GNOME-Mud 0.11 was released yesterday. This was probably something unexpected to those who follow the mailing list, as it's the first release in over three years. Back in 2006, Les Harris started contributing to the project and started a major rewrite of the program. Things looked very promising, with the program being ported to newer GNOME technologies and standards and being basically rewritten from ground up. However, Les got hit by Real Life and being the project's only real hacker, development basically stopped for nearly two years. On June, I was tempted to remove my irssi subscription to #gnome-mud; all I did was idling or telling people who popped by that nothing was being done and that wouldn't change unless someone rolled up their sleeves and finished up the nearly ready 0.11 release. A few days after considering declaring GNOME-Mud dead, Les joined IRC after more than a year of no contact, recovered his GNOME account password and started to commit the missing bits at an awesome pace. A few weeks later, 0.11 was done, with even more features than originally planned (support for more advanced MUD protocols like MSP or ZMP, for example) and I finally found the time to make a tarball and publish it. Les has lots of plans for the next release, and I hope my old wish of seeing GNOME-Mud becoming a MUD client that is comparable to the classic zMud will soon be a lot closer. The foundation set by this release certainly will make it easier to accomplish. As always, if you want to contribute, we'll be happy to help you out on #gnome-mud at GIMPnet, or in gnome-mud-list@gnome.org.

Yesterday, my friend Marc had to visit a court in Barcelona, after being accussed for an electoral penalty. Marc has always had a strong Catalan sentiment, and fights for the independence of his country from the French and Spanish states in as many ways he finds convenient. In this direction, he's been involved in countless activities promoting independence, in the Internet and in the streets. For now, he has to deal with living in the Spanish state, and recently this became a legal problem. Spain held parlamentary elections in March, and Marc was appointed to serve at one of the polling stations in Barcelona. Believing he had nothing to do with an election process to elect the Spanish parliament, he conciously refused to take his seat during that Sunday, infringing the Spanish electoral law. He presented his allegations to the officer, and refused to declare anything else. He now faces a fine ranging from 180 to 1800 or community work (which he would, again, object to perform). The officer told him that he's apparently the first Catalan to object like this, so what will happen next (besides he'll have to sit in court and see how it goes) is unprecedented. While Marc and I don't share many of our political views, I admire his dedication and his solid defence of his ideals. If I had been called to serve in a polling station last March, I would most probably have had my own personal debate on what to do, but suspect I would have ended going there to avoid creating these kind of situations, and would have had to participate in a process that I consider broken, unfair and undemocratic. I admire and support Marc for being stubborn enough to get this far. His case has had quite some echo in the Catalan blogsphere and some Catalan media like VilaWeb. Some people have started a campaign to collect money to help Marc pay the fine. The response so far has been surprisingly positive. Marc, molta sort i una abra ada!

The newspapers brought good news bits in the last two days. P blico reports on Paco Rivi re's ongoing quest to get a refund for the extra money he had to pay for a Windows licence when he bought a laptop. Paco is a well known member of the Ubuntu Catalan community and has been battling for this common-sense right for 3 years. The trial took place last Monday, and hopefully he'll be able to report some good news soon. In totally unrelated news, the Valencian caveman Juan Garc a Sentandreu, leader of the right-wing Coalici n Valenciana party, was arrested yesterday, for still not too clear reasons. Being one of the biggest enemies of my language, and having a long record of violent attacks to cultural entities and other political parties in Val ncia, I can't say I pitty him at all. I hope he had fun sleeping with the yonkis in the central police station last night. :)

This week I spent some time upgrading PyBlosxom to version 1.4.3. I was still using 1.2, which probably was insecure and buggy. This is the first step in a bigger plan to replace Apache2 with nginx in this server, but that will come later. I was lucky to find PyBlosxom's author, Will, on IRC at the right time, who kindly answered a few questions and helped solve a few issues with the comments plugin and flavours. So, after a while, I had fixed a few subtle, 4 year old bugs in my XHTML templates and more notably, fixed lots of small bits in the rss feed, which finally makes Liferea and Advogato like my entries. But, the biggest achievement was getting a brand new comments.py plugin from Will, which allows to close comments on entries after an expiration date. So, even if I was happily using Mako's Akismet plugin, I still was getting 5 or 6 spams each day on very old entries (favourites being one about Alonso visiting Val ncia and one remembering the 70^th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War). Well, not any longer. My dear spammers, you can now go pester someone else, or pick new entries pretty quickly before they get closed down. It's been a nice fight, but it's a good time to wish you go away and fuck off. With love, Jordi. Thank you, Will!

