Recent blog entries for Jordi

Pyrenees and Mallorca

This is the last thing I type before I leave office, pick up my backpack and drive all the way to Espot, in the Catalan Pyrenees, to hike around the GR 12 during 7 or 8 days. After that, we'll take a plane to Mallorca, to spend another week with Jeroni and others in a small town (I always forget its name).

I'm really looking forward to this, it's been two years since my last trip to the Pyrenees, and I've been wanting to visit Mallorca for a long time.

I'm glad I'll be completely incommunicado, so see you on my return on the 18^th. Have a nice DebConf, you lucky ones!

Syndicated 2008-08-01 12:04:00 from I still don't have a title

Cinema de Barri in Benimaclet

Last summer we tried to organise a Cinema d'estiu movie projections in Benimaclet's Church Square, in an attempt to promote social activities in the street done by the neighbours, for the neighbours. The response was very positive, and the first two projections attracted many people, who would bring a chair and their dinner to the old town's square to watch a movie. Unfortunately, the authorities, who were completely out of the loop, weren't happy and on the 3^rd week the Local police appeared and said that that kind of activities needed official permits, and disallowed the projection.

For this year's summer, we decided we'd try to do the projections once again, and learned that only a legally-established organisation can do the paperwork to get an authorisation. In parallel, some neighbours of Benimaclet, who had liked last year's idea, were working on their own to repeat the experience, and somehow Clara was contacted by them, and we ended up collaborating. As these people are members of the Associació de veïns of Benimaclet, there were legally able to do the paperwork, and soon we agreed on the four movies for this year, to be played every Sunday of July at 22:00h.

Our pick for Sunday 6^th was Giuseppe Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, followed on the 13^th by Elling, a Norwegian comical drama by Petter Næss which I hadn't seen and I can totally recommend. Last week we saw Poniente, a Spanish film by Chus Gutiérrez that focus on immigration issues in the South East of Spain, based on the racist happenings of El Ejido of 2000. Finally, next Sunday is the turn for some political action with V for Vendetta. A note for Benimaclet neighbours: if you don't come to see the movie, be aware that we plan to pump up the volume a lot for this one. You're definitely going to hear it from home. ;)

We're very happy about the response of the neighbours this year. Not having done any effort to announce this around the city, except for a few posters around Benimaclet during the last week of June, people clearly remembered last year's experience and the plaça de Beni was full of chairs for all three weekends. It really helps to turn around during a projection and see so many people behind you participating in something you've invested some of your own time and money. It's probably too late now, but there's some talk of extending this to the Sundays in August, so we'll see. Also, we plan to do a picaeta for atendees as a small closing party for this year's cycle.

See you on Sunday, and enjoy V!

Syndicated 2008-07-25 21:34:00 from I still don't have a title

GNOME-Mud 0.11

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.

Syndicated 2008-07-25 20:38:00 from I still don't have a title

Marc Belzunces' conscience objection fight

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 abraçada!

Syndicated 2008-07-04 21:20:00 from I still don't have a title

In the news

The newspapers brought good news bits in the last two days.

Público reports on Paco Rivière'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 García Sentandreu, leader of the right-wing “Coalición 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 València, 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. :)

Syndicated 2008-06-18 22:31:00 from I still don't have a title

Upgrade to PyBlosxom 1.4.3

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 València 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!

Syndicated 2008-06-13 16:24:00 from I still don't have a title

Naked bike ride

<description>

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 &#x201C;just because we can&#x201D; mostly.

So, after being invited to the ride the week before, 5 of our colla were in the old T&#xFA;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&#xE8;ncia. The ride was too long for my taste, covering the whole Fira, Pla&#xE7;a d'Am&#xE8;rica, carrer Colom just in front of &#x201C;El Corte Ingl&#xE9;s&#x201D; (I wonder how many known people saw me there), X&#xE0;tiva, Russafa, back to X&#xE0;tiva, Town Hall, Ciutat Vella, river margin and Blasco Ib&#xE1;&#xF1;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. :)</description>

Syndicated 2008-06-12 19:58:00 from I still don't have a title

Interview in El País on Debian's OpenSSL incident

<description>

Last week's edition of Ciberpa&#xED;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&#xE8; 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&#xE8; for the opportunity to clarify some of the Debian bashing.

I expect the full interview will be published either here or at Merc&#xE8;'s website in the following days.</description>

Syndicated 2008-06-03 17:11:00 from I still don't have a title

Thank you!

<description>

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&#xE8;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&#xE0;, by TV3's M&#xF2;nica L&#xF3;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.</description>

Syndicated 2008-05-20 21:43:00 from I still don't have a title

30

<description>

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.</description>

Syndicated 2008-05-15 09:57:00 from I still don't have a title