!?!?!?!?!?
Why does it even ask me?
Updated: because I had set signed.applets.codebase_principal_support in about:config to true to be able to pay my taxes online. I have set it back to false, and now the box doesn’t appear anymore.
I’m so going to Debconf 8…
Here are my travel details to and from Buenos Aires, in case someone wants to fly with me:
All for 783 euros, bought 1 week ago. I’m arriving 1 day early and 4 days late, but I’ll take the chance to help the organization after my arrival and visit Buenos Aires after Debconf :)
And I’d also like to apologize in advance to anyone I ask to fetch me something, because, being Spanish, it is possible I’ll say something obscene instead ;)
It’s not every day that your work is ignored by a founder of Mozilla Europe. From El País:
En España un 23,5% de visitas se dan en Firefox, un índice que es superior al de EE UU, pero que no llega a los índices de Polonia donde el 40% del tráfico se da en el navegador de Mozilla. A pesar de estos aceptables datos [Tristan] Nitot ha recordado y prácticamente hecho un llamamiento para crear una versión del navegador en gallego: “Hay una versión en catalán de Firefox construidas por voluntarios que les importa su idioma, al igual que la hay de euskera. Pero aún no hay una versión en Galicia, muchas veces me lo preguntan y mi respuesta es que si nadie de Galicia se presenta no habrá una versión en gallego, estamos dispuestos a que la gente trabaje con nosotros".
Loosely translated:
“There’s a Catalan version of Firefox built by volunteers who care about their language, and there’s another one in Basque. But there’s no Galician version yet, I get asked this very often, and my answer is that if nobody from Galicia steps up there will be no Galician version. We would like people to work with us".
So, apparently, there’s no Galician translation of Mozilla. I guess that my more than three years’ worth of work were wasted (Dec 2001 - Jul 2004 and Jan 2006 - Aug 2006), that Xis and Galego21 did nothing back in the nineties and noughties, and that what mancomun.org is hosting is an empty XPI file.
To not speak of the paralysed/paralysing bureaucracy of the Mozilla Foundation when several groups of volunteers, one after the other, tried to reinstate the official Galician l10n team.
I would be pissed off if I cared about Galician. Because, you know, from reading my blog it’s obvious I don’t.
Oh, please, I don’t think I ever had a favourite film:
I cannot remember what I wrote here when I signed up more than two years ago.
And, of course, there’s something good about this form, and something (else) bad about it:
The bad: this is displayed just after it has verified my email address.
The good: at least it’s not asking for my mother’s maiden name.
Many languages are spoken in more than one country, and many countries have more than one language. When you forget this you do stuff like language selection menus that use flags to represent languages. This is problematic for several reasons, starting with having to ask yourself what flag you are going to use to represent English, and how to deal with the angry letters you’ll receive when you use the national flag to represent a regional language. So, using flags to represent languages is definitely discouraged.
This said, have a look at this small piece of the KDE l10n stats page:
The funny thing is that the flag you see next to “Galician” is the flag of Greenland. And Galician is not spoken at all in Greenland! So, what happened? Why did they use so wrong a flag?
The problem is that the ISO 639-1 code for the Galician language is “gl”, which is the same as the ISO 3166-1 code for Greenland. So, when choosing the flag for Galician they confused the language code with the country code and selected the flag for “gl”: that is, for Greenland.
(I’m surprised that they used the Ukrainian flag (“ua”) for the Ukrainian language (“uk”), and not the Union Flag. Perhaps that would have been too obvious an error :) – although I have been told by email that the ISO 3166-1 code for the UK is “GB”, not “UK”)
So, my takeaway message is: don’t use flags to represent languages and if you do, make sure you use a flag of a place where the language is actually spoken!
Addendum: I have just seen that Basque is accompanied by the flag of the European Union! That’s because the language’s code is “eu”. Ah, and there are three variants of the Chinese language (Hong-Kong, Simplified and Traditional), all with the flag of the People’s Republic of China. Someone is bound to receive angry email – Taiwan is a political hot potato. I have sent email to the maintainer of the page.
If I think that the FSF did the wrong thing, is there any way in which I can display my opposition? Can I become a negative member? Can I make an antidonation: get them to give me money?
Update: In other words: I think that the AGPL is not free. Clause 13 is a restriction on usage. I’m very disappointed. (And the GPLv3 is not a high note for the FSF either).
July 5th, 2007 will be the 10th anniversary of the Debian Social Contract.
Also, on July 5th, 2007, I will be flying to Dublin to start a new job at Google Ireland the following Monday.
