Advogato blog for Jordi

A horrible Valencian tradition

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 16:11:20 GMT

My workmate Pep was kind enough to drive me home back from work today. Ideally I would have cycled home as always, however today my bike was stolen again. It's not the first time or the second one, not even the third. My red Orbea is the fourth bicycle that gets stolen since cycling became my primary means of transportation more than 10 years ago.

Sadly, in València, the norm is to get your bicycle stolen every few years, if you need to leave it unattended during work hours. In this case, its even worse as the bike stays inside the University campus all day, supposedly guarded by security personnel, and in a place where dozens of people tie their bicycles, with constant presence of the people who work in the CPI complex.

This bicycle was given to me by Cherry when she left València, just a week after the previous one had been stolen. She had bought it to cycle around the Valencian mountains during her 6 month stay in Clara's lab, and was immensely kind to give it to me when she learned what happened to mine.

I planned using the mountain bike during the long 9 d'octubre weekend, but I'll have to see if someone can lend one for this year's cycling trip.

It seems I'll have to resort, again, to my 29 year old Laida to move around València, which will need an extensive repair of both wheels and brakes. Time to visit Benimaclet's bicycle workshop.

Mouth Freedom

Thu, 18 Sep 2008 03:10:51 GMT

Today I got the brackets attached to my lower jaw teeth removed. What I'm experiencing now is something like mouth freedom. I mean, I can even move my tongue around my mouth painlessly!

Festa!

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:07:18 GMT

The word is out! Carles, Jonathan, Sabri and I will be throwing a hopefully great 30th anniversary party next weekend. It will start at 12:00 on Saturday and finish at some point during the next day. We have planned fun games during our “30thlon”, prepared infinite hours of all kinds of music (including Chimo Bayo, NO LESS!), bought a supermarket worth of drinks. Do not miss!

Uno, que no pare ninguno!

Pyrenees and Mallorca

Fri, 1 Aug 2008 10:18:27 GMT

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!

Cinema de Barri in Benimaclet

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 21:06:38 GMT

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!

GNOME-Mud 0.11

Fri, 25 Jul 2008 20:08:24 GMT

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.

Marc Belzunces' conscience objection fight

Fri, 4 Jul 2008 20:07:43 GMT

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!

In the news

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:09:27 GMT

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. :)

Upgrade to PyBlosxom 1.4.3

Fri, 13 Jun 2008 15:24:37 GMT

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!

Naked bike ride

Thu, 12 Jun 2008 19:05:44 GMT

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 Túria'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 València. The ride was too long for my taste, covering the whole Fira, Plaça d'Amèrica, carrer Colom just in front of “El Corte Inglés” (I wonder how many known people saw me there), Xàtiva, Russafa, back to Xàtiva, Town Hall, Ciutat Vella, river margin and Blasco Ibáñez.

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. :)