We watched either parts or the entire three matches yesterday. So, long report..:-) The day began with the most unbalanced game of this world cup, featuring New Zealand, world's top rugby team, against Portugal, ranked 22nd. Rugby in Portugal is played by about 4200 people only, in less than 50 clubs. All players are amateur but one (Gon alvo Uva, playing in Montpellier, France), being dentists, students, etc...and coming to RWC during their holidays. The result (108-13 and 16 tries) was expected but the feeling when Portugal scored a try was great, with the 40,000 attendees in Lyon supporting Portugal. Personnally, I had great time chatting on IRC with Miguel Figueiredo, one of the leaders of the portuguese l10n team in Debian, during the match. We watched Wales-Australia (20-32) during the evening. That game was obviously the key match of this pool, with the winner very probably finishing 1st in the pool. Wales playing in Millenium Stadium in Cardiff is always astonishing and show how much the Welsh people love this sport. During 1st half, Australia strongly dominated and logically lead 25-3 with 3 tries. Berrick Barnes, their new fly half (Stephen Larkham injured), is a very promising player and, imho, the match's MVP (even after being severely bashed by Gareth Thomas on Australia's first try). After half time, the Welsh team courageously fought and came back to 13-25, menacing Australia which was more hesitating. Unfortunately, Australia scored a try after a big mistake by Stephen Jones. So, even with good play by Wales and another try by the incredible wing player Shane Williams, Australia logically won this game. Again, a southern hemisphere team dominated a northern hemisphere one. This is probably what will happen during this entire WC and I bet that New Zealand, Australia and South Africa will end up in semi-finals, quite probably along with Argentina, unless France does a miracle and ends up 1st in their pool. I think that Australia is slightly weaker than NZ and RSA, though. So, my current bet is NZ-RSA for the final (this can happen, given their respective track to the final and given that they certainly will end up first of their respective pools). Finally, we watched the second half of Ireland-Georgia (14-10). *That* was quite a surprise. Ireland was very close to lose this game with Georgian forwards crushing them repeatedly at the end of the match and nearly scoring a try that would have made them win. Everybody was waiting for Georgia to swell after their strong 1st half (3-7) but they managed to fight until the last second, supported by Bordeaux 40,000 attendees (minus a few thousands of Irish supporters, of course). So, while the initial question was whether Ireland would score a bonus point, the final question became about them to *win* the match. This gives even more credit to Argentina's victory last Tuesday. Full standing ovation for Georgia at the end of the match. Today is again a busy day. I'll probably skip Fidji-Canada (which happens at the same time than France-Namibia) but certainly won't miss Samoa-Tonga and, of course, France-Namibia. Samoa have to win to keep their chances of qualifying (they can beat England, really) and, well, France has of course to win *and* score a bonus point. In this world cup where to so-called "small" teams are not that small, everything can happen and France is anything but safe, ehre.

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,

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.

Today was the day we had tickets for *the* match of the day between South Africa and Samoa (59-7). Of course, the Springboks won this game after the Samoan players were exhausted of their battle after 60th minute. However, we really enjoyed a great game during 1st half (21-7) with solid play by RSA (without great vista, as usual, but, well, I'm not a Springboks fan) and ultra-solid defense by Samoa. And, well, as long as the Samoans have the ball in their hands, everything can happen, especially with Henry Tuilagi, impressive number 8, which has been acclaimed by the Parc des Princes public when finally quitting the game on 60th minute. Three great moments in the game:

• The Samoan try by Gavin Williams who made the whole Parc stand up and shout
• The Samoan team spending 10 terrible minutes in RSA camp, unfortunately without scoring but being pushed by 43000 people in the stadium (ie the 44000 attendants minus about 1000 South-Africans...), yelling out "Samoa" even though probably 99% of us aren't able to even point Samoa on a world map.
• The standing ovation of the public to the Samoan players at the end of the game when they came back and thanked us for the support

South-Africa is however much more organized, of course, and their attacks were terribly devastating sometimes, with Bryan Habana scoring 4 tries. They're however a little bit hesitating with the ball in hands and their defense wasn't *that* impressive. While writing this, I'm watching Scotland-Portugal (56-10) as we came back from the Parc des Princes. This game happens in St-Etienne, my home town. I imagine the noise and feast in town, where we still remember a famous Scotland-Morocco during Soccer WC 1998. Apparently, the Scots like St-Etienne. Apparently, Portugal resisted during about one half and they even scored a try and sometimes endangered Scotland. Good game by the Scots who can hope to qualify for 1/4th finals. Tonight, Ireland-Namibia. If we aren't too much rugbyfied, I'll watch even if the result is quite predictable. Both teams are in France's pool, so watching team will be interesting. And even now, 2h before the game, there are 25.000 Irish people in Bordeaux. Probably interesting noise over there. Another match today, which I didn't watch because we were on our way to the stadium: Wales-Canada (42-17). Canada was leading 12-7 on half-time and even 17-7 on 45th minute. So, well, not very brilliant for the Welsh. Finally, their most experienced players came back (S. Jones, Gareth Tholas and Collin Charvis) and they easily came back and overscored Canada...who never resigned and were very close to score again at the end of the game. Brilliant day and, believe us, watching rugby *in* the stadium is really a great experience (we don't do this often enough...).

