At last. After a 2-month wait, my new laptop has arrived. It's a nifty T41p which replaces my broken T20. I can already feel its magical powers: I wrote more lines of code for me this weekend than in the past two months.
VLC in sarge
VLC has entered Debian testing yesterday. It was a real nightmare due to the GNOME/KDE/Mozilla/whatever build dependencies, but it eventually did it. The last update was more than two years ago!