Two successive days with only one match. We watched Scotland-Romania (42-0) yesterday. Very serious match by the Scots who played better than their first match. They scored 6 tries against a quite weak Romanian team, with no soul. Nothing really important to say as I nearly felt asleep watching the match. Italia-Portugal today feature a good hot attendance in Parc des Princes with the numerous Portuguese or Portuguese-origin people who live in the Paris area pushing "their" team. Most of them certainly never got interested in rugby before (futebol!) but that gave a noisy stadium, particularly when portugal scored their try (and only points in the game). Italia won 31-5 after a good start, but quite weak field play later even if the Portuguese has big defensive holes. I don't really see Italia beat Scotland now and I think we'll see Scotland in 1/4th finals. Small day to come tomorrow (Wales-Japan, with a probable easy win by Wales), before a peak day on Fridady with a very much expected France-Ireland.

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.:)

An interesting story that give some idea of what makes rugby somewhat different from many other (even professional) sports: yesterday, after their defeat agains New Zealand, "Os Lobos" of Portugal got their revenge by beating the All Blacks....at soccer. Indeed, after the match, while warming down at Gerland's stadium, the two teams improvised a soccer match which the portuguese won by 3-1. Then both teams went to the All Blacks changing room and shared some beers in the traditional "third half" of a rugby match. Would anyone imagine this during the soccer world cup?

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.

Biella blogged about King of Kong, a movie about classic video games. I also enjoyed it, although I felt the rivalry and competition cheapened it (while also certianly giving it more of a story to tell). I wish I could enjoy competition the way Bubulle so eloquently describes. For me though, getting to the end of a game is more like raching the end of a long hike, whether you beat someone to the end or not doesn't matter, it's the personal experience of getting there that counts. Anyway.. The reason I'm really responding to Biella's post is because of the question she asks:

But what I also found amazing was how the movie conveyed the persistence of the (older) game. They live on in the lives of individuals and collectives, despite the rise of a whole, new class of games that are much more popular today. I am not sure how much longer they will live on, or if the movie was also inadvertently portraying the rise and slow decline of an era that will, in another 50 years, become part of the archive of dead history.

My guess is that the classic games will persist past the lifetime of their hardware, and that they'll keep on appealing to at least a small percentage of new gamers. Actually, I think they're more popular now than they were fifteen years ago, partly because the commercial gaming industry has moved further away from what the old games are really good at, and partly because emulation is so good that they're available to everyone. And maybe even partly because to really appreciate Kenta Cho's games or many of the other new non-commercial games that Miriam keeps finding and pushing into Debian, you need to know the classics. Even if you do suck at galaga, and even if the only version you've really played is xgalaga, which lacks ship capture. :-) I never played games in machines that ate quarters as a kid, because I didn't have many quarters, and it didn't seem to be a good value. I put one of the few quarters I've ever spent into a video game machine earlier this summer, in the corner of the Mus e M canique that's dedicated to sorta-old video machines (as opposed to ancient, lovingly restored arcade games). It was a metal slug machine. I've beat metal slug under emulation, but only at the expense of many emulated quarters. Another quarter went into vintage game of pong. I enjoyed playing them both on real hardware, but emulation was good enough for both of these and for many other games in between.

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).

The bets are now closed. They'll be kept at http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/500000.html (yes, 1995 HTML again). Now let's wait for the bug #500000 to happen.

Just watching Toy Story 2 this morning (always with great pleasure, all these movies are just plain fun), I noticed that Buzz Lightyear has a...red swirl...on his chin (probably figuring a dimple or so). I should just check if he has one in Toy Story 1 or if this is a hidden easter egg. Update: indeed, the swirl is reverted:

Chat with bubulle These are a few notes from a chat with Bubulle about package descriptions. Check a description against keywords To see what packages would match certain keywords, and how:

ept-cache dumpavail keyword1 keyword2   grep-dctrl -sPackage,Search-Score .

To check how much a package would match certain keywords:

#!/bin/sh
PACKAGE=$1
shift
ept-cache dumpavail "$@"   grep-dctrl -sSearch-Score -FPackage -X $PACKAGE

Technical details in the descriptions The programming language used to implement the software and the X UI toolit used by the software can also be removed from descriptions: Debtags offer a better place to store this information, and most package managers now show tags together with the package description. Submitting descriptions for review Submitting descriptions for review to the Smith Review Project means posting them to the publicly archived debian-l10n-english mailing list, and that may turn off some. It would also be interesting to change the description template generated by debhelper to mention the Smith Review Project and a link to description guidelines Description guidelines There are various description guidelines that could use consolidation and eventually inclusion in the Developers Reference. For example, Writing package descriptions is a very good guide, but most of the unsolved issues at the end have actually now been solved by the Smith Review Project.

This is just a proof of concept. And I think those are simple po files not po-debconf files. Anyway, I'll polish the scripts a little more and then migrate it on i18n.debian.net[*]. Of course, this will be done for all languages when the scripts are more stable.

[*] thanks to Christan Perrier, I have access to that machine now

Meike and Alex, please use the following: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- BARBECUE VOUCHER Please grant this voucher's holder(s) a free barbecue at Bubulle Hotel assuming they fill in the following conditions:

• Be Debian friends
• Do not come in winter
• Do not bring bad weather
• Be able to support Mr "talks too much"'s awful French accent for more than one hour

Bubulle Hotel, http://www.perrier.eu.org, public transportation map on request ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't want to get into the details, but I lost a big chunk of my to do list due to an unexpected power problem. So, if I promised/told you that I will take care of an issue and I will not do it, please remind me.

