Older blog entries for Jordi (starting at number 31)

I have something similar to the flu or something. Last night was hellish, vomited two times, etc. Right now I have a bit of fever, and it's imposible to concentrate to get some work done. It's the first day in a loooong time I watch three movies. I don't watch much TV normally, but what could I do today but lay around... I hope I'll be ok tomorrow, I want to spend this long weekend (saturday-tuesday) locked up at home...

Finally got the WMBiff patch that uses libgcrypt and gnutls. It's in CVS, unreleased and waiting for people to say it's not horridly broken.

Sony Tech Service is lame. They had my monitor kidnapped during a whole month, got it back on Friday and now the display is blurry at some points of the screen. GRRR!

It's been a while since the last post. Since then,

Free Software

XQF 0.9.6g was finally released, with lots of new support, like Q3A protocol 66, Tribes2 and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, i18n... And CVS is even better, with new support for GameSpy games, and some nice reorganization of preferences and things.

WMBiff 0.3.2 wasn't released yet. We've been getting some patches, but they had licensing issues: Md5 and OpenSSL licenses suck. Someone is porting stuff to GPL'd libraries, so we'll have a nice release soon.

About the Catalan translation of Boot Floppies, the manual is virtually finished, only one 50kb document remains unstranslated, and the rest is being reviewed by the team. My part, the installer program translation has stalled at ~55%. I guess I'll get to work on it this week.

Haven't touched GNU/Hurd in a while, I really need to buy a hub to be able to have my desktop and that box online at the same time.

War

Hm, last time I posted I was puzzled about the War's name. It was changed, but really, you guys at the Pentagon should try harder. Perdurable Liberty (or whatever is the new name) is still ridiculous.

Life

Well, clases started, things are starting to suck again. I got into French classes finally, I hope it'll be fun. My ankle is still fubared, I can't run more than 3 kms without getting that pain.

No further translation progress o boot-floppies, so I'll miss my deadline of this weekend, as I decided to go to my village this afternoon.

War
Operation Infinite Justice.
Ridiculous name. I first looked for some "from the makers of Terminator II" slogan, but after a while I convinced myself it was true... heh. The worse is that it's obvious a lot of injustices are going to take place against the Afghans that haven't departed.

(20 Sept 2001 post, when I couldn't reach Advogato)

Flood!
This may be more or less common in other countries or even in some regions of Spain, but not in Valencia.
Last night I discovered the underground corridor (where the entrances to the garages in our street are) was getting flooded, due to massive rain (~70 litres in two hours). I had to wake up the neighbours, it was funny to see them in their pijamas with brooms, cleaning everything. Fortunately the heavy rain stopped and the sewer level went down, so we could start cleaning the garages.

That, added to power outages, resulted in no translation progress for Catalan boot-floppies, but it's around 45% already.
I reinstalled GNU/Hurd again, and it doesn't crash on apt-get install xlibs-dev anymore. Cool. I compiled minicom for hurd-i386, will upload later.

Phoon :

Hmmm, you need to practice a little more Spanish ;)

I'll take an exam in my Spanish class soon. I wish I'll do ok. (or whatever)
Haré un examen en mi clase de español pronto. Ojalá que lo haga bien.

But ok, not too bad :)

yakk :

Yay, that panel is so cool!

Boot floppies translation are around 20%, but I haven't started today's round yet.
I'm getting plenty of bug reports against Aterm, but as I don't have my monitor yet (fuck you all at València's Sony Tech Service), I can't test it. It's been nearly a month without my monitor, stuck in this Windows 2000 jail, with putty's all around. They promised it'll be fixed by tomorrow...

As jacobo did some time ago for Galician, I'm now furiously translating the Debian Boot-Floppies to Catalan. The main piece is a big po, but it should be finished in a few days if I keep working like this. Others in the Catalan team are finishing and polishing the translation of the Installation Manual, so I'm pretty confident that Debian's install process and main tools will be fully localized to Catalan for Woody's release. The bad side of this is that I need to freeze my translations of the Debian website, but I guess the floppies are a lot more interesting at this point. If you speak/write Catalan and want to lend a hand, please debian-l10n-catalan at lists debian org.
Speaking of translations, I'm receiving many new translations for GNU nano, since we entered the Translation Project, cool!

A new WMBiff should be released soon, with the APOP patch, now that exams are over. We'll see.