Knowing many people in the Debian community, I knew others would be there too. And Gunnar confirmed it yesterday via Planet Debian. Yes, I participated in the World Naked Bike Ride, although at the time I didn't know about the campaign, I thought people were doing it just because we can mostly. So, after being invited to the ride the week before, 5 of our colla were in the old T ria's river bed, near the Fira Alternativa's scenary at the scheduled time. Not having done anything like this before, we were a bit expectant to see how many people would actually do it, before deciding to join them. After a while, more and more people seemed to gather, and it finally took off. Pants off, and there we go! The insane amount of photographing and filming that was going on around us at the beginning was a bit uncomfortable, but after a while we had mostly forgotten we were riding our bikes naked through the commercial arteries of Val ncia. The ride was too long for my taste, covering the whole Fira, Pla a d'Am rica, carrer Colom just in front of El Corte Ingl s (I wonder how many known people saw me there), X tiva, Russafa, back to X tiva, Town Hall, Ciutat Vella, river margin and Blasco Ib ez. Even if it was a sunny day, the chilly wind made me feel really cold, but overall it was quite fun, and an interesting experience I might or might not repeat. I'm certainly not becoming a naturism activist or anything like this. I do think we have way too many taboos, and every time I get rid of one, I feel a lot better. :)

Last week's edition of Ciberpa s included a lengthy article which tried to explain Debian's and Ubuntu's OpenSSL problem to unexperienced computer users, it's impact, what should people do and what happens next. Merc Molist sent in a few questions for me to answer, a small part of which were used in the article. While I don't like a few bits of the article that much, I tried my best to make it clear that Debian is not a bunch of clueless and careless Free Software enthusiasts. The treatment that the incident had in some well known Spanish security-related websites was in my opinion deplorable, so I want to thank Merc for the opportunity to clarify some of the Debian bashing. I expect the full interview will be published either here or at Merc 's website in the following days.

Last Thursday, and the few days after, were quite intense. A series of events made me feel really loved by a lot of people, which is always a good reminder of what kind of friends you are surrounded by. I could talk about Pep's gift at work, Visenteta, a goldfish which now lives in an aquarium at home, which in turn was donated by Cristina and Brande. While I still have mixed feelings about keeping animals in cages, my choices were give it a better place than the small bowl where it initially lived, give it away to someone who could properly take care of Visenteta, or sacrifice it. I unsuccessfully tried #2, can't do #3 myself, so I accepted Brande's offer to have a decently-sized aquarium at home. Visenteta seems happy today, and I've learned all about aquarium maintenance the hard way. During the day my mobile phone didn't rest for too long intervals; everyone was calling it to congratulate me and so on. But the bigger emotions came after leaving work, when I went to l'Alqueria to hang around with my friends and see if they would go have an orxata with Maria and me. Strangely, they refused, being in the middle of an apparently very important plant transplantation operation. When suggested going for dinner instead, the reaction was pretty cold too, but this was understandable as we'd meet on Friday at my place for a tiny celebration. In the end we headed off to Alboraia alone and had a delicious orxata in Toni's shop. Maria said she had a surprise reservation in a Indo-Pakistani restaurant near my house, so after a while we cycled back to Val ncia. As it was getting dark and cold, we went into my house to get some clothes, and when I opened the living room door, I was scared by a bunch of shadows suddenly shouting at me and was buried in confetti. I couldn't react for the next 10 seconds, while my brain quickly built relations of many details that had happened during the week, all part of the preparations for a secret party at my own place. Wow, the feeling is incredible. I've participated in similar surprise parties, but had never been the target. I hope everyone reading this gets one at least once in their lives, I really loved it! But still, when the party ended, I slowly started to find little gifts all over the place: a book under my pillow, a bicycle bell on my handlebar, a cactus for my computer space... My friends had been planning all of this for the last two weeks, and I never suspected anything. Incredible! It really makes me feel surrounded by people who care about and love me, and went through the hassle of coordinating 10 or 12 persons with me not noticing at all. Thank you, everyone! The book, by the way, is Si no plou, plour , by TV3's M nica L pez, a fun compendium of popular weather proverbs which we discovered in a gas station in Tarragona, during our Easter trip to la Terra Alta.