Today (well, technically yesterday now) was my last day at Allenta. It’s been several good years, with nice and funny coworkers (and friends), learning and doing lots of very varied stuff. However, after several years I felt a need to do something a bit different. It appears that working at Google is all the rage now, so I decided to jump on the bandwagon ;)
Oh, yeah, I’m excited about living in Dublin, and about working at Google. I already have so many plans, I’ll be happy if I manage to undertake 1/10 of them ;-)
If you live in or near Dublin and want to meet, feel free to call or email me. My Spanish phone number is in the Debian developer database or in all of my domains’ WHOIS records. My email addresses are all easy to find.
As I don’t know what kind of Internet access I’ll have outside of work (assuming I will not be out exploring the city when not working), it’ll probably be a bit hard for me to keep up with mail and with the Galician debconf template translation stuff. Today I’m in the 12th position in the ranking, with only 12 strings left to catch the Brazilian Portuguese team. I know that the Catalan team wants revenge from when I overtook them. It’s your opportunity, nois! :-)
For several days now, I have been seeing messages like this in my logcheck output:
Jun 27 19:24:07 maestro postfix/smtpd[14339]: warning: malformed domain name in resource data of MX record for neolookups.com: *.mx.*Obviously, the MX entry for the domain “neolookups.com” (and all its subdomains, apparently) is “0 *.mx.*”.
It turns out that you cannot search for “*.mx.*” on Google, so I ask you, dear Lazyweb, is this one of the latest tricks spammers use to try and thwart antispam countermeasures?
Enrico: if you extract the platforms using “lynx -dump -nolist” (or “w3m -dump”), you’ll only extract the text, with no HTML, and the keywords will vary slightly:
Last Friday I was tinkering with apcupsd and rrdtool and decided to join both: I’d monitor the mains voltage during a period of 24 hours, to see if it varied during the day. Well, apparently, it does.
To my untrained eye it looks like it varies with the load in the electric network: the voltage is at its highest during nighttime, and hits its lowest point at 13:30 (solar mid-day in Galicia); then rises again while people is having lunch then dips until after 18:00. The discontinuity at about 20:15 was due to my briefly stopping apcupsd to change a configuration in my UPS.
Now, I don’t know if the mains voltage really varies so much during the day or if it is because my UPS’s voltmeter is a piece of shit (which it, apparently, is) and is affected by the presence of non-resistive loads or whatnot, but the graph is interesting anyhow. Detailed explanations by people who know more about electricity than yours truly will be appreciated.
On an unrelated subject, I’m teaching myself how to juggle a reverse cascade. To do it properly, it requires better timing and more homogeneous throws than I’m currently able to do. So, to master it, I first need to suck less at juggling. We’re working on it.
My enjoyment of my hobbies does not depend on what others are getting from doing the same.
Does yours?
I mentioned Fidonet in my latest post, and that in the year 2000 I still cared about it. I think two years ago I still cared a bit, because with all the mad year-1997-web skills I could muster I made this jewel of a website: Welcome to FidoNot!.
I’m plugging it because I will probably not renew the domain next year (this year I did it by mistake) so it’s almost your last opportunity to see it, and I’m quite proud of it in an evil way. You know, it brings evil smiles to my face when I think about it and all.
And it’s actually been useful for someone: that someone was looking for animated rainbow thingies like the ones I put there, so… :-)
(Plus, the time spent looking at that thing is not spent arguing in Debian lists or proposing resolutions.)
The new Google Code Search yields about 32,700 results for “fuck” and only about 100 for “make love” (with double quotes). I haven’t tried “make sweet, tender love”, but I think the number of results would approach zero :)
Also, my name appears about 200 times, mostly as a translator — but there’s some actual code of mine too!
Next time I’m asked “have you contributed to any open-source projects as a developer?” I can point to Google Code Search and say: “oh, yes, there’s this code I made in the year 2000 (back when I still cared about Fidonet) to make GoldED+ use ncurses instead of printing directly to the terminal” or “oh, yes, I made a small library for reading and writing gettext PO and MO files in PHP for use in Drupal, and they still use heavily modified versions of two or three of my functions”.
Or I could simply say: “yes, but it’s all irrelevant now”.
Given two choices, one of which is apparently the status quo and other which is definitely the status quo, I’d choose the latter. It’s the “apparently” part what scares me.
FWIW.
Ana said that I should change my “Get Firefox” button (down there in the page footer) to a “Get Firechicken” button. First I had to create one, so there it is:
Don’t you know what Firechicken is? It is my candidate name for the trademark-unencumbered version of Firefox. Wanna see the logo? See the logo!.