Sadly, it looks like there will be no trip to the Pyrinees next week. Pitty, I was anxious to go there, but finally only two of us wanted to go, and we prefer preserving our friendship than hating each other after a week of being all alone in the middle of nowhere :)

Tomorrow, my September exams will be over. I'm pretty confident I know the last exam well, but we'll see. Exams are full of surprises :)

On monday I was pretty annoyed about SinDominio.net's domain hijack by a group of vandals. I can't understand the enormous fuckage in the domain trasfer protocols. At least with our previous registrar, Gandi, you just need to ask for the transfer at another registrar, Gandi processes the transfer immediately, without the need of an authorization of the domain owner. They mail you, warning that this is taking place, and if there's something wrong, you should reply at the mail _FAST_. I think this is unacceptable. Anyway, we mailed, phoned and mailed again eNOM.com, the new registrar, trying to explain that this transfer was done by someone who was speaking in the name of the real owner. Late on Monday we got a reply from them, suggesting that we could end the problem if we asked the new owner to transfer the domain control to us. Heh, I guess they wouldn't be so kind. On Tuesday, with the United States paralized, they were very kind and professionals and answered our new requests, and changed the owner of the domain to the real one again. We're staying at eNOM, which is a lot more expensive, but at least you can lock transfers and they were so cool with our problem...

War
About jmallett's article, I'm a bit dissapointed as he is. He says the US must fight back, a war must be started, and that all the Advogato geeks should be enlisting themselves in the Army. As a gun-hater, I just feel disgusted when I read this. This kind of feelings, driven by hate and anger can only end on more killing of innocents. It wouldn't be the first time, others have pointed with examples (Sudan). happybob talks about blockades against countries. Do you know who are the ONLY people affected by a blockade? Yes, it's the innocent people, like those which are now buried under the WTC wreck. Innocent children, women and men in Iraq have been suffering a brutal blockade for 10 years. There's an extreme lack of the most basic medicines. Children starve in Iraq, in a potentially rich country. Do they deserve it? Will the innocents killed in Afghanistan deserve it? In Afghanistan, people left the cities, forced by the Taliban, and live in Middle-Ages conditions. They don't know what the WTC is. They don't know who bin Laden is. They don't give a fuck. Their only preocupation is to stay alive till tomorrow.
I liked lkcl's and dyork's comments to the article. I guess you realize the relaxed crypto policies in your country could be tightened again, in the name of security. Not speaking about privacy...
Of course, and as I said in my previous entry, I think the attacks were terrible, and I can't imagine what ideas could drive someone to execute them. Just don't copy those ideas, it will just make the shitball bigger.

After the shock...

Yesterday I wanted to post something, but I just couldn't, I was still in this weird state of incredulity, although you know it has really happened.
When I thought I had stuck the idea in my head, I just needed to read the CNN footers in TV, "Both WTC Towers collapse" to go back to the sensation of being in the cinema theatre, watching some stupid movie, like "Independence Day". It's unbelievable that when I go to New York (the only city in the United States that I really want to visit), the Twin Towers won't be there. It's a ridiculous idea! I couldn't believe that the Pentagon, the symbol of USA's military strenght, had been partially destroyed in a matter of seconds, by surprise.
Here in Spain, many people were worried about today, about what could happen if someone claimed the attacks and some war started here or there. But the weirdest thing is that nobody is claiming all this shit.

It's was the first time I spend most of the day at the keyboard and I don't get _anything_ productive done.

I can't understand what could be in the minds of the people responsible for this, it's just too terrible. It's as terrible as the Ethiopia civil war, which everyone ignored, or the nuclear bombs of WWII, anyway.

As somebody said, life goes on...

The following post is written with so much anger and despair that it should be in Badvogato, but anyway.

If you're a Spanish geek, you probably know already what happened last night with SinDominio.net's DNS record. Some lame group of script-kiddies, speaking in the name of freedom, hijacked our "sindominio.net" domain, and pointed the website at a stupid page full of false claims, like the relations of our organization with ETA, the Basque armed separatist group.
BarraPunto.com posted a story about this, and at least the majority of people are against this action and are offering help (like sindominio.* subdomains in their own domains, etc). But at the time of this writing, the domain isn't back, and we have no word of the new registrar (enom.com).

I have no idea of how much mail I'm losing. My Debian mail is getting redirected to another address already, so it should be safe, but to many lists I subscribed as jordi@sindominio.net, so we'll see in the next hours.
If anyone has some experience with this type of crap, please advise.

To complete the diary entry, I should have released WMBiff 0.3.2, but my exam on Saturday and this DNS incident has postponed everything till who knows when.

If you want to contact me, you should probably use one of the following email addresses:
jordi@[213.172.36.134],
jordi@debian.org,
jordi@oskuro.net.

Manu Chao's Radio Bemba Tour 2001 next Thursday in Burjassot! It'll be a wonderful concert! (unlike the website)

People excited about a one and many zero's when they type "date". Fortunately I went to bed before it happened.