And today, I finally turn 30. I've been grumpy about this day getting closer and closer for the last three or four years, which have passed in front of my eyes with me nearly not noticing. The last year has had more downs than ups, and at times has been quite dark. I feel things are slowly getting better, and I spend more time looking forward than back, which certainly should help. Tomorrow I'll hold a small party at home with some friends, but the big and proper event will be in September, when five or six people in our colla, born in 1978, will celebrate our 30^th birthday, in a massive, weekend-long party already dubbed La festa dels excessos. You shouldn't miss this one! Thanks to the many people who have phoned, texted or emailed me already. It reminds me that I'm surrounded by people who love me and were there when I needed them.

Several people have been discussing what material is appropriate or not for feeds syndicated by Planet Debian. It's basically the same discussion that also pops up every now and then in any big planet like GNOME's, KDE's, Ubuntu's or ours, with some people advocating for Free Software or techie stuff content only, and an apparent majority liking and defending that people write about their latest Debian hack, but also how wonderful their vacation in Paris were, or how their favourite politician did this or that. For some time now, Planet Debian has a small new feature that might have gone unnoticed by many, and could help some readers get rid of undesired content from the post listings. Steve Kemp added a cookie-based per-author filtering system to Planet a few weeks ago. Next to each author name you'll see a link which can be used to collapse all entries by the author. This setting will be saved in a browser cookie, and can be reverted by clicking on the + link next to the collapsed author. To expand all hidden posts, use the Show all link in the Planet's right column above the subscription list. So, if reading about baby Jesus annoys you, just click on and be happy.

Today's edition of El Pa s, the most read Spanish newspaper, celebrates the 10^th anniversary of it's weekly technology section Ciberpa s with a special edition which takes a look back at the last 10 years of computing, and also looks forward to what the future will bring us. Merc Molist interviewed Carlos Atar s, my mate at Softcatal Jordi Mas and myself, on what happened during the last 10 years of Free Software and where we are heading. The paper edition features a *gasp* half page picture of me laying on the grass, but is otherwise identical to the online version. I need to add, this feels a bit strange. :) It's the first time I see myself refered to as just Mallach , but I realise I'm getting old...

As Josep asks for it every now and then, and we really enjoyed this trip, it's time to write about the four days we spent cycling from Ripoll to Girona, through the Ruta del Carrilet, a Catalan via verda similar to the one we completed a year ago. I spent this year's 9 d'Octubre cycling trip with totally different trip mates, not related to my triathlon team. The extensive group was formed by Sabri, Mar, B rbara, Carles, Desi, Adela, N ria, Amador and myself. We started our journey by car from Val ncia to Mollet de Mar, where we parked the cars and take a regional train to Ripoll with our bikes, where the real journey would start.

Arrival at Ripoll When we got to Ripoll, it was quite late and dark, but we managed to find the start of the Ruta del Ferro rail trail which would take us to Sant Joan de les Abadesses. It was quite cold, but especially really humid, so we had to think twice before settling on a place to camp and setup our tents. We had to take special care of covering the bicycles as the air was really wet, and anything we left uncovered would appear soaking next morning. In part, my shoes suffered from this.

Early next morning we had breakfast on the wet grass and then started our way to Sant Joan through a deliciously well equipped and maintained cycling track, which unfortunately only lasts for 12 kilometres through a splendind landscape. After having breakfast in the old railway station in Sant Joan, we abandoned the Ruta del Ferro to take a road to Olot via Sant Pau de Seguries, where we had to climb a small mountain and then descend through the Vall de Bianya until we got to Olot.

Sant Joan de les Abadesses' railway station Asking the locals for the start of the Ruta del Carrilet was fun due to the strong oriental accent in the area and we sometimes wouldn't get a word of what we were told. An old man recommended us finding a big park in the outskirts of the town, where we prepared our entrepans for lunch, and after a little rest, we started cycling up the Carrilet, which would take us to Girona in two stages. This Catalan area is of volcanic origin, and there are several natural parks dedicated to the phenomenon. There are many mountains covered with forests and impossible peak shapes, which due to the time of the year were starting to go from green to brown and yellow, making fantastic colour schemes in the landscape.

