6 November 2007

Great final. South Africa *and* England showed that a match without tries can still be one of the best of the tournament. The first half was one of the most intense (I'd say *the* most intense) I've seen, with England playing well with their strengths (forward lanes, mauls) but felt against a tremendously defending South African team...and a perfect Percy Montgomery transforming all penalty kicks, therefore converting RSA domination. I also noticed the incredible energy of Bryan Habana who "destroyed" Sackey three times even if he weights many pounds less. I think that all rugby fans enjoyed that final even without tries (again, South Africa wins a world cup without scoring a try in final). So, that's the end of 1.5 month of rugby crazyness. Dear readers who survived until now, thank you for sharing my passion for that sport...et rendez-vous pour le tournoi des 6 nations..:-)

After Argentina-France on the first day, that one was planned to be one of the few big matches of first round. Of course, after the game won by South Africa (36-0), that seems pretty silly to say... The Springboks were definitely better than England, in all parts of the game. What stunned me, particularly after watching South Africa live , is their complete control on the game, which is a great improvement over their match against Samoa. South Africa scored three tries all of them great examples or organized attacks by the rear lines. Two tries for JP Pietersen, after 3 by Habana on first game: the South-African wing players rock. Despite this, the player of the game was definitely Jason Du Preez, the scrum half (hope this is the correct term in English) who organised all attacks from RSA. England was missing too many key players (several injured) to be able to be a menace for South Africa. They never were really dangerous, except maybe when the magic Jason Robinson has the ball in his hands (what a player!). I was particularly disappointed by their center back players, and even more particularly by Farrel. Ditto for Andy Gomarsall as scrum half. So, South Africa is now probably qualified with two quite easy games against USA and Tonga. England will have to fight to qualify and noone can tell if Samoa or Tonga can surprise them. Watching Samoa-Tonga on Sunday will be interesting and Samoa-England or Tonga-England are already key matches. A great rugby week-end is about to begin, again. Today, Wales-Australia is the match of the day, for sure, with wales playing home (some matches are not in France, but in Cardiff and Edinburgh). New Zealand-Portugal will be...interesting, though the only incertainty is the number of scored tries. And finally, Ireland-Georgia is of some interest for the French. Tomorrow, France could have hard times against Namibia. Of course, the challenge here is winning *and* scoring the bonus point. That match is 5 days before a key France-Ireland, so the challenge is also not wasting too much energy. Of course, tomorrow's top match for me is Samoa-Tonga while I whileprobably skip Fidji-Canada (too bad, I haven't seen those playing yet). BTW, if someone has a recording of the most intense match as of now (Japan-Fidji), I'd be delighted. Rugbystiquement v tre,

...and, really, we nearly never thought that Argentina could win tonight. South Africa was really too strong for them. The only domain where Argentinians dominated were scrums but this was much compensated by their great weakness on line-outs, losing something like 5 or 6 of them. South Africa thus logical won very easily...and Bryan Habana is now the best try scorer all along RWCs, along with Jonah Lomu. He is a really great player, indeed. Much much impressive South Africa: they'll be by far the favourites of the final against England, which they beated already during that World Cup. I said several times that I'm not a deep fan of RSA's play, but I could become one. Their game improved all along the World Cup and today, they probably played their best match. Two remakes next week-end: France-Argentina for the 3rd place and South Africa-England as final. That will be good matches, no doubt...and I hope that Bernard Laporte will change the French team to play against Argentina.

OK, I'm taking the risk of being ridiculous and have all my English friends laugh loudly in 3 hours. So, my bet is South Africa winning over England, 25-16 (3 tries, 2 transformed and 2 penalty kicks while England scores one trandformed try and 3 penalty kicks). The weather is *perfect* over Paris tonight. That will be a great final.

Logically, Argentina won against Scotland tonight after a.....quite boring match. Scotland, as expected for them unfortunately, wasn't able to put speed in their game, the only way to beat Argentina this year. Even with that poor game (Lamont, their rear player, was a disaster), Scotland finished quite close to ARG, who didn't play brilliantly with many approximations (Hernandez being a bit arrogant, trying to kick too many drop goals) and a bit of luck. So, nothing really impressive in that match. Does that mean that South Africa has better chances to qualify for the final: who knows? Argentina can be unpredictable...but it seems they are a little bit burned out (they don't really have 30 top players and some of their key players appear tired). The semi-finals will feature France-England (about 50-50 chances from what we saw up to now) and South Africa-Argentina (60-40, in my opinion). Next week-end, Stade de France.

