Saturday

Arrive at Heathrow. Richard gets to be my special lounge buddy - we later discover Bastien sitting outside looking like a lost puppy. Flight is delayed by a mere hour, so we get to the hotel with little trouble and check in. Dinner with Luis and co on pillows on the street. This becomes a recurring theme. Drinking is involved. This also becomes a recurring theme. People complain about my shortcut finding skills.

Sunday

See beautiful things. Thankful to finally get to see buildings older than my old college. Dinner under some bridge with Red Hat folks where we discover the joys of the "special price". People once more complain about my shortcut finding skills. Suspect pillows are involved, but hazy recollections.

Monday

Arrive at the university by taxi. More to the point, arrive at the university by taxi without taking a 30km detour. Dinner with Canonical people, then a party in some overpriced bar on the top of a very big hill. Discover that taxi drivers in Istanbul either have no fucking clue where anything in the entire world is, or that driving tourists to bizarre locations is a national pastime. Avoid this fate and arrive home at something like 4AM.

Tuesday

Corporate whoring continues with dinner with Collabora people (delayed by two and a half hours because Christian values getting sweaty with other men over eating, or something), followed by more drinks on the pillows. Am vindicated when it turns out that my route back to the hotel would in fact be the shortest possible route back if people didn't keep insisting on making random left turns when we're almost there.

Wednesday

Fascinating (and increasingly drunken) discussion of the neurobiological aspects of colour spaces with Pippin precedes drinks on the roof of the university. Narrowly prevent Luis' attempt to leave the foundation open to flagrant copyright violation suits. More pillows.

Thursday

Wake up with a twisted ankle and a broken laptop. I had a good birthday, it seems. Collabora host a party on a boat. Miraculously, nobody falls off the boat. We head back to the pillows while others trudge up the hill to Taksim. Aaron wins the inaugural Aaron Bockover award for services to the GNOME community.

Friday

Dinner with Novell, demonstrating my even-handedness when it comes to accepting corporate favours. Miguel reveals his true nature as a Microsoft shill by admitting to owning an XBox. I advise him to raise his free software credentials by getting a Freerunner - as a bonus it'll crash whenever anyone tries to call him, preventing Microsoft from whispering more sweet nothings in his ear. A foolproof plan. Party paid for by Google. Ear bleedingly loud. Some drinking involved. Return to bizarro deviant pillows where we are treated to the spectacle of child labour. Spend some time wondering why Planet Fedora is discussing upskirt photos and decide that hating the entire human race is probably the best option.

Saturday

Turns out that while the Grand Bazaar is effectively just a shopping centre, it's a fucking giant shopping centre that sells nothing I can find any excuse to want. Wander over to Asia for dinner. Conversation with Lennart about using cgroups as a mechanism for providing application latency requirements and how the current lack of standardisation of mountpoints and exposure of irritating implementation details makes it almost impossible to use them for anything. Fascinating diversion into how to deal with getting a SIGBUS when your mmap()ed soundcard gets hotswapped, including deciding that the easiest way of getting a reliable indication of your current process maps is by, erm, parsing /proc/self/maps. Final pillows trip. Emotional farewells (by which I mean more drinking)

Sunday

Airport. Plane. Train. Home. Transfer hard drive into laptop with working screen. Discover that productivity not actually enhanced by having more than a 300x200 pixel area of functionality. Decide to write libelous article about previous week instead.

Max Stotsky reported bug #490000 on Wednesday July 9th. Yet another i18n-related bug for a round number mark: "apt-cache search and ddtp". As bug #480000 was reported as of May 7th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 9th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. The probability that they win iw now indeed very high as our bug reporting pace is obviously very constant. I will therefore not win the contest (which many people already lost as they predicted dates that are now in the past) See you around September 9th for celebrating Debian having half a million bugs in 15 years.

Roberto Lumbreras reported bug #480000 on Wednesday May 7th. As bug #470000 was reported as of March 8th 2008, we're still keeping nearly exactly the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 7th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. Jacobo Tarrio has his chances, though. I haven't done any MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. See you around July 7th for bug #490000!

Last years, Francis Tyers has been working as Debian maintainer for Apertium packages and upstream (Apertium is an open-source machine translation platform), and I've been sponsoring it all this time.