Under a green ceiling in Olot Just after the few first kilometres, the railroad track starts to descend most of the way, which makes it easy for people who aren't too trained, and easier to enjoy your way chatting with people while you cycle. As we consumed the daylight, we came across a parish church party with lots of old and young people from the nearby town of Sant Miquel de Pineda. Amador and I were lagging behind a bit at that point, and when we got there, we found the rest of the group were already off their bikes and either having a curious look over the party, or directly following suit and dancing like the others. We had a peek into the small church and also into a small graveyard in the back, where I was surprised to find the enemies of my Catalan grandmother: Fam lia Matabosch , as one of the headstones revealed.

Partying at Sant Miquel de Pineda As it was getting late, we eventually started off again, but luckily B rbara spotted what seemed a good sleeping place for that night. To the right of the trail there was a hermitage (devoted to Santa Cec lia) up on the hill which, for bonus points, had a porch with a recently renewed roof which would help cover ourselves from humidity and rain, as we found soon after starting cooking dinner. While the cooks prepared our soup, some others went down to the Carrilet in order to find out if the next town was close so we could get some driking water for the dinner. Luckily, Sant Feliu was close enough, and we found a bar where we got some water... and two bottles of wine, which made some people back at the hermitage very happy. We were quite tired though, so we eventually went to sleep after reading some stories from a great tale book, with the sound of rain hitting the grass outside the porch. The rain was still with us when we started waking up, so we had breakfast and packed our stuff very slowly, in an attempt to avoid getting wet. But rain didn't stop, so we made a few hacks on our bicycle bagpacks to minimise the amount of rain wetting them. When we were finally ready to set off and had cycled around 3 kilometres under the light rain, it finally stopped raining, making the rest of the journey very pleasant.

Sleeping under the porch of Santa Cec lia's hermitage This part of the route is again quite beautiful, with impressive amounts of green vegetation at both sides of the track. There's a lot of water presence in the land, which makes the type of trees and bushes quite different to the ones we are used to find in the Valencian Country. After going by a few small towns, we arrived in the old railway station of Amer, hometown of the Puigdemonts. Even if it was a bit early, we decided to have lunch there, so a few of us went down to the centre of the town to buy bread and some other details to eat. Being in my friend Josep's town for the first time, I wanted to visit his family's bakery, but unfortunately it is closed on Mondays. We had lunch back at the cute station, and eventually kept going on our way to Girona. Outside Amer, the Carrilet was temporarily cut by the road, and there were two possible alternatives: using the road, with heavy lorry traffic, or diverting through a very steep track with very hard slopes. Most of the group preferred the road, but Mar, Amador and I went up that track, which was hard to climb and really fun to descend. Apparently, Amer locals call those 1.5 kilometres the Tourmalet . It's probably not so bad, though. :)

Amer's railway station Unfortunately, the Ruta del Carrilet starts getting uglier after Amer, and as you approach the more industrialised towns near the capital Girona. The area around Angl s wasn't that fun, with the track continuously being invaded by cars and other vehicles. Soon after we were in the farmland area surrounding Girona and its Devesa. Jonathan was waiting for us in the city, after his two month stay in Scotland, and we were all happy to meet him. We discarded continuing our way to the coast, which was the initial plan, and instead dropped our stuff in the house of one of Adela's friends, and went out to have dinner to a Wok restaurant, where the poor people running it suffered our childish behaviour involving the rotating central dish on our table and custard sucking contests. Jonathan guided us through the Cathedal and city wall areas of the town centre, which are impressive, and we climbed all of the wall towers to have great looks over the dark and quiet city. Eventually, we went to sleep, as Adela had to leave early, and we had to pack to get our train back to Barcelona. Back in Mollet, we cooked our last camping-gaz lunch in the park right next to the station, before noticing the place stinked of dog poo. After the careful operation of filling the three cars with 9 bicycles, we were finally on our way back to Val ncia, completing another great cycling journey. If you like bicycle tourism and can travel to this area in Catalonia, I highly recommend it, as there's many great places to visit, all of them accessible with bikes.