Sunday's matches featured three interesting games. We didn't watch much of Fidji-Canada because it was scheduled at 14:00 but announced at 21:00 on the schedule I had..:-(.. That's too bad because these two teams are the only two I haven't seen during an entire game yet. Fidji won after being menaced by Canada up to the last minute. So Fidji keep their chances of qualifying, which they'll have to win by beating Wales. Samoa-Tonga (15-19) was very promizing and turned out to be a deception for me. We watched only the first half of it (Eurosport wasn't broadcasting it live... suckers!). The suspense was there, particularly at the end of the game, when Tonga were playing only with 13 players for five minutes, while leading by 4 points only. However, Samoa obviously played quite badly and never really succeeded during that match to push their very physical way to play rugby. Tonga keep their chances to qualify, which they'll have to defend against England. France-Namibia was the last match and was obviously eagerly awaited by most of my fellow French supporters. Seen as "the match of revival" (as if losing to Argentina was a shame....), this was indeed a mor ethan easy match, as one would expected. Anyway, France played it well and played it the way it had to be played, so even if 87-10 doesn't really mean anything (particularly when playing against 14 players most of the time), they used all the strength of the team to build that victory and I believe there are still many strength in the French team. Critical rendez-vous against Ireland on Friday. Today (Monday): no match. Tomorrow, only one (Scotland-Romania in Murrayfield: critical match for the Scots). Everybody, us included, is resting.:)

I recently ranted about Ubuntu not giving much credit to Debian. I have to complete this by thanking the Merge-o-Matic feature which (for a few months now) sends to package maintainers a diff file with the Debian package when a new Ubuntu package is uploaded. This sometimes make it quite easy to spot modifications done by Ubuntu and eventually adopt them. This already bringed me, as maintainer, a few interesting patches for iso-codes, console-data and geneweb. In the case of iso-codes, samba and geneweb, the Ubuntu patch was even reported manually as a Debian bug by a Ubuntu contributor/developer (no later than today, Martin Pitt took care to suggest us to adopt bzip2 compression for iso-codes and Mathias Gug proposed a patch to enable usershares in samba). So, well, even if things can still be improved, many Good collaboration also often happens.

After one day off, we watched Argentina-Georgia yesterday evening. Interesting game because it directly affect France's chances to qualify after Argentina's win on Friday. Argentina had a big disadvantage by playing only 4 days after their historic battle against France. As a logical consequence, they appeared quite tired and very imprecise. On the other hand, Georgia fought very courageously with a strong pack of forwards, encouraged by most of the crowd in Lyon. Finally, Argentina won *and* scored the bonus point by scoring a try in the very last minute (which might become very important to qualify in this pool. Good game even if Argentina was not that impressive, but I still think this is mostly because of the 4-days delay. Today, 3 games were scheduled. We didn't watch USA-Tonga (15-25). USA was slightly favourite for that one but they also were quite tired by playing 4 days only after their battle against England on Saturday. This was the first match for Tonga and obviously the island players were less tired and played a good rugby to win that one. Japan-Fidji (31-35) seems to have been the most uncertain match as of now. I somewhat regret not watching it as these two are among the teams I like watching and 7 tries in the match probably made it very interesting. Tonight, we watched Italy-Romania (24-18). The italians compete with Scotland for the remaining qualifying spot in that pool, if one assumes that New Zealand will obviously win all its matches. So, Italy *had* to win that match. The quality of romanian rugby has decreased in the last 10 years, but they still have a good set of great players, most of them playing...in France (just like one third of the italian team, indeed). The match was quite indecise with italy keeping the ball all first half long, but only leading 8-0 on half time....and being surprised by two romanian tries at the beginning of second half (8-12). After a strong domination of Italy, Romania was logically sanctioned by one expulsion and a penalty try (for successive voluntary faults), but, until the end, Italy was still in danger. They finally made it, which was the most important for them, 4 days after they were sweeped out by the All Blacks. We're now eagerly waiting for *THE* game of this week, England-South Africa in the Stade de France on Friday. Elizabeth found out that a few tickets are still available, but for 253 euros each, we decided to watch it on TV. So, between 21:00 and 23:00UTC that day, don't even think about pinging me on IRC. I still haven't decided who I'll support the most as I'm not a huge fan of either team....but they're still among the best in the world, of course.

