA 1.0.1 in a few days, I hope, after we file bugs against these packages warning about the API change and telling people what the (very simple) fix is. The most wanted part of the ALSA 1.0.1 final release, alsa-driver, was uploaded a few days ago and surprisingly we haven't got any new bugs about it yet.

Mozilla 1.6 landed in unstable last night, making me feel quite uneasy. Yeah, I'm still under the meta-gnome2 syndrome, as it still hasn't made it into testing (there were problems trying to remove the old gnome-core 1.x package), but it should be sorted soon. For more fun, the arm autobuilder surprised us with a successful retry of galeon, which should make it quite easy to have it in testing soon. I quickly warned Mark about not uploading galeon until it goes in (which will happen in a few days due to libbonobo) and he agreed, and uploaded to a private repository instead. Thanks! Galeon 1.3.12 is another nice step towards 2.0, it fixed many of the small bugs that annoyed me every day. Meanwhile, I quickly uploaded Mozilla Euskaraz 1.6, while I wait until the Catalan Mozilla team makes a final decision on translating or not this version (the guy in charge has no time to do this currently, and said he'd prefer doing 1.7; but who knows if Sarge will have Mozilla 1.7...).

I'm even more sleepy today.

In the last days, the facts have convinced me that GNOME Mud is officially out of the death spiral where it had got stuck in the last many months due to development inactivity. Some days ago I posted about my surprise seeing new blood coming into GNOME-Mud. In the last few months (where barely anything had happened with GNOME-Mud), Robin and I had been getting subscription notifications to gnome-mud-list, but everything was quiet, and we were considering posting a call for help to FootNotes. Suddenly, Aravi and Uranus started joining #gnome-mud regularly, and have posted a few interesting patches. Lately, Aravi fixed PyGTK support and wrote his first script ready for mass consumption, the typical health monitor for your character, which nicely attaches to your taskbar. Finally, a usable GNOME Mud plugin! :) Meanwhile, Robin should be finishing the first bits of the move to libglade, while Uranus finishes MSP support, using GStreamer to play sounds. I'm trying to identify the numerous places where the app needs HIG love.

I tried playing a bit with Sodipodi and Inkscape to create a small shield to be used as notification area icon. Hmm, I suck at those programs for now. :)

We finally sent in the proposal to reorganise Debian's Catalan team. There's not too much feedback yet, but at least it's positive for now. Looks promising though, I believe we can find plenty of contributors in the many Catalan LUGs around the territory. We'll see. Committed a bunch of new GNOME translations from Xavi, while we try to figure out what to do with the giant evolution translation.

Holliday tomorrow, which means getting up quite early for cycling...

Guillem and I have finally decided what coordination strategy we want to use for Debian's reborn Catalan l10n team. The Dutch and French teams have a quite organised method that works through e-mail, as we wanted, and provides a way of nicely tracking the status of all the translations that Debian translators need to care about. We have a proposal written which we'll mail to debian-l10n-catalan@l.d.o tomorrow, let's see if people like it.

Uploaded GTranslator 1.1.4 to Debian, after applying a patch to remove some GTK 2.3-only (I guess) stuff.

Yesterday I went to bed at 1:30AM, probably managed to get asleep at around 4:30. Excellent...

Today I was prodded publicly on debian-l10n-catalan@lists.debian.org about the lack of Catalan translations for Debian Installer... looks like I had slacked for too long, although I had finally restarted my work on this during the last few days. Finishing it isn't a big problem -it's not that big-, what was slowing me down was my lack of experience to merge the big full ca.po into the little modules' po files. I don't know why, but I hadn't learned about msgmerge -C, which will do the trick (although it's still quite time consuming, at least for the first commits which will need changes to probably all the installer modules). Christian Perrier and Steve Langasek (the very famous Catalan-American ;) have offered help to handle this. I'll probably accept their kind offer tomorrow, when I finish putting my po more or less in shape. All of this makes me wonder something else, though. What is the status of the SGML installer and release notes docs for Sarge? Has work started on this? If so, I should probably find some minion to handle the Catalan translation if we want to have it ready in time.

In short, the Catalan World Domination Plan has been slightly delayed, but just wait... in 10 months or so you'll find yourselves saying "Bon dia!" every morning!

I need to find some time to do some GNOME commits I have pending, mostly Catalan corrections from Jordi Mas to a zillion modules in the extra and fifth-toe sections. I promise it'll be done by the weekend.

I also have to do my usual ration of studying, plus some cycling training, plus I have to be in a party in about 2 hours. This weekend is going to be short...