First day of the Rugby World Cup around here. Here are some of my impressions (for those of you not aware, I'm a rugby fan for ages and this event in my country will definitely affect my work on free software in the next 6 weeks). France-Argentina (12-17): being beaten by Argentina is a surprise only for people who don't know that much about Argentina in rugby. Argentina is currently ranked 6th in the world national team ranking, very close to Ireland (5th) and before England (7th), the last RWC winner. The argentinians played the best rugby they could play against a very hesitating French team. All players know each other very well as 2/3 of the Argentinian team plays...in France. The world's top player (imho), Juan Mart n Hern ndez, lead his team to victory while the french were anything but brilliant. Nothing really harmful, indeed: in rugby, completely screwing a match happens and does not necessarily mean anything for other games. Only drawback, if France qualifies, it becomes more and more likely that the 1/4 final could be France-New Zealand. Ouch... New Zealand-Italia (76-14): I haven't seen that one, therefore missing the first "haka" of that RWC. All Blacks are still the favourites of the RWC and they scored the quickest try as of now. Italy team fought quite well, from what I read, with one of my favourite players (Maurizio Bergamasco) scoring a try. Australia-Japan (91-3): in the past, Japan was closer to the top rugby world teams, particularly because of a long tradition of playing 7-players rugby and therefore being very efficient in rear lanes play. However, rugby changed last years and the power is the key. The japanese team was obviously lacking it...and then they had 14 tries scored against them by a very strict Australian team. England-USA (28-3 as I'm writing this): England is not that impressive but serious, still. The USA team plays well around the scrum and defend pretty well. On the English side, Mike Catt could be one of the stars of that RWC. And, yay, while writing this, USA scored a try against England *and* Lawrence Dallaglio got expelled for 10 minutes. Two occasions for me to be happy..(sorry in advance to my friends in England). Tomorrow, we'll attend South-Africa vs Samoa at Parc des Princes, Paris. That will definitely be a great feast and a nice rugby match. We'll of course put our heart on the Samoan side (I'm afraid I've never been enthusiast with the South African way to play rugby).

Well, checking ISO-3166-2 data for my country, I found out that France officially listed the following subdivisions in ISO-3166-2:

• 22 metropolitan regions
• 4 overseas regions/departments
• 96 metropolitan departments
• 2 territorial collectivities
• 4 overseas territories

Thankfully, they didn't list the hundreds of "cantons" and "arrondissements", nor the 36,000 municipalities. Ah, and France is also one of the very few countries that have *more than one* ISO-3166 code as, besides the logical FR, we have GP for Guadeloupe, GF for Guyane, MQ for Martinique, RE for R union, YT for Mayotte, PM for Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, NC for New Caledonia, PF for French Polynesia, TF for the Southern French Territories and WF for Wallis et Futuna. Dammit..:-) Even our British friends didn't steal codes for Scotland or Wales...

Today, I spent the entire morning working on the iso-codes package. This package features, among others, the giant ISO-3166-2 list, with all subdivisions of all countries of the world, thus about 4000names. Alastair McKinstry built this list long time ago, from various sources, as the ISO-3166 maintenance agency, does not provide the official list freely. Therefore, the work we (Alastair, Tobias Toedter, Li Daobing and myself) are doing on iso-codes is of some importance as this is the only freely available list of ISO-639 (language names), ISO-3166 (country names and subdivisions) and ISO-4217 (currency names) available in a machine parseable format, along with translations in a lot of languages. We are indeed upstream for that list which is used in many Linux distributions. So, today, I went on the ISO-3166 maintenance agency newsletters (*these* are freely available) and used them to update the subdivision list for as many countries as possible. That involved *copy and pasting* from PDF files to text files so that names are preserved along with the correct various funky characters used in many languages. You can help this work. Just install the "iso-codes" package, then check /usr/share/xml/iso-codes/iso_3166_2.xml for your country and report anythink you consider being a problem as a bug against the iso-codes package. Please note that the ISO-3166 MA only uses official references from the national standard bodies of all countries, so please use official sources as your reference. Of course, patches are very welcomed because dealing with all these names without messing with the "funky characters" is not easy. Please also note that the ISO-3166-2 standard uses "romanized" names, so only Latin characters should be used (all variants of such characters are accepted, though). My conclusion of the day: the world is bloody complicated. There are even subdivisions (named "castles") for....San Marino, one of the smallest states in the world. Luckily, the Holy See (the reall smallest state in the world), doesn't seem to have subdivisions...so far. And the country with the highest number of official subdivisions is....Slovenia (184!).

