I am so pleased that Sabayon and Pesselus will most likely be in GNOME 2.14, and that Sabayon already uses Pesselus. I do hope that they show up in menus for humans as something like “Administration/User Profiles” or “Administration/Lockdown Editor” or something even clearer. They bring GNOME’s beauty to the system administrators.

I like to think that the Lockdown Editor was created finally in response to a suggestion I made after I visited a small rollout . This other little feature (easy keyboard preview) was also needed by that rollout. I coded no part of them. My point is

• If you visit someone to do a rollout report, you can discover important (but easy) stuff that should be done.
• If you invite someone to do a rollout report, your life might get even better.

I met several people at the GNOME stand at Systems in Munich who were planning their own small GNOME rollouts in colleges, schools, and small businesses, in Germany, Austria, Hungary, and Romania. I gave them lots of Ubuntu CDs and told them all that I’d love to visit and do a report after a few months. I hope they all get back to us.

My project to win back my time is making good progress.

• John Palmieri has taken over from me on the release team. He'll be good at it.
• I've announced that I'm not standing for the Board this year.
• I've announced that I'd like someone to take over from me on the GNOME Germany board.

I intend to enjoy doing more software development for a while. Glom coding should restart in January.

I was pleased by the discussion around the board size referendum. The next board will definitely feel more empowered to create decision-making processes and to delegate more tasks.

Lots of gtkmm (GTK+ C++ API) applications have popped up recently:

• VMWare Player (closed-source, but gratis). People already love VMWare's ability to emulate complete operating systems inside other operating systems, and to clone them and rollback. Soon (now available as a beta) we'll be able to distribute one of these sessions without charge, like sending someone a PDF to view in their gratis Acrobat Reader, but this time it's like getting a full computer in a window instead of a document. LiveCDs suddenly seem difficult in comparison. The linux version uses gtkmm for its GUI, and I expect to see it everywhere. The developers have already given back considerable time, code, and cleverness to the open-source platform that they use.
• Gobby is a collaborative text editor plus chat thingy. More and more people are mentioning that it's truly useful and works. They seem interested in an ueber-reusable C API for the underlying collaboration protocol.
• Synfig does 2D vector-based animation. It seems to be a serious tool for professionals. It looks impressive and seems to create impressive animations. This is almost, but not quite, as cool as when the Muppet Workshop used gtkmm (I will never stop mentioning that.)
• Gideon Designer seems to be yet another next-generation Glade replacement with some extra cleverness for gtkmm programmers. It looks impressive, but we all know that we don't need one of these in C (glade-3), C# (stetic), python (gazpacho) and gtkmm (Gideon). It's silly. However, I assume people are doing this for themselves for fun, and not seriously losing time that they would spend on more productive things, so don't let me spoil your fun.

I haven't used any of these applications yet. Blogging takes time, you know.

When we add Inkscape and my Glom project (finished some day when I get the time or money), I don't think we need to keep asking the gtkmm developers (mostly me) to also code a killer application to justify gtkmm being available on distros (available everywhere now anyway) so that people can code killer applications. That had annoyed me.

This is not a wave of gtkmmification, nor a sign that C++ makes everyone an order of magnitude more productive, or that we should all start using C++ and shouting at the people who don't want to. It just shows that, with GNOME, you can _really_ use just about whatever programming language you are comfortable with.

I will almost certainly not be running for the GNOME board this time. There's still important things to do, but I only planned to be useful for one year, and I really need to reclaim some time by giving up some responsibilities. In the second half of this year I haven't even had enough time for the few hours that the Board needs per week. The first half of the year was consumed largely by GUADEC Stuttgart, though GUADEC never needs to be that difficult.

It's been a pleasure to work with the Board this year, and it's tempting to try to get elected again just so I can keep meeting these wonderfully talented people.

This board has dealt with (or 99% dealt with) several issues that had been dragging on for the previous year or so, but it needs to be even more decisive. I've been thinking about who would be good for next year. So, in no particular order, and probably forgetting some very useful people:

• Dave Neary. I know that Owen doesn't plan to run again, so I think Dave Neary would make a perfect chairman. Owen has done a great job, but I think Dave will be even more ready to bring things to constructive conclusion. He's already shown an extraordinary ability to get things done while judging what the community wants. Incredibly, he achieves that while upsetting almost nobody. Give him a mandate to do even more, even faster.
• Quim Gill is organising this year's GUADEC in Barcelona. I've been impressed by his commitment and ability to work with the Board, the community, local government and business. My experience this year showed me that being on the Board is a big help when organising a GUADEC.
• Daniel Veillard: has said that he's thinking of not running this year. I hope he changes his mind, because his minute-taking does so much to keep meetings on track. He's also often the voice of the non-commercial community. And he has a great French accent.
• German Poo Caamano is very active in South America, and has lots of ideas to do even more with the Board's support. When I met him in Stuttgart, I could tell that he has real people skills, but doesn't forget that there's important stuff that needs to be done.
• 
  Federico Mena-Quintero has given lots of his time and expertise for detailed tasks such as the trademark agreement and the documentation plan/contract. Let's have some more of that.
• Jonathan Blandford has also given large chunks of his personal time, sorting out our finances and trademark agreement, while always being good-natured and light-hearted. His experience would be useful next year.
• Luis Villa has effectively pushed for accountability and efficiency,
  and he seems ever more capable of
  dealing with other non-profits and legal issues. He understands the need for marketing at this stage. He's even becoming
  concise – not an easy habit to learn.

I'm starting on the Hildon C++ bindings for Nokia. Setting up the development environment was really easy with the detailed instructions. I used the scratchbox 0.9.8.5 version via the debian apt-get source, and it worked fine on Ubuntu Breezy.

Compared to emulators I've used for mobile phone work, this is easy thanks to a fakeroot shell and X-Windows. The N770 environment just runs in a second nested X server. And because it's a real linux system, with shared libraries and real processes, instead of a lump of statically-compiled hacks, you can start and stop programs individually (run-standalone.sh yourapp), just like a real computer, and actually debug/interact with them properly. You can't understand how nice this is unless you've experienced the tedious crap I've used in the past. I haven't developed for Nokia phones, but I bet it isn't this good.