Today's appalling ClearCase discovery is that teams working on one project from different sites must each have their own branches, and must constantly merge the changes from the other sites' branches into their own. Taken to its logical extreme, that would mean that, if a project such as GNOME used ClearCase, we would need hundreds [...]

I still haven't found an acceptable German web hoster. Last time I mentioned this I got a few suggestions, but none that actually offer ssh login and cron jobs at a sensible price. People suggested Manitu (no cron jobs), and Domainfactory.de. I found a few more hosters that seemed to be suitable but many seem [...]

At the weekend I was at the Sophie Calle retrospective at the Martin-Gropius-Bau. She was blogging before the web existed. Now you don't need a museum to share the fascinatingly mundane details of life. The poster is all over the town.

By the way, the Cinestar Wahlparty was a disappointment. I got there at about 1:30am, and had to wait outside for half an hour at the back of a small crowd, for no apparent reason. When we finally got inside there were another couple of hundred people there, but there was only one badly-placed semi-large [...]

On the language-bindings mailing list, James pointed out this really useful list of new functions in GTK 2.5/2.6. I have dealt with most of these in gtkmm 2.5, but I'm waiting for a GTK tarball release before I can release it.

I am genuinely surprised at how thoroughly the Democrats have lost. I really thought there was a chance for a substantial moderate vote and a return to peace and sanity. This time America has actually voted for an extremist religious and ideological administration, and it's the extremism that got voters to the polls. And this [...]

The new glibmm 2.5.1 now has a mature version of the command-line-argument-parsing API, wrapping the GOption API in glib. I've been a bit rushed, so now would be be a good time to check it. Or regret it later when you try to use it. Here is an example.

There are some good articles in the Economist this week about usability and simplicity of user interfaces. I like the automobile analogy, in which they point out that cars were once so complex that you had to employ a driver/mechanic – equivalent to today's computer support techie. I often find it depressing that we still [...]

Today Andrew “MINIX” Tannenbaum, revealed himself as the guy behind the electoral-vote.com site that I check everyday. Nifty.

N24 has more information about the Sony-Center Wahlparty tomorrow. It looks like it might actually be a big-screen outdoors thing like they had for the world cup. That could get pretty cold in the middle of the night. Mal sehen. E-mail me if you want to meet there [1]. [1] Unless, of course, you're some [...]