Less than one full day to read 8000+ mails. Not that bad. Among these were like 2000 spams that hadn't been detected by my spamassassin+CRM114 setup on my mail server, but properly identified by CRM114 on my laptop. Interesting thread in debian-devel after I reported bugs about the use of "Homepage: " in packages descriptions and Christoph Berg objected to it. Apparently, this could lead to the support of a "Homepage:" field in debian/control which is Good. New samba upstream release (3.0.25c) on its way. Steve Langasek did a release of the package while I was away, Peter Eisentraut did some bug triaging and No l K the prepared the release toay, searching for the bugs that are fixed. No real problem building the new version, except for the Python bindings which are nearly unmaintained (we are seriously considering to stop providing python-samba so please speak up *and* come helping if interested). The D-I l10n-sync script was hosed for 2 weeks because of a broken Swedish translation file (I hate poEdit for this, see #420685). I really should begin seeking for a backup for D-I l10n handling as Dennis Stampfer is now apparently completely MIA. Nothing really important apart from all this. Probably time now to begin preparing a possible trip to India for FOSS.in which I really would like to participate to, if I can find a way to fund the travel. Also time to think deeper about the proposed Extremadura i18n meeting which hasn't met a huge success, probably because we really want it to be focused on *one* goal this time (DDTP/Pootle).

We're just back home after spending two weeks enjoying the wonders (and heat and forest fires...scirocco, mamma mia!) of Sicily. We had no network at the hotel and Italian (or sicilian, or just Cefal 's) Internet Caf s just suck (only a few computers running Windows while I forgot my special "Putty key" and no way to connect my laptop). So, 8000 mails to read (plus 6400 spams gently sorted by CRM114). I'll be busy for the next few days and I cross my fingers for no disasters on my packages. ...ah, apparently a KDE transition is in progress if I believe the output of "aptitude dist-upgrade" on my laptop...:-)

Sesse pointed the Dell repository with Debian packages of their firmware tools. Out of curiosity, I installed the firmware-tools package, then identified my Latitude X1 BIOS as A03 and noticed that Dell now has a A06 released. So, I attempted to update it:

mykerinos:~# update_firmware --yes
Searching storage directory for available BIOS updates...
Checking system_bios(ven_0x1028_dev_0x01a3) - a03
        Found Update: system_bios(ven_0x1028_dev_0x01a3) - a06
	
	Found out of date packages.
	
	Running updates...
	Installing system_bios(ven_0x1028_dev_0x01a3) - a06
	Traceback (most recent call last):
	  File "/usr/bin/update_firmware", line 226, in ?
	      sys.exit( main() )
	        File "/usr/bin/update_firmware", line 160, in main
		    ret = pkg.install()
		      File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/package.py", line 51, in install
    return self.installFunction(self)
      File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/package.py", line 24, in defaultInstallStrategy
    raise InternalError("Attempt to install a package with no install function. Name: %s, Version: %s" % (self.nam                e, self.version))
package.InternalError: Attempt to install a package with no install function. Name: system_bios(ven_0x1028_dev_0x0                1a3), Version:
a06

No luck, then..:-) I'll check this more carefully when back from holidays. Anyway, updating my BIOS before leaving is probably not a good idea..:-)

Today was a strange day. We are preparing our holiday trip to Sicily but had a full day at home, meant for packing and the like. Indeed, packing was done in a few hours this morning and I ended up....hacking on D-I. For whatever reason, I came back on the plans we have, among the D-I team, to switch to console-setup for console handling. Something already done in Ubuntu and which brings, for instance and if I'm correct, the benefit of having the same keyboard maps for X and the console. So, first, I summarized the floating ideas in a wiki page. Then I worked on a few possible modifications to "localechooser", the D-I component that allows users to choose their language/country/locale and which needs modifications for console-setup. That lead me to produce an experimental image of D-I netboot for i386 and asked translators for some testing. MJ Ray noticed the call for testing and asked Esperanto translators for some testing, which Serge Leblanc did...and reported a nasty bug, later confirmed by Damyan Ivanov, then investigated by Anton Zinoviev, then digged a little more by me again, then advised by Rapha l Hertzog and Julien Cristau on #debian-devel-fr...and lead to an RC bug reported against....perl base. All this, of course, was completely unplanned as of this morning. This is probably one of the reasons that make me enjoy free software development.

Yesterday sucked. I thought I'd try cheering myself up by doing some work for/with someone I've enjoyed collaborating with before. So this morning, I translated Christian Perrier's call for Esperanto D-I testing and Serge Leblanc had tested it before lunch. What a star! I think it's easy to see the problems and overlook good things like this. I know which I prefer, but people tend to focus on bad news more than good, don't they? Pick any debian news service and good news seems like a small fraction. Want to change that?