Having lunch in Mollet

My Apple Powerbook 5,4 just booted for the first time using GRUB, with no manual intervention, from Apple chime to GDM prompt. This is a great milestone for GRUB2 on powerpc-ieee1275 and OpenFirmware, as until now, multiple problems in the loader would drop you to OF console straight away, although other PowerPC hardware with other firmware implementations did manage to work. Recent fixes by Pavel in the core and some other minor fixes for the userland utils have taken grub2 to the point where it is usable on most PowerPC hardware. On Apple, the only minor issue remaining is grub-probe insisting on (hd) not being a valid device name, so for now I have to trick it into believing it's really (hd1). In parallel, many other GRUB2 improvements haven't stopped hitting CVS in the last months, which have seen how new contributors joined grub-devel and helped GRUB2 get the great momentum it's enjoying right now. Vesa, Robert and Bean have been really active lately, and have fixed long standing issues or written a lot of new code. One of the features GRUB2 acquired recently was image loading for background images. Much more powerful than the implementation in GRUB Legacy, GRUB2 can now read images in multiple formats, can handle up to 24bit colour and render a menu in arbitrary resolutions. The menu can now show UTF-8, and the Debian package will configure a pretty theme that matches the rest of the system if desktop-base is installed:

GRUB2 speaking UTF-8 Catalan Although I'm not sure if GRUB2 is completely up-to-par with GRUB Legacy on i386/amd64, it seems the tricky bits, like video, LVM, RAID and the standard filesystems are supported and working. What GRUB2 needs now, in order to finally replace the aging and upstream-lacking GRUB Legacy you probably have installed, is massive testing. Debian has traditionally been a testbed for GRUB Legacy patches, and is also the platform where GRUB2 is being more widely tested. Having GRUB2 included in lenny's debian-installer would be a great step forward, and by the looks, I think we're well on time to manage this. Replacing GRUB Legacy with GRUB2 is trivial. On PCs, just install the grub-pc package. You'll be offered to keep GRUB Legacy, but with an added menu entry to chainload GRUB2. If you're worried that GRUB2 might fail on your hardware, accept this, and try to load GRUB2 from GRUB. If it works, you then know you can get rid of GRUB Legacy completely and keep GRUB2 in the MBR. On PowerPC-based Macs, you'll have to work around the small issue I mentioned above. Install the grub-ieee1275 package. You also need a very recent powerpc-ibm-utils package, which was just uploaded to unstable. Mount your bootstrap partition, probably /dev/hda2 in /boot/grub, and generate a device.map file with grub-mkdevicemap. Check the contents. If your first device name lacks a drive number such as (hd), it's probably correct, although this will make things fail later. Change it to (hd0) for now. As grub-install relies on grub-probe, you'll have to generate your grub image by hand. Copy all .mod files in /usr/lib/grub/powerpc-ieee1275 to your bootstrap partition, and generate a core.img:

root@powerpc:/boot/grub# grub-mkimage -d . -o /boot/grub/core.img *.mod
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# update-grub
root@powerpc:/boot/grub# nvsetenv boot-device hd:2,core.img

The generated grub.cfg will have references to (hd0,X), which you'll have to correct back to (hd,X) if necessary for your OpenFirmware. After this, you are probably ready to reboot, cross two fingers and get a warm "Welcome to GNU GRUB!" message at boot, which will then be followed by a standard GRUB menu, but on your nice PowerPC box. Unfortunately, the eye candy in the screenshot above isn't available yet in this platform, as it lacks VESA. Does someone in the audience want to contribute a video driver for powerpc? :)

As part of a sad trend that pulls me away from my healthy travel habits, I just booked plane tickets to Brussels for February 22nd. Note this is 1.5 months of planning ahead. madduck, your turn! Additionally, two weeks ago I got tickets for a one week long trip around parts of Germany at the end of the month. The travel plan is totally undefined, so I don't know what cities I'll be visiting yet. Fun!

Six months ago, a political group in Spain made a big fuss and noise when the Government of Venezuela closed down the anti-chavist RCTV TV station, and waved the flag of freedom of speech, called the democratically elected government a regime , and called their president a dictator . On Sunday night, these very same people, following orders from the leaders of the Valencian government or should I say regime , drove up to the top of the Carrasqueta peak in Xixona, in the South of the Valencian Country, and protected by the winter's darkness, proceeded to force open two locks, broke into ACPV's property and unplugged and precincted the equipment which had been broadcasting the signal of TV3 and the rest of the public Catalan TV channels to the South of our land, for the last 21 years. Although this wasn't unexpected it is probably one of the biggest attacks to freedom of speech, choice and plurality since democracy was restored in the state. The political benefit PP is planning to obtain from this attack is clear: pleasing the regional right-wing cavemen who think we have nothing to do with the Catalan culture just 2 months away from some very decisive elections will probably give them a handful of extra votes. There are also economical interests involved, like having right-wing media groups control even more digital TV channels that they already do, but that's really anecdotic now. Two nights ago, it was the South. In a matter of days, the antennas in the Bartolo, in the North of the Valencian territory, will also be unplugged, blackening the screens of thousands of Valencians who think they have the right to watch decent quality TV in their mother tongue. Thank you, fascists.