I tried to upload the new mailutils snapshot today, but found out it requires the new gnutls packages which are stuck in the new/ queue. I downloaded the packages from Ivo's web, but can't upload until the packages hit incoming. This started a discussion which made us find out a few packages still use gnutls5. Time to change that... On other fronts, StevenK fixed the remaining issues with alsa-driver 1.0.1, and it's ready for upload. Probably tomorrow. What we can't upload yet is alsa-lib, that's going to get hairy thanks to an API change in 1.0.x...

Now, off to cook some Spanish omelet...

After days of annoying different people and mailing lists, meta-gnome2 is finally ready to enter Debian testing during Saturday's testing run. Yesterday, one of the two required browsers, epiphany-browser, finally made it into testing, while planner, libgda2 and libgnomedb got their missing builds. libxslt is ready to go in tonight, unblocking the way for abiword, too. The only missing bit was sound-juicer, which I demoted to Suggests: for now in the new version I uploaded yesterday. Two days of wait and, hooray, testing will have all the important bits of GNOME installed (for i386 and powerpc, at last). We'll have to keep looking for a few missing builds for a handful of packages for 3 architectures. Kamion and I are tracking the status daily at the DebianWiki. Many thanks to aj and Kamion for the nice help with most of this, specially with the big jack-audio-connection-kit hinting, and the s390 and m68k guys for not getting too pissed at me when I requested random builds. :) At last I'll be able to stop looking at build logs every 6h looking for the happy "maybe-successful" tag... not Kamion, who apparently has to nurse KDE in now, good luck. ;)

I also made a quick upload of mailutils, basically to link it against the new libidn11. In the upstream trench, Maildir support landed in CVS on Wednesday, adding to the already available support for mh, mbox and imap mailboxes in GNU Mailutils. Some people have been waiting for Maildir support for many months, and it's finally here. I hope this makes more people give mailutils-imap4d a go, even if there's a severe lack of good documentation right now. I'll upload a new snapshot to Debian unstable in a few days, just in case a mail-eating bug has crawled into the new code.

Thanks to the two persons that mailed me privately about my personal fight against IE's stupidity. It finally wasn't a transparent PNG issue, but IE not grokking position statements on the global body block of CSS, or something similar. Ross put me on the right track, and I have it nearly fixed now.

My cold is nearly gone now. I have been training since Monday and except that day when I couldn't breathe too much, the other sessions have been nice. Of course, I'm sleep deprived again, but that's a minor side-effect. :)

Last, but not least, tbm, I do not suck!

"No shit, Sherlock!", you guys are probably thinking. Well, of course I knew, but yesterday it was the first time I did a serious webpage with CSS and stuff that is aimed at Windows users, and after my teammate and I finished it, with some nice looking results, we discovered it's completely crap when viewed on Internet Explorer. This time, the "they lose" strategy won't work, because we don't expect duathletes visiting the site will be using Firebird, so we better fix it. It sucks that 90% of the browser market is dominated by this utter crap. Come on, it's 2004... it's about time transparent PNGs were supported by software that pretends to be serious... not to talk about the random behaviour of their CSS parser. I need to ask some GNOME webmaster how they get their header IE-happy. It probably boils down to avoiding transparent png's where possible, and using jpeg's instead. *sigh*.

To make this entry a bit less ranty, I'll add that as days pass, Debian's GNOME meta packages are nearer and nearer of entering testing. Today, another dependency of the five that remain is entering testing, and Abiword, one of the tough players, is nearly ready. Again all thanks to Kamion and aj doing magic. Now, if we could get epiphany-browser correctly built...

In the more GNOMEish front, it's been a nice week for GNOME-Mud. It has gone from mostly maintenance mode, due to lack of manpower, to, suddenly, having 2 or 3 new persons poking at it and submitting patches, some very nice which close TODO items that were years old. Big thanks to Nuno Sousa, who is on hacking spree, and has already coded connection status and activity for the mud tabs, removed some old annoying behaviours of the tabs, created a nice tray icon that informs of MUD stuff and is currently finishing some rocking MUD Sound Protocol, which will bring sound support for MUDs that support it. It won't be long before 0.10.5 is out. Nuno has more ideas, so stay tuned. :) (anyway, if you think GNOME-Mud has the potential of becoming "The MUD Client" for GNOME and want to help, please write to gnome-mud-list, as we still need help to get things going. For example, we have a plan to move to libglade and do HIG cleanups, help would be very welcome in those areas.)