Finally, I made it. I just completed the upload of my pictures of Debconf7 to my gallery. Comments included. Enjoy. Or not.

The winner is Pierre "Madcoder" Habouzit who first mentioned (Enrico Zini came a little bit later) xbacklight which works perfectly with the i915 card in my Dell X1 and can even fade the screen brightness to values I couldn't reach with the Dell's buttons. Once, again, Keith Packard save my life (my Watts in that case). He already did so with xrandr, allowing to easily play with screen output on the very same Dell and have nice ways to do my talks. That X.org and XSF team really rock!

Today, I made my first steps using the collab-maint repository on Alioth. I accidentally noticed that one of my packages, namely calife (a sudo-like utility which I use since more than 10 years and developed by Ollivier Robert, one of my very very very old friends in the FLOSS world), got a new release at the beginning of July. That was a good occasion to move calife package's maintenance to Alioth and then learn about collab-maint. Thanks to the pretty good documentation, this has been done "en un tournemain" and, that upload had then two benefits: a new calife and my first package in collab-maint. It's now probably time to move there some of my packages, the first being my pet package, geneweb (who has its own project on Alioth, which i certainly overkill). Thanks, again, to Alioth admins for that very efficient work.

Dear Lazyweb, While hunting the wasted Watts on my laptop, I'm trying to find a way to automagically set the screen brightness on this Dell latitude X1. The laptop of course has screen brightness buttons, which work nicely in X but I really would like to find something similar to /proc/acpi/sony/brightness for Sony laptops or /proc/acpi/toshiba/brightness for toshiba ones. Hints?

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...:-)

Some people reading this blog know that I'm growing a special link with the isolated kingdom of Bhutan in the Himalayas. This link is born with the DzongkhaLinux lanuch back in 2006 and the connections that were established then with the people working over there on their national Linux distribution at the Department of Information Technology. And more particularly with their lead developer in this, Pema Geyleg. In parallel to this, I developed a good "vibration" with that country and I realy plan to come back there in the future and visit it more deeply, including all friends I made there in very few days. The country is currently not what we, in the so-called western world, would call democratic. This is a monarchy and not, yet, a constitutional one. However, the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, (who has been ranked among the 100 people who have more influence in the world, last year, by Time magazine) decided long ago that he would bring the country to democracy by following a long but probably needed process. He first resigned last year, surprising everybody in the country, in the favor of his son, Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, who is currently the youngest head of state in the world. Democratic parliament elections are programmed for 2008. And, yesterday, as another step in this democratic process, the Prime Minister resigned along with 6 other ministers, to "enter politics" in preparation of these national elections in February/March 2008. Again, it's very interesting to watch this process from far and see whether the country will succeed in achieving this transition (Pema told me several times that, indeed, the majority of people in Bhutan are not particularly eager waiting for this transition, given the very special relation they have with the king (the buddhist religion playing of course a great role there). And, well, let's anyway hope that the future government and parliament will keep the push they're giving to the development of free software, currently.

I recently purchased a nice thing: a notebook cooler. Indeed, this was originally meant for my "Freebox HD" box, a TV-over-DSL box provided by the French ISP named "Free". These boxes have a huge problem: overheating that makes them hang when using some of their functions (usually reading videos stored on their internal HD). So, I bought a notebook cooler from Antec and just put my box on it and it doesn't hang anymore. Of course, I tried that thing with my laptop (a Dell Latitude X1 which, as many subnotebooks, can become quite hot). This is really impressive. The temperature reported by ACPI drops from 55-61 Celsius in normal operation (55C while reading mail, 61C while compiling samba) to 45C all time long. The notebook cooler is autopowered through the USB ports of the notebook (of course, that means that it drains some power...about 100mA from my rough estimations). It is about 22cmx30cm and 1.5cm height. Of course, as it includes some fans, it adds some noise to my otherwise silent laptop. I would anyway recommend it especially for subnotebook owners who leave their notebook power for very long time as it certainly help a lot preserving the batteries life (Li-ion batteries don't like heat). Antec has two models of notebook coolers: this other one seems designed for travelling. The device is sold for about 30 euros in France and Antec's web site rates it for $40. I'll probably buy another one to definitely host my laptop and even probably yet another one for my son's Dell Latitude 100L (which also overheats a lot when he plays these stupid MMORPG things..:-) Update: notebook batteries are Li-ion based and those don't like heat either..thanks to Thomas Viehmann for the precision.

Brice Goglin just announced that he considers the bug triage task on the XSF bugs nearly completed. This graph shows the result of that giant work. So, please, be impressed in case you never noticed that work and just buy Brice a beer next time you meet him. And then go back cleaning out your own packages' bugs, of course..:-)