Today is H ctor s birthday. We celebrated with his family and a couple of close friends. He cooked a wonderful meal for us (he is a great cook) and we had a very nice afternoon, despite having a flu (again!) and a very runny nose. I am at this very moment preparing a sponsored upload for Carlos, one of the close friends who attended. He will become an excellent Debian contributor some day.

I got H ctor a couple of cookbooks for his birthday, but much to my surprise I received a brand new server from him (late Xmas present, but I am to blame for the delay). I can now get rid of this damn noisy and slow thing that sits under my desk, aka nima. This has been a faithful server for many years and I think it deserves to be donated to the local hacklab, as I believe it can still be of use.

I hope I can put all this CPU power to good use in my Debian QA work (which I am slowly coming back to).

H ctor has been my best friend for almost 10 years. We also are co-workers at soitu.es now. He was the one who made me believe that I could contribute to Debian and that I should apply to become a Developer (although Santiago Vila was actually the first one to spot me). He was the one I run to when I felt like dying shit after my divorce . He is still the one I run to most of the time when I need support or advice, and he has this wonderful way of making me feel safe in this scary world. Even though we naturally don t agree on a lot of stuff, he does his best to respect my eccentricities, and I always carefully listen to what he has to say. I am very lucky to be his friend. May this friendship last many, many more years. H ctor, keep rocking!

Santiago Vila uploaded base-files 4.0.1~bpo40+1 to backports.org, because the package from etch doesn't include the GPLv3 license. If you're going to upload the backport of a package which software is under the GPLv3, please make sure it depends on at least this version of base-files.

I just upgraded my home server (kheops) to etch. I just had an issue with lifelines-report, which the former maintainer should be ashamed of. Apart from that glitch, the upgrade went well, thanks to the excellent upgrade advices in the Release Notes. Funnily, I got warned that kheops still has the "base" package installed which I didn't notice in former upgrades. This is pretty expected as kheops has never been reinstalled, is my home server since october 1996 when I installed Debian Buzz on it. I think that I'll just avoid following Santiago Vila's advice and leave "base" installed on my system, indeed. Just for fun. This is the 6th server I upgrade as of now. All other servers were pretty minor servers at work. The big issue is now upgrading the file and print servers and particularly the samba file server which hosts files for 250 users. This is probably the one and only server for which we will setup a clone and play the upgrade scenario a few times. Etch rocks, as expected.

A couple weeks ago, Debconf-ES II was held in Guadalajara. It was terrific: meeting again some people whom I already knew, many of which are more than fellow developers; meeting for the first time some others who I hadn’t; and, of course (and finally!), Mao. There was also a KDE talk, telling a bit the story of the Debian Qt/KDE Maintainers. I enjoyed it a lot; among other things:

• while the talk was in Spanish, the slides were in English; it was probably quite strange for some, but hey, that’s the way it came.

• slides were not done with OO.o Impress or similar: Vim plus Konsole with a huge font!

• my utter inability to speak proper Spanish for Debian-related stuff became (as if there were any doubts left) evident.

• we were two people on stage, which make the talk pretty dynamic. Dear Isaac, YRMWAYKI.

• Santiago Vila kudoed us!

As always, eternal gratitude to the people that worked their asses off to make this event possible. Even if not tons of work got done during that weekend, it was surely a big dose of energy for all of us! NP: Astrud, Masaje