I often hear, mostly from comments in online forums, that there are no software patents (yet) in the EU. I wish it was so, but I am not convinced of this. I thought that, though the EU has not yet decided on a software patent policy, that left various country-specific software patent policies in place. [...]

In Ubuntu Feisty, my new file manager folder windows have a name column that’s too small to show any text. I wonder, is this an Ubuntu Feisty-specific bug, or something that has arrived in generic GNOME 2.17/2.18. I think it’s a show-stopper for either Ubuntu or GNOME. Update: This is fixed now, after the latest [...]

ABI Stability Is Difficult It’s easy to break the ABI of a C++ class. Just add a new member variable to a public class or add a member variable to an implementation class that’s used a a member instance in a public class. C has the same problem, though it’s not quite as bad because [...]

Last night I went to see Fanfare Ciocărlia with the neighbours from across the hall, at the Muffathalle here in Munich. Fanfare Ciocărlia are a popular Romanian gypsy band whose music is the basis for parts of the Bucovina Club and Electric Gypsyland CDs that I love. It was good for the body and soul. [...]

The FOSTEL Telephony summit looks to be shaping up well, for Wednesday 4th and Thursday 5th April 2007 in Paris. I am consistently impressed with Dave Neary’s ability to get stuff done. Thanks, Dave. Unfortunately I don’t have time to attend myself, but Openismus is sending Armin Burgmeier, mostly so he can represent his Gobby [...]

Here are some of my thoughts after trying the latest beta version of Canola. The smooth über-simple UI very nearly turns the N800 into a home internet media player, but falls slightly short. If it was open source then it would get there sooner. If Canola doesn’t then someone else will first, which would be [...]

I’m using a dodgy fork of Scratchbox 0.9.8 so I can use apt-get through https instead of http, but the following tips should be relevant for the regular Scratchbox 1.0.x that I’d rather be using. Make sh point to bash instead of dash (probably not necessary for Scratchbox 1.0.newenough): sudo rm /bin/sh sudo ln -s [...]