What I didn't lost and concerns others:
- tdebs wiki page update (Hi Chealer)
- po-debconf translation compendium for Romanian
- some aspell-ro related stuff
- naughtysvn coding: adding update command
- apt-zip - update support merge
- ppp-udeb - integrate with netcfg
- d-i documentation addition: new language process: X layout selection (Hi bubulle)
- svn-bp: bug squashing party
- gnome-screensaver translation
- NM (Hi Christian)

I just booked and paid my tickets to reach Edinburgh next month and attend DebConf7. I’ll be flying to New York on June, 16th through Delta from MEX. Then, I’ll go over the Atlantic with Flyglobespan, from JFK to Liverpool John Lennon Airport. From there, I’m still not completely sure, but I guess I’ll go by train to Edinburgh. Same way to return, on Sunday 24th, after spending a Saturday night in NYC. There’s a small thing that it’s still worrying me. I got the best deal ever from the US to the UK with Flyglobespan, but their first transatlantic flight will be by the end of May and I’m travelling in the middle of June. So, I’m bit skeptical on the matter. But reaching the UK from the US for only 550 USD, return, was impressive and I took the chance. If I don’t appear on DebConf on Sunday 17th around midday, it’ll be because I’ll be in NYC waiting for some answers from Flyglobespan. Anyway, I just moved and this travel expense was not easy. Actually, I wasn’t considering to attend, but after receiving sponsorship, I reconsidered and well, it couldn’t be possible at all without the support of the DebConf orga team, Gunnar, who lent me the sponsorship money for faster and local moves; my employer who is paying the MEX-JFK-MEX flight, but after all, my beloved fianc e, Raquel, who has been an incredible support for a guy like me (a fat, lazy, farty, stupid, anger-tending dude). I really, couldn’t be the happiest person I am today, without you: I love you, peque :-). Have I mentioned that any Debian friend visiting Mexico City can crash on our apartment? Yes! Just like bubulle’s hotel in Paris!

The time has come for me to rant again about the crazy world of VCS. I noticed today that a few things changed in apt l10n and I wanted to resync with Michael Vogt's bzr archive. I was first notified about some archive format change and was suggested to run some magic spell to bring my archive to the Wonderful World of bzr 0.whatever_new_version. Fortunately, it worked, which is good because I have no bloody idea of how I can reconstruct a broken archive. Then, unfortunately, when trying to push these changes to my public archive (the one used by maintainers for l10n changes):

bubulle@mykerinos:~/src/debian/apt/bzr/apt/main> bzr rspush
kheops.homeunix.org:/home/www/www.perrier.eu.org/debian/packages/d-i/level4/apt-main
Bzrtools is not up to date with installed bzr version 0.15.0.
There should be a newer version available, e.g. 0.15.
Unable to load plugin 'bzrtools' from
'/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/bzrlib/plugins'
bzr: ERROR: unknown command "rspush"

So, again, something changed in bzr stuff. bzrtools is then broken, the rspush command I'm using for a while now is broken and I can't publish my changes anymore. Of course, while I'm fighting with this, the good old SVN for D-I still works like a charm just like it's doing since December 2003 when Joeyh migrated from CVS to SVN. Joey, Frans, promise me you'll never ever switch to this distributed hype and keep our good old, crappy, limited but rock solid SVN. This was the rant of the day.

Note to self: when running "aptitude upgrade" in a window, avoid entering suspend-to-disk without checking what dpkg is doing at the moment the system enters suspend. Today, I had indeed the very bad luck of my system entering suspend to disk exactly when the postinst of initramfs-tools was updating the initrd for the kernel I'm using. It did shutdown exactly at the moment where the initramfs image was backed up but the new one was not in place yet. Guess what happens when booting up again? :-) Of course, this also happens the very same day I just cleaned up old kernel versions because I'm happy with the current kernel I'm using. To complete the nightmare, no CD drive handy while I was in the train, so no possible immediate rescue and one ends up with a bubulle looking through the window in the train instead of doing his Debian duties. Back at work, the magic rescue mode of D-I of course saved my life, as usual. PS: I wonder whether this race condition could be considered a bug in initramfs-tools.

My dear comment-hating Bubulle, you forced me into writing yet another weblog entry :)
I have not yet worked it out completely, but it might be that your problems with suspend to RAM your Dell machine are related to having the Composite or AIGLX extensions loaded. This is just an hypothesis, and might be just wrong, but:

• My Dell XPS M1210 worked beautifully right out of the box. It suspends to RAM without a problem, and comes back to life fresh as lettuce. I have even used the suspend to disk, although I don't really like it if I have an alternative.
• Sometimes, however, I noticed that -only if it has been suspended for around one day or more- resuming does not work - It tries restoring the video state, but seems to continuously fail. I see a X11 cursor (arrow), another X11 cursor (hourglass IIRC), and a block of what appears to be a random memory dump, around 100x100 pixels
• I have not reported this as a bug, as it is damn unpredictable
• I installed AIGLX/Composite/Compiz on my laptop just to show it off to some friends upon first installation. I recently installed them (well, Beryl instead, but that should not prove relevant) on my desktop machine as well, as I was writing an article about it and wanted to provide screenshots
• My desktop machine has an Intel 82865G video card. My laptop has a 945M. I expect them to be quite similar.
• Once, I came back from a weekend, and found the weird video breakage pattern on my desktop as well! Of course, I have not yet removed the AIGLX/Composite configuration from it, expecting the problem to show up again... But no luck. I have had this machine for several months already, and had never seen such a problem

So... Christian, have you tried the plainest X configuration? Have you tried maybe switching to one of the virtual consoles before suspending? Or maybe even shutting down your X session?
I hope this helps you chase down your problem. Do not worry, though - I don't want to be hugged/kissed to death by a cheese-eating translation-loving Frenchman.