Today, I've uploaded a new version for Apertium (3.0.7) that solves a few errors that has been blocking a new lang pair. This new pair is en-es. It's still in beta status, but the quality is quite good.

Now, we can see in Debian a lot of pairs:

English-Spanish

English-Catalan

French-Spanish

French-Catalan

Spanish-Romanian

Spanish-Portuguese

Spanish-Galician

Spanish-Catalan

Esperanto-Spanish

Esperanto-Catalan

There are too a graphical user interface for Apertium (apertium-tolk) that is a useful test program for apertium-dbus.

The present for apertium: support txt, html, rtf, odt, docx, wxml and xlsx documents.

The future... more lang pairs (spanish-basque, catalan-romanian, spanish-occitan and catalan-occitan)... integration with OpenOffice and Iceweasel

Went to the CSO yesterday as a nice way to end a frantic workweek: first a beer or two after work, and then off for some Jazz. Yesterday's program was the SFJAZZ Collective: eight individuals, all noted in their own right, coming together for a few weeks each year to play as an ensemble. The program generally consists of two halfes: one with material by a modern composer -- Wayne Shorter is this year's pick -- and new original compositions by the band members. This was a special treat as Wayne Shorter's compositions from the 1960s, both from the bands he lead and as a member of the legendary Miles Davis Quintet, have always been some of my most favourite modern pieces. At the same time, it gave me a chance to finally see Joe Lovano on ts and Stefon Harris on vb. Other band members were equally impressive: Dave Douglas tp, Miguel Zenon as, Robin Eubanks tb, Renee Rosnes p, Matt Penman b, Eric Harland dr. Favourite new composition of the night: 'Angel's Shares' by Penman. All in all a nice evening out to cap off a busy week.

Pierre Habouzit reported bug #470000 on Saturday March 8th instead of taking care of Habouzit Jr. Shame on him. Double shamre: that was an RC bug. He really should hijack that gromacs package which sounds to me as a special version of EMacs for the Groland country (fr_FR joke). As bug #460000 was reported as of January 11th 2008, we're still keeping the pace of 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 10th 2008. As a consequence, the candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are still Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I still plan some MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself. I also expect the lenny release to speed that up. See you around May 10th for bug #480000! PS: has anyone tried to plot compute the number of bugs we *close* in the same amount of time?

Raphael Geissert reported bug #460000. As bug #450000 was reported as of November 9th 2007, this roughly gives 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 10th 2008. So, the current candidates for winning the 500000th bug contest are Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I should plan a few MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself.

Raphael Geissert reported bug #460000. As bug #450000 was reported as of November 9th 2007, this roughly gives 2 months for 10,000 bugs, so 60,000bugs a year. Bug #500000 should then be reported around Sept 10th 2008. So, the current candidates for winning a href="http://people.debian.org/~bubulle/500000.html">the 500000th bug contest are Miguel Gea or Kartik Mistry. I should plan a few MBF to keep chances of winning the contest myself.

I've been using vim for long time. Last weeks I've been improving my configuration, and now I have:

* Integration with quilt
* Navigate into deb files
* It shows C functions prototypes
* auto-completion of C structures
* auto-completion of known strings
* Project management
* syntax correction
* translate documents with apertium
* doxygen function auto-comment
* extended shell scripts support (snippets insertion, syntax correction, parameters control...)
* highlight current line
* show unified diff for local file changes

And now: I must to program in java. I don't like it, and the worst is that the better I found to program in java is Eclipse. It's powerful but it needs a lot of processor, memory...

Recently I've discovered eclim, a vim plugin that integrates Eclipse on it!!! The only "problem" I found on it is that it need eclipse 3.3 and in Debian we only have 3.2. I've downloaded and old eclim version (1.2.3) and it seems to work nice in Debian.

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.

[19:10] thanks to emacs you learned to play piano
....
You are welocome, vim.

A few days ago, I was sponsoring some packages. My laptop has something broken and it sometimes shows irreproducible errors, so I used another computer to make the package builds... I did an error. I didn't do it with pbuilder... so the result was a few ftbfs.

To avoid this to happen again, I've prepared my own autobuilder with a incoming system with a few scripts writen by Matt Brown.