W00t, my pet package is so clean! Ah, looking closer, there's a Ubuntu thing in a corner. I'll integrate that patch when Debian will be mentioned in their release announcements.

Erinn, I got it, thanks to Mohammed. So, dear, now you have to switch to KDE and learn German.

RSA leads by 13-3 against Fiji. They played very slowly...and lost tons of balls during 1st half. IMHO, the Springboks should be scared. Another team was leading 13-3 yesterday evening...:-)

After my rehearsal from yesterday, I finally booked my flights to Edinburgh for Debconf 7. I'll fly from CDG terminal F on June 15th 16:15 (AF5052) and will fly back to CDG on June 24th 09:05 (AF5051). The return flight is somewhat more expensive than later flights (about 30EUR more) but much more convenient for me. See you in EDI, ladies and gentlemen...

... I just learned how to use Mercurial after Daniel converted his darcs repository for aptitude to Mercurial. Being such a VCS wizard when you're told to be the DD with no programming skills is kinda scary...:-)

Hmmm, dear LWN, Anthony Towns is not alone when claiming that the reaction of the Debian community towards Nexenta after they announced their work was probably overflated and certainly too much aggressive. I remember having done so already and I did it again later. I usually avoid debian-devel flamewars but here, this is not really a flamewar. This was a rude action against people who may have done mistakes, errors and certainly need to talk deeper with the Debian community. Even if the contributors in this thread do not think they have been rude, I'm pretty much sure they have been "perceived" as being rude by outsiders. I'm afraid that such behaviour is very likely to enforce a very commonly feeling among the free software community of Debian being a kindergarten of free software bigots completely disconnected from real life. We know we are not this so we should try to avoid people thinking we are. This is not why I work in this project. When it comes at Free Software, I'm a kind of "bigot" too, but I usually try to not enforce my bigotry to other people by being uselessly aggressive. This also is a key point for Free Software and we should more often think about it. (don't take the word "bigot" as first degree, please...) We (as a community) have been aggressive with Nexenta about this issue, just like we have been in the past with, say, Ubuntu. So, I wish that we'll sing along with Erast Benson at next Debconf just like some did at Debconf 5 with the Shuttleworth gang. I wish I would see more Debian contributors bringing this feeling in -devel, especially our "historical" contributors, just like Ian Murdock did. Don't be shy, people..:-)

Julien's blog entry and some spare time lead me to try this powertop utility which I never heard about before. As a consequence, I ended up tine tuning a few parameters on my laptop, mostly sound card and wireless card energy saving parameters. I also finally turned "noatime" ON on my mounted partitions when the laptop runs on battery (I use laptop-mode for such automation). I was prevented to do so util now because mutt relies on access times to define whether mailboxes got new mail or not. However, recent mutt version now have "set check_mbox_size" which make mutt rely on the mailboxes sizes I still have fine tuning to do, mostly trying to get my hard disk really spin down in some occasions (mail reading, mostly) as well as automate the screen brightness, but this powertop utility is really worth it in the hunt for wasted energy. And, of course, installing it is just a matter of "aptitude install powertop", thanks to Patrick Winnertz who packages it. And thanks to Julien who blogged about Powertop, even for ranting about it...:-)

New pictures again (I leave tomorrow for holidays, so I hurry up). Again among my favourite ones, pictures of people just socializing. Amaya once wrote that Debconf is more about socializing than hacking and I couldn't agree more.

There are some bloggers who I'm really happy to see back in the blogosphere.

Geez, I got a Nokia M770 for X-Mas. /me does the geek dance.

107 packages get out of NEW today. I wonder how many of these will have introduced debconf templates that we will have to review, then translate..:-)

...before I have to survive with a right-wing president for 5 more years. So, after 8 years of De Gaulle, 5 years of Pompidou, 7 years of Giscard (20 years right), 14 years of Mitterrand, 12 years of Chirac, I will very probably have to wait for 5 more years to get a president who's closer to my own political views. May I say CRAP?