With four plane tickets already in our hands, it's official. Clara, Sabri, Joni and I will be flying to Marrakech as 2007 languishes, spending the first hours of 2008 in the city, and then start our way to the South during the following week. We still haven't settled on a planned route, but travelling with these friends is mostly a synonym of adventure and fun. The desert, the snow, the villages, the mosques, the souks, the spices, the hammams... I can't wait!

Recently, GozRita unveiled the names of our two Falleretes majors for 2008's Falles festivities. All the free newspapers did some extensive coverage, with reports on who they are and what they do. Qu Valencia interviewed the little Fallera major, and then posted this:

Little Victoria learns Valencian So, Victoria Bl zquez speaks English and Valencian "nearly perfectly". Great! I think having newspapers treat Valencian as if it were just another foreign language that students are forced to learn is a great example of the dark future our language will face in just a few generations.

Sometime in August, I said I would watch the Inbox Zero talk later on that day. Well, I finally did today. And I'm ready to mass-murder my (now not so) fat inbox folder and start from scratch, and becoming a good boy. In fact, I've been on probation for a few weeks. While I wasn't watching the talk (which is pretty insightful and fun, and useful if you also have these horrid mail handling problems) I did roll up my sleeves a few times and worked on reducing the problem. After a few rounds of fighting, things were looking slightly better. I deleted TONS of spam which still was sitting in there. I deleted entire threads of list mail which for some reason wasn't being filtered properly. I archived a lot of random, misc email. I even replied to some job offers, for a change. I fixed my .procmailrc a little to get rid of lots of useless stuff that appears in my mail. It got better, but not entirely better. I went from the 6600~ which was probably the figure when I said Enough! to around 2580. It's still a lot, and I can still get rid of a lot more with easy pattern searches in mutt. The good news is that, for the first time in ages, the number of emails in the mailbox has stayed stable for more than a month. I tell you: I'm proud! So Merlin gets asked in the talk what to do when you've been a naughty boy for a long time, and you've ended up with this HUGE mailbox you can't handle anymore. His answer was what some people suggested in blog comments: put it aside, start from zero. Merlin calls it mail-DMZ, and that's probably what I'll do in a few hours, admittedly with a sentiment of guilt deep in my chest. And from that point, I'll have my mailbox be a TODO list. Delete. Defer. Delegate. Respond. Do. Simple! Other Planet Debian participants like joeyh commented that something that really helps is reducing the number of times you poll for email. For me, that means

set daemon      1800            # Pool every 30 minutes

when it was 5 minutes before. I hope I won't find myself issuing awaken commands often... I remember when, more than five years ago, having more than 100 mails made me feel bad and go cleanup. After some vacation, it went up to 150. Then Christmas came along, 300, until I found myself nearing 7000 last summer. Before moving my junk to a demilitarised mailbox, I'm having some fun replying to some email. The first one in my mailbox is from a member of a Catalan "Mallach" family.

From: Conchita Broquetas <familia_mallach_broquetas@yahoo.es>
Subject: Hola!
To: jordi@sindominio.net
Date: Sun, 17 Jun 2001 16:55:17 +0200 (CEST)

who discovered there was a "Jordi Mallach" other than his brother in the Internet. Apparently we had an exchange on where our families came from (Mallach is all but a common surname... anywhere, and my family has always wondered where it came from). So that's more than 6 years ago. I think I'd love to get a reply to some email sent by me years ago which has been sitting for years in a mailbox, because "I need to reply to this sometime". I think the Mallach-Broquetas are getting one tonight. If you think I'm dumping random thoughts on a vim buffer, it's probably due to me feeling sad today. Sorry, but I feel like typing, and I don't have a typewriter with me. Speaking of sad, nothing beats the next email which sat for some dramatic 6 months in my messy inbox until I found out in the worst of the possible scenarios. Let's go back to late February, 2004, when I had no job, and I didn't have a clue on what to do with my life.