I suppose it will do my sponsors have his/her packages uploaded faster and I don't forget again to built them in a jail!

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.

Ten years ago, Miguel de Icaza announced the GNU Network Object Model Environment project, an attempt to fix a dependency on a non-free library for free desktops. Today, GNOME is a large, healthy and fun project with a very steady mission and personality. Congratulations to everyone who made it possible!

One day like today, ten years ago, E.T.A. kidnapped Miguel Angel Blanco and gave the Goverment 48 hours to transfer all E.T.A. prisioners to prisions in Basque Country. On 12th July 1997, they shoot him twice at back of head, after one of the biggest demonstrations in Spain against terrorism, with millions of people out at the street asking for him to be freed. Anyway, there are still people that considers them only a separatist group, though they are considered a terrorist group by European Union, United States, and United Nations.

Miguel Angel Blanco


The first day. Newspapers talk about him.


When the given day and hour arrived, every TV channel showed this image.


He is found yet alive and taken to the Hospital. He fighted for life during 12 hours more.


Spain at the street on 14th July. 1.5 million people in Madrid.

All photos were taken from elmundo.es

It seems that I've held up -at least for half a year- what I stated back in January - I come by bike to work almost every day, and really enjoy the time spent on two wheels. My times have -of course- improved, as has my dominion of the bike - I make ~10 minutes each way (must be a bit more on my way to work than on my way back, as it is uphill).
My city's government seems to be seriously promoting people to consider using the bicycle as means for regular transport and not just as a recreational device - I see some of its measures as quite silly, but some are just perfect. One week ago, while I was on the plane from Edinburgh, we had the first Ciclot n, a 32Km ride open to everybody (and of course, Nadezhda was among them). Over 70,000 people took part, reportedly, and it seems it will be held monthly. Besides that, yesterday we had the paseo dominical in Coyoac n very close to my house - What's that? Something similar to the ciclot n, only much smaller (14Km), much less publicized, and in a different place of the city every Sunday. Well, we started up the day at 8 AM by cycling from Metro Copilco to Miguel ngel de Quevedo, Av. Universidad, R o Churubusco, Divisi n del Norte and Henriquez Ure a back to Metro Copilco. We later learnt that around 10,000 people took part. 14 Km, 30 minutes - not bad, and quite enjoyable!
We didn't go for the second round, because we wanted to be by ~10 AM at Reforma, probably the city's most emblematic avenue, to be part of the demonstration marking one year of the electoral fraud. But... Well, we didn't want to just leave the bikes at home and go by metro - What can we do? Yes, take the open streets. We followed a bit of the path we had taken a bit earlier, then took Minerva, Insurgentes until Reforma (~45 minutes). And once we got to the meeting point, we didn't want to step down and crawl the bikes along... So we both found out that not only we dared take the main streets where people are not really used to cyclists and where taxi drivers will often try to make a point that if you don't own a car you should use a taxi and not a bike - We were able to cycle most of our way to Z calo, going slowly and moving through people, in what seemed to be almost an unthinkable feat for me just a couple of months ago. We can now control the bike, we can even be almost still while riding it, and not crash into anybody!
Of course, the way back was similar - We took our bikes across Obrera, Doctores, Algar n and lamos, then took Av. Universidad all the way down to Copilco, and -after some three hours riding, with my arms quite red and of course somewhat dehydrated and sore-butted- got home.
It feels great to have a well-deserved siesta! And... Well, biking is just too enjoyable. I guess we had ~45Km yesterday, plus some ~5 extra zig-zagging through the crowd. It rules.

Synfig is a powerful, industrial-strength vector-based 2D animation software package, designed from the ground-up for producing feature-film quality animation with fewer people and resources.

Yesterday, upstream released a new version that solves a lot of known problems. Paul Wise has worked  hard and has prepared the new package. (Thanks for your work!!!)

Now, we need your help testing this new version. You can install the new packages (version 0.61.06-1), test them and report bugs.

At this moment, we have two bugs (#370461 and #370459) blocking it and we are waiting your bug reports to know if we can close them.

You could find a lot of samples on  Synfig samples page, but maybe you want to test it with a Debian related animation!