I imagine that people find the huge polpyaudio and libgnomesu threads on GNOME's desktop-devel-list a bit daunting, but I think they are wonderful. People are clarifying user and technical requirements, and taking us closer to more things just working.
I feel that the libgnomesu situation is similar to the project-utopia situation (getting removable devices to […]

My current paid-work project will be cancelled at the end of the month, so I'll have more time for Glom in January.
Lots of mistakes have been made during this project, but nothing else has hurt us so much as ClearCase. Every other problem could have been overcome if it hadn't been for ClearCase at the […]

Microsoft Visual C plus plus .Net2003 seems to have a dynamic_cast bug that's very similar (but not 100%) to one that gcc 2.95 had a couple of years ago. It means that Visual C plus plus won't be able to use gtkmm, though of course we welcome patches.

On Saturday we saw Franz Ferdinand at the Tonhalle in Munich. The band are scots, with one member from Rosenheim, near Munich. It was simple and lively. Unfortunately we couldn't see much of the actual band, because germans are too tall. Without the camera's zoom I'd have no idea what the stage looked like.

Last night I met Fer for a couple of beers in Berlin. He's here to see Tom Waits live, the lucky bastard. I learned that both Fer and Carlos g-s-t Garnacho are now working on Linux stuff at Tecsidel in Madrid.

gtkmm 2.5.1 is out, with lots of new API. I think people will be particularly glad to see the combo and progressbar CellRenderers. The GTK developers have achieved far more in GTK 2.5 than I had a right to expect.

There's an Orkut-like website in Germany called openBC. I think it's meant to help you to make business contacts, but this is not how business contacts work best. For instance,

I'll not be impressed with a cold call just because the callers says that he's a friend of a friend.
I'll be annoyed when somebody uses my […]

The CSU government in Bavaria just decided to ban muslim headscarves in schools. Meanwhile, schools in Bavaria are required to display crufixes (the nasty body on the cross ones) in every classroom, even in schools where the majority of students are muslim. This is not a place I would like to send my kids […]

It looks like gstreamer-based audio (Rhythmbox) and video (Totem) players will be installed by default on all major Linux distros some time soon, but they won't play proprietary stuff like MP3 and DVD. If a company like Fluendo made it really easy (download then double-click) to install these codecs on all major distros then I […]

I'm posting this from Ubuntu, which I'm trying via the LiveCD. It's a far better example of Linux than Knoppix, without techy distractions.
Apparently Ubuntu will do regular LiveCDs, not just for major releases. I hope that this happens and I think that we should link to them when we announce GNOME development releases. As well […]