From: Mark Shuttleworth <mark@hbd.com>
Subject: New project to discuss
To: Jordi Mallach <jordi@debian.org>
Date: Sun, 29 Feb 2004 18:33:51 +0000
[...]
I'm hiring a team of debian developers to work full time on a new
distribution based on Debian. We're making internationalisation a prime
focus, together with Python and regular release management. I've discussed
it with a number of Debian leaders and they're all very positive about it.
[...]

I'm not sure if I totally missed it as it came in, or I skimmed through it and thought WTF?! Dude on crack or I just forgot I need to reply to this email , but I'd swear it was the former. Not long after, no-name-yet.com popped up, the rumours started spreading around Debian channels. Luckily, I got a job at LliureX two months later, where I worked during the following 2 years, but that's another story. I guess it was July or so when Ubuntu was made public, and Mark and his secret team organised a conference (blog entries [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]), just before the Warty release, and I was invited to it, for the same reasons I got that email. During that conference, probably because Mark sent me some email and I applied a filter to get to it, I found the lost email, and felt like digging a hole to hide for a LONG while. I couldn't believe the incredible opportunity I had missed. I went to Mark and said "hey, you're not going to believe this", and he did look quite surprised about someone being such an idiot. I wonder if I should reply to his email today...

My lack of posts lately left Planet readers without yet another yay, GNOME 2.20 released post. I'm sure nobody missed it. However, I can report what's going on in Debian regarding its packaging. The executive summary is: the GNOME team rocks, and having much of GNOME 2.20 available in sid on the very same day it was officially announced was possible thanks to the incredible work done by lool, Np237, slomo and other restless team members, who spent the summer tracking GNOME 2.19 releases and packaging them in experimental. To get a better view on what's left to do, you can use the 2.20 status page, which you'll see shows lots of green at this point. Some of the outstanding blockers are gtksourceview and the new epiphany-webkit binary stuck in NEW, which block gedit and epiphany, and of course, the initial mess that the buildds need to sort out to get the dependencies installed. The rest of red bits will continue trickling in unstable in the next few days. Beware of the new behaviour in control-center, which will by default use the DPI value provided by X. Some X drivers are still buggy and can provide bad values, which will cause bad font displays. If you're hit by this, you can force a DPI value in control-center, which should fix the issue. Also, you can read the relevant thread in our mailing list. Enjoy 2.20! Update: yeah, ftpmasters rock too, and epiphany hit incoming just a few hours after posting this entry. Yay ephy-webkit!

Sound Juicer "The Best Blue Is Through The Trees" 2.20.0 is out. Tarballs are available on burtonini.com, or from the GNOME FTP servers.

• Remove a work around now that GStreamer is fixed, and update requirement (#472650, Jaap Haitsma)

Also thanks to the tireless translation team: Djihed Afifi (ar), Ihar Hrachyshka (be), Alexander Shopov (bg), Runa Bhattacharjee (bn_IN), Jordi Mallach (ca), Ask Hjorth Larsen (da), Hendrik Richter (de), Tshewang Norbu (dz), Kostas Papadimas (el), David Lodge (en_GB), Jorge Gonz lez (es), Ivar Smolin (et), I aki Larra aga Murgoitio (eu), Ilkka Tuohela (fi), Christophe Benz (fr), Ignacio Casal Quinteiro (gl), Ankit Patel (gu), Eyal Mamo (he), Gabor Kelemen (hu), Francesco Marletta (it), Takeshi AIHANA (ja), Young-Ho Cha (ko), Erdal Ronahi (ku), ygimantas Beru ka (lt), Raivis Dejus (lv), Arangel Angov (mk), Kjartan Maraas (nb), Wouter Bolsterlee (nl), Tomasz Dominikowski (pl), Og Maciel (pt_BR), Duarte Loreto (pt), Mugurel Tudor (ro), Nickolay V. Shmyrev (ru), Danishka Navin (si), Matic gur (sl), Elian Myftiu (sq), (sr), Daniel Nylander (sv), Dr.T.Vasudevan (ta), Theppitak Karoonboonyanan (th), Baris Cicek (tr), Maxim Dziumanenko (uk), Clytie Siddall (vi), Funda Wang (zh_CN), Chao-Hsiung Liao (zh_HK, zh_TW).

jordi@nubol:~$ countmail
SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR!
SIX THOUSAND ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-FOUR MAIL MESSAGES!
HAHAHAHAHA!

I'll watch the talk this evening.