You saw it here first.
A new multifunction device (a Samsung SCX-4200) was recently bought at home. It “supports” Linux via a proprietary, binary-only driver that does not let you scan except as root. A normal user receives a Segmentation Fault. Of course, the installer “fixes” it by adding a setuid wrapper to xsane…
As I didn’t like that “solution” very much, I investigated a bit and learned that the Segfault happened after “scanimage -L” called the iopl() syscall. That call is used to be able to access I/O ports directly, and can only be called by a process running as root.
That driver’s name was “Unified Driver blah, blah, blah". That means that it “supports” a lot of multifunction devices, among them several that run plugged into the parallel port, and the driver was trying to detect a parallel port device by accessing the parallel port directly, and that’s why it called iopl().
After a couple of hours (I don’t do it every day, mind you) trying objdump and gdb and a hex editor (biew, which helpfully includes a disassembler too to guide you in your hex editing adventures) I managed to disable the parallel port check and make the driver a bit less insane (now I only need to make users who need to use the scanner members of the “lp” group).
I guess that it means that you don’t really need source code to modify your drivers and firmware (picture yourself a tongue well stuck to my cheek).
To be helpful I made the modified version, with instructions and HOWTO, available at http://jacobo.tarrio.org/Samsung_SCX-4200_on_Debian. Copyrights be damned, I shouldn’t have had to do it.
![A script in this movie is causing Macromedia Flash Player 7 to run slowly. If it continues to run, your computer may become unresponsive. Do you want to abort the script? [Ok]](http://jacobo.tarrio.org/albums/cosas/slowscript.png)
Ah, do I have a choice?
n.nfshost.com: I win (for now). The ones that got me stuck were 13, 20 and 27.
The name of the friendly lizard appears to be Phrynosoma Asio, but is known locally as “camaleón” (even though there are no native Mexican chamaeleons, or perhaps precisely because of that).
In a recent message to debian-legal (may have not appeared yet when you read this) I said that I didn’t believe in “oh, this clause in this license is not relevant, since it’s already implied by law”. I believe that if it’s there, it’s for a reason, and I don’t want to be surprised when I find out what it is for. Furthermore, “implied by law” means nothing, since laws change, and different countries have different laws (really!).
In other words, I don’t think lawyers go around putting decorative clauses in license statements. If they had such an artistic inclination, the results would rather look like this:
[…] construed as a distribution of this Package.
9.
If you intend to advertise,
our name you may not utilise.
Get our written permission first,
or in jail you’ll die of thirst.10. THIS PACKAGE IS PROVIDED “AS IS” AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR […]
I found it fitting to do this to the Artistic License :-)
(Yes, I know it’s hideous. Think of it as lawyer-poetry.)
Ana was intrigued by the idiom “to open a can of worms” tonight. There are two English idioms I like, too: “to stir the pot” (when you do it, what used to be in the bottom rises to the surface) and “the shit has hit the fan” (no need to explain what happens when viscous matter gets in contact with an object that revolves at a high speed).
But one word that intrigued me, in turn, was “aftermath”. What’s it? The feeling you get after solving a particularly difficult mathematical problem? Well, no. Apparently “a math” is a mowing (of grass or hay or whatever), and the aftermath is “the grass that grows after the first crop of hay in the same season” (Webster, 1913).
14:29 <jacobo> ains, Joey's confession 14:29 <jacobo> that is always happening to me, but worse 14:29 <jacobo> should I put “confession++” in my nametag? 14:29 <jacobo> or something like that 14:29 <jacobo> I could create the Confession Commons 14:29 <jacobo> and then I would say that I’m CC with some options 14:29 <jacobo> for example 14:30 <jacobo> CC-ff 14:30 <jacobo> Confession Commons - Forgets Faces 14:30 <jacobo> CC-fn (Forgets Names) 14:30 <jacobo> CC-hp (Has Prosopagnosia) 14:30 <jacobo> CC-sp (Scared of People) 14:31 <jacobo> and combine 14:31 <jacobo> CC-ff-sp 14:32 <jacobo> this is so big a load of nonsense that it’s well-suited for my weblog
Every time Manoj writes an e-mail in a mailing list you read, you pick up a unexampled word.
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Those of you who will go to DebConf 6, be careful.
Many Linux distributions suffer the curse of the Galician-Portuguese words. This means that many of such distributions have names which look or sound like (or are) Galician and/or Portuguese words.
For example, “Ubuntu” sounds, in Portuguese, like “O Ponto”, which means “The Point”. “Debian” means, in Galician, “They Should” or “They Owed”. “Centos” means “Hundreds” (and reminds Galician speakers of “Centolos”, “Spider Crabs”). “Fedora” looks like “Fedor”, which means “Stench”. “Nexenta” looks like the Galician word “Noxenta”, which means “Disgusting”.
AFAIK, “Red Hat”, “Slackware”, “Caldera OpenLinux”, “SuSE”, “Mandrake” (sorry, “Mandriva”) and “Yggdrasil” mean nothing in Galician or Portuguese, but I’m sure that, given enough beer, somebody will be able to think of something.
(As a speaker of Galician, I can offer my services as a naming consultant. My fees may look expensive, but think of the advantages of not having millions of Brazilians laugh at your distribution’s name!)
If they ever had a life, now it’s time for Spectrum lovers to lose any remains of it they may have left:
So after feeling motivated again, I’ve updated my old Galician translation of Mozilla Firefox 0.8 for Firefox 1.0.7, I have some people testing the translation and will soon update it for Firefox 1.5.
As I’m keeping my translation strictly unofficial (I want nothing to do with upstream Mozilla), it’s possible that I’ll receive some messages about how I’m infringing on the Mozilla Foundation’s holy trade marks, and how I’m not keeping the standards of extremely high quality that the Mozilla Foundation guarantees, yadda yadda yadda., so I’m already prepared for that eventuality:
I don’t know the English idiom for “tocar las narices”, but if they do it to me, I’ll adopt this name and logo for my translation. And then, if I translate Thunderbird, I’ll call this one “Thunderchicken” :-)
I can definitely see that, when Wesnoth 1.1 is out, it will cause a new decrease in productivity in Debian.
PS: Not really. Fhew!
PPS: Other suggestions were: Frozen Wesnoth, Frozen Budoku, or worse: Wesnoth Budoku.
<tongue location="cheek">
These two are GNOME and KDE, according to GNOME people:
This is GNOME, according to me (KDE user):
</tongue>
KDE 3.5 is out, and amongs its new features there’s a new dialogue that allows users to perform an action when new media are detected (go to the bottom of the linked page to see it).
But I still think that the wording of the dialogue is awkward.
MySQL AB is lying.
(Communications protocols are not protected by copyright, so they cannot be GPLed).
Click on the image to view a joke I cannot explain.
It weighs about 100 kilobytes. You have to know the rules to understand it (you certainly don’t need IQ 136). I cannot guarantee that it’s funny, though :-)
SVG available on demand.
It’s probably easier to get if you have been to Finland lately… ;-)
If you haven’t, this may serve as a clue.
(But I won’t killfile Andrew — I haven’t killfiled anyone yet, but I have several people in the shitlist, anyway.)
When Mako writes about top posters, I cannot help but think of this kind of posters:
There’s a t-shirt too…
By the way, I’d like to apologize in advance to the passengers of flight Air France 1098, Paris Charles de Gaulle — Helsinki on July 9th, in case your (our) flight is delayed because I have a very optimistic travel agent who believes that 65 minutes ought to be enough to make a connection in that airport. Thanks.
I’d apologize to the passengers of the return flight to Vigo on the 18th too (50 minutes), but I can’t remember the flight’s designation.
Update: Oh, the schedules in the CDG airport can be seen online, and apparently all my flights arrive at and depart from terminal 2D. Hopefully, that will mean less running around than I had foreseen. Or perhaps it’s just that I got too used to the Madhouse-Barajas airport (where they’ll lose your baggage even if your plane does not stop there).
When this appears in Planet Debian, this will mean two things:
Well, these were three things, but I’m not repeating the Spanish Inquisition skit here. Take care.
By the way, the ability to create debian-installer CDs with preseed files is amazing. Congratulations (and thanks) to all the culprits :-) More news tomorrow when I’m no longer fuming :-)
This is a useful T-shirt. Of course, to realise its full potential you must use a mirror :-)
The Mono Project’s web site has been changed to use MediaWiki as its engine.
Myself having changed my own personal homepage to MediaWiki some months ago, now I can say that I’m a leader ;-)
Ok, so now I’m starting a weblog in English.
If the design looks a little bit like Russell’s, this is because I don’t do web design (that’s why the colors are hideous, too). Turn a design into HTML and CSS I can, but….
My idea is that it will contain some technical information, things that happen to me, etc. Just like I had intended my diary in advogato to be, five years ago.