Saturday 28 April 2007

moto frenzy

GREAT!

This is the word that can describe what I felt today at the moto exhibition that takes place here, in Bucharest (until the 1st of May).

Hondas, Yamahas, Aprilias, Harleys, Suzukis, BMWs... all kinds of bikes, speeders, choppers, cruisers, naked...

Of course, I couldn't resist and I touched, sat on, admired and analysed them all that I could (the Honda and the Ducatti people were the most uptight about this subject).

I was with a friend and he made pictures, but I will have them only on Monday...


And all of these after I met my father this morning before he left for a ride up to Vama Veche (a known rebels' meeting point at the Black Sea). I met him and gave him a pair of chaps for the ride with the beautiful Virago he bought a month ago!


I just need to pass over the formalities, take the driving license exam for A category (motorcycles are in that category, here in Romania; I already have a B category, for cars) and get on with riding myself... on the driver's seat...


Today I felt alive...



P.S.: I would be really cool to go to DebConf7 with the bike and meet some people, but I don't think that is legal for me to drive outside my country in the first year after taking the driving license (although I don't know yet if that would apply to me, having already a B driving license). More than that, the long ride alone I would have to make until I meet with others seems a little risky (you never know what the trip has to offer).

The answer ...

I just received a weird SMS which, surely, was not addressed to me... And I deleted it...

"Message 42 was deleted"

I guess 42 is the answer! :-)

Friday 27 April 2007

change www.debian.org look, but don't forget wiki.debian.org

Lately, there has been a lot of discussion around reorganizing the layout and looks of the www.debian.org site and related sites.

Gustavo made a mock-up of the site with methors.debian.net/debian-live.alioth.debian.org theme.

All fine and dandy, but please, don't forget about wiki.debian.org.

P.S.: I am thinking of remaking the theme I did for wiki.debian.org to match this theme.

Wednesday 18 April 2007

wiki.d.o theme

As Bastian has pointed out, wiki.debian.org has a butt-ugly theme. I agree.

Some of the people that were present in Extremadura in September know that I was working at the time to make a wiki theme more integrated with the www.debian.org theme.

The result is partially complete, but is better, IMHO, than the ugly default theme. Sceenshots and the source is available (in a darcs repo). If anyone cares to continue and close all the remaining points, I would be glad to see that theme changed.

Unless somebody does something about both issues.

Comments are welcome! Contributions are welcome, you just do:

darcs get http://users.alioth.debian.org/~eddyp-guest/darcs/wiki.debian.org_theme/

And hack on that modern-wiki.debian.org theme

Wednesday 11 April 2007

finally, I can get rid of filelight!

The desktop enviroment is not a religious thing for me. IMHO, they all (3 of them) have missing parts which are present in the others. I never really used Xfce.

OTOH, I have been switching back and forth between GNOME and KDE during my time as a GNU/Linux user. Since I always found that one of the environments was missing things which were present in the other, I think I have switched at least 3 times both ways by now.

Now, with the release of GNOME 2.18, I will have one less reason to think to move away from GNOME, which is the current desktop environment. One of the apps I was missing in GNOME was a filelight-like application that would show usage in a very intuitive graphical way. Now it seems that baobab (commonly known as Disk Usage Utility) has a ring chart similar to filelight's. Yay!

Now, if somebody would take the task of rewriting granslator, I would be more than glad to drop kbabel...

Note: I was disapointed that GNOME Space Chart never made it to public... that disappointment lasted until now.

Saturday 7 April 2007

Thanks...

The answer to my previous question is "to be". That happened thanks to a bunch of people, in no particular order:
  • Jens Sidel, for committing and suggesting early activation and advices about switching to PO format
  • Christian Perrier, for being a really nice guy and for being the person that made me click and start contributing to Debian
  • Kobayashi Noritada, for magic po4a related commands
  • Frans Pop, for actually activating the thing and for advices
  • Andrei Popescu, for the multiple patches sent and the late hours sacrificed on the Romanian localization altar
  • Stan Ioan Eugen, for the work done on the translation done for 1.119, multiple comments and comments done at really late hours last night
  • Dan Damian, for being the first person to translate the Release Notes in Romanian, at my suggestion
  • Ruşeţ Zeno, for comments and suggestions
  • Denis Barbier and Martin Quinson for creating po4a
  • Nicolas François (aka nekral) for maintaining po4a
  • Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña, for making calls to translations and sacrificing the Spanish translation while working on the English text to bringing it in shape
  • anyone that I forgot or don't know about and had a role in making this possible
  • silent reviewers on the debian-l10n-romanian list - I wish you started speaking instead of unsubscribing
Updates:
  • David Roundy, for creating darcs with its nice darcs send feature which allowed parallel work

"To be or not to be on the first CD?"

That is the question. Well, not personally[0], the Romanian translation of the Release notes.

If you would have asked me yesterday, I would have said the plan is "to be".

Plan: make sure that a decent enough text is committed in CVS at all times.


What happened? Let me see...

(Time stamps are for EET - UTC+3 now - unless specified otherwise)

- pack in the morning
- take luggage to work
- buy train ticket before going to work
- ask on list to take action if I don't act by 03:00am EET (00:00 UTC)
- send the translation as is (25u), maybe the connection at my parents is broken
- leave from work directly to the station
- meet a pair of lovers in the train
- he is so into her
- she plays him like the fool he is
- translate on the train
- 5u and the battery is at 8%
- no "darcs rec", hdd consumes battery
- close lid instead of hibernating
- mini-panic, mini-panic[1]
- resume and hibernate - those percentages seem to change sooo slowly
- arrive home
- Internet connection works, good
- continue updates
- reach 100%
- send first complete draft of the translation for inclusion
- parallel review gathering up to 4 people on #debian-ro for review
- joke seriously about me not being able to send the translation
- ask again for action from the team, if needed
- 02:30 - translation seems to be mature, less an less problems are found, should be committed
- 02:40 forgot to ask activation, new mail
- ??? - turning point?
- send mail... error
- can't send mail with the request to activate Romanian
- provider's network seems to be isolated
- realize I don't know if the commit request reached its target
- frustration eased up by the already made requests to take action, if needed
- 04:30 - power goes out
- no ping from GW either
- 04:30:01 - decide to write a blog about this day
- start in zim
- write a first nice draft - with some exciting writing style
- zim looses my article when trying to remove a link-ified timestamp
- start gedit
- break the plug of the network cable[2]
- 09:09 not even the GW is reachable
- 05:10 sleep
- (expected) 06:30 wake up
- (expected) check the network connection
- translations committed ???
- thank to people / take action yourself ???
- 07:00 (04:00 UTC) Romanian translation and CD images status: ???
- sometime during the day - publish article


[0] pure unintentional rhyme
[1] I never lost files with a Linux FS, but I have the mandatory fear
[2] is not fixed in the socket

Tuesday 3 April 2007

quote of the day

"The list of features is a mile long but let me summarize them all down to this simple statement: everything just fucking works exactly as you would expect it to."

No, this is not about Debian Etch :-) (but I guess we could make that happen).

Here is the origin.
Sorry for indirectly advertising non-free software, I just liked the quote.


Update:

Martin, it seems (just at first glance) that Zimbra is licensed under a MPL license and is non-free:

"The Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS) Server and Zimbra Ajax Toolkit are both licensed under the terms of the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and require that modifications made to existing files